Studio Practice ceramics


 I found these porcelain fragments in the ceramics workshop weeks ago and I loved them! they're so delicate and the blue glaze is so vivid - they look like shards of china plates but whoever made them stamped them with lace so they have this amazing raised surface. I wanted to incorporate something like this into my project-  after looking into contemporary jewelry I knew I wanted to something you could wear but I didn't really know how


 

Until I saw this wearable porcelain dress by Chinese contemporary artist  Li Xiaofang. He finds shards of porcelain, some dating back to the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties and then sews them together with thin metal wire. Its insane the amount of precision it must take to piece all the fragments together so seamlessly.

I did a couple of tests with some porcelain slabs- rolling different samples of lace into the clay, I found that you get the best results if you slightly dampen the surface and pick a lace that has more of a raised design. I then broke some of the slabs into fragment and punched holes into them so once fired I can thread them together- ill figure out how I want them to flow together once they've been fired. 
I also tried to mold some pieces around my arm - and then laid them over a cardboard tube so they could dry enough to hold their shape. not sure if the molded ones will be very sucessful - James said that when porcelain is fired it goes a bit liquidly and wants to go back to flat- we'll see.











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