A Semester of Ceramics

I completed my first semester at Princeton this December. It was an incredibly hard choice choosing to go so far away instead of IITk, but I’m glad I ended up going.

One of the classes I took this semester was Introduction to Ceramics. The goal of the class was to teach learners the basics of hand-building and glazing using clay. Although I had prior experience with polymer clay, ceramics was a new material for me. I had only made small pieces in the past and had no experience creating sculptures that were as large and structurally sound as those required in this class. Ceramics came to me as a completely new material, but it still gave me the comfort of familiarity.

This blog post details everything I made in the class.

The class was structured around a series of assignments. Each assignment involved sketching out ideas and presenting them to the instructor, building a sculpture, and then participating in a class where all of us would critique each other’s sculptures. All of this work culminated in a final project which had no guidelines. Spoiler alert – I absolutely hated my final piece, but eh, that’s just the way things go sometimes.

Our first assignment was to make test forms. Basically, we had to make small clay figures in under 15 minutes each so that we could test our glazes on them.

I found the modeling part of it very fun, but the glazing was immensely tedious. I’m not a huge fan of painting, and the glazes mostly turned out different from how I had envisioned. This was a major source of frustration, especially for my future projects.

The second assignment was called “Anything but a Vessel”. When most people think of ceramics, they typically imagine bowls, pots, vases, or other kinds of containers. The aim of this assignment was to challenge this conventional mindset and motivate people to create sculptural forms, wearable art, and other non-vessel objects.

I decided to make a corset. The idea was to take something very un-claylike, fluid, and unstructured-fabric- and make it out of clay. I had imagined and sketched out a far more elaborate version with back panels and lace sleeves, but it did get simplified significantly. Since the clay was thin and under stress due to the curvature of the bodice, the panels kept cracking. I’d spend hours making a panel, leave it out to dry, and then show up to it being cracked into four pieces when I went into the studio the next day.

I eventually got two front panels done. At this point, I just decided to ditch the back panels and supplement the existing panels with lace. The front two panels were initially molded to my body, but they lost most of their curvature in the firing. It is still wearable, and I find the concept of using ceramics to create wearables interesting. It may not be practical, but it is certainly intriguing.

In my critique, someone pointed out that technically, a corset is a vessel for a body. They’re not wrong, but shhh, let’s appreciate the artistic departure from its conventional function.

The third assignment was to create a 1:1 copy of an item around us. I went with a Converse. This was one of my favourite things that I made in the class. The clear gaze got a bit milky, but the glazes were generally worked out in my favour.

The third assignment was a collaboration project. We had to partner up with someone else in the class and each of us had to create a piece that interacts with the others’ in some way. My partner, Shauna, and I decided to create this piece titled “Control”. We wanted to show how influence from different bodies can sometimes be destructive for a person.

We created the puppet by linking separate elements with wire so it moves dynamically when touched.

As a part of our class, we had several visiting artists who would come and talk to us about their work. During the week of this project, the artist duo Ficus Interfaith visited us and looked at our sketches and project ideas. They provided us with insights into how collaboration works between two people who have their own creative inclinations and styles. They showed us ways to create a cohesive art piece while retaining individual styles. We used a lot of their techniques in our project.

And then came the final assignment. Initially, my idea was to create an interactive installation titled “Reflection”. I had planned to create a round table with multiple sculptures, each representing an emotion. A raspberry-pi-based emotion classification system would be set in place that would recognize the viewer’s emotion and rotate the table so that the appropriate sculpture would be displayed. The installation hence, would be a reflection of the viewer.

I got as far as setting up the classification system on the Raspberry Pi. It was way too slow, so I used my computer to set up the classification system and established communication with an ESP32 microcontroller to control the servo.

I had only four days to complete this project because of other deadlines. After spending a day and a half on the circuitry, I realized that I did not have enough time left. I still had to create multiple sculptures, fabricate a round table, find a good power source, and more. I also did not want to compromise the quality of the actual sculpture because I focused too much on the electronics side of things. So, I made the decision to start with one sculpture of a sad person, put all the time I could into it, and if I had enough time remaining, I would start working on the other elements.

I’m happy with my decision because it took 2.5 days to complete just one sculpture. The drying process, the new inlay technique I wanted to try, and the two firings consumed too much time.

I wasn’t happy with the basic model to start with. It got even worse from there. The sculpture broke during the firing, and the glaze dripped. I had to figure out a way to fix it 30 minutes before our final critique and this is what I ended up doing.

I titled it “Disintegration”.

Here are some of the things I made just for fun.

The first picture shows the first bowl I’ve ever thrown. I knew pottery was challenging, but I never comprehended just how hard it is. I had hoped to sit at the wheel and produce a lopsided bowl at least, but instead, I ended up with a bunch of gloopy clay all over my pants.

The second one is a sculpture of my dad, for my dad. He loves it a lot, but is very salty about the fact that I made him no hair 🙂

Overall this class was incredibly fun. It served as an excellent study break. I didn’t get the chance to work on many personal projects, but I hope to do that this semester. A partially assembled whale lamp, snugly encased in plastic, awaits my return to the dorm.