Statement:

This is my first year of really doing wheel throwing and initially my favorite part of the process was glazing. I love putting glazes onto my pieces and seeing how they flow down the clay, it adds a little surprise because it is one of the parts of the process that I can’t control.

After experimenting with most of the glazes and seeing how each one moves differently I started to learn how to better control them. My pieces were now starting to be formed based on how I wanted the glaze to move so I needed something new that would be unpredictable and a new challenge to control. I found this in raw metals.

The first metals I tried were simply coins in pinch pots under clear glaze. Most of the coins created a similar effect, a grayish rough patch in the center with green splotches around it except for the penny. The penny grew up from the bottom in a black mass with different metallic colors spread on different parts. Initially I assumed that something had reacted with the copper of the penny since pennies are mostly copper (or so I thought) so I brought in some copper wire and tried putting it into pieces. It had a nice effect of streaking down very well and making some deep greens but it did not grow out like the penny did.

It took some pondering but I remembered that pennies are actually largely zinc and when I looked it up I saw that after 1983 they have become 97.5% zinc to only 2.5% copper (I guess because zinc is cheaper). My next move is to test some raw zinc (once I can find some) and see where that goes, hopefully something cool.

Jack
April 2009