Victoria Ashdown Art

I booked the empty space in fine art enable to hang my compositions, I put hooks in the ceiling and in the walls and played with hocking porcelain scribbles and springs off one another. I played with colouring lighting and putting a using a coloured background.

I had great fun making shadows with my sculptures with different lights. I put up a sheet of paper behind one of sculptures and traced the shadow with ink, then moved the light and traced again.  I am really happy with this drawing, as I think it has a good amount of negative space.  I would like to experiment with shadows more next term.

 I was going to make a stop motion of my favorite 'scribble', but I accidentally broke it. I started playing with the broken pieces, arranging them, I think this could make a really interesting video, and is something I would like to experiment with more.

In my last post I was making these scribble like extrusions which I was thinking of combining them with other materials. I have been into the plastic workshop this week and have been weaving heat molding strips of plastic into my porcelain lattice. I really like how the materiality of the opposing materials is shown through this piece, but I feel that in general it's too busy and compact and there needs to be more negative space within. I have also got to work on the actual extrudings, currently I am using wooden dies on the extruder however the lines that are being piped are not as strong as they could be so I will try to get plastic die to be cut with the laser cutter. I am also thinking of using other materials such as metal and have managed to get springs of different shapes and sizes and will experiment putting these into compositions.

here is a few photographs of me playing with combining plastic with my ceramics 

I've been continuing to extrude lines. In my last post I said that I wanted to work on colouring the clay, therefore I wedged some blue stain into porcelain, as I did last year. I can then vitrify the porcelain as glazing them would be difficult due to the complex shapes. In a tutorial the question of how important is the colour in the clay, was brought to my attention. I have thought about this a lot, there is many ways I could add colour into the sculptures other than in the clay- with other materials and lighting . Therefor I will make more extrusions with the inherit white colour and emeriment with adding other materials. This photo shows two shapes although I will not make any more shapes in colour, I really like these pieces, as you can balance them together so they stand on their own. I like this as they have this codependent feel.

This term I have taken a long time to really get started with an idea but this week I have been working with a mix of porcelain to make these 'scribble' extrusions. I am working directly with the materiality of the clay as I pipe out a long stretch of porcelain and then let it fall allowing gravity to make the shape of the piece. I am really excited of what I can make out of these as its a scale up from the miniature extrusions I made last year. One of the biggest question I need to address is how to add colour into the porcelain, I did this easily last year with stains but the scaling up of the work would make this harder and more expensive. More photos and experiments to come.