Semester 3

This semester was filled with a lot more failures than successes. During my first semester of my BFA, I had briefly looked into the Japanese technique of Nerikomi but I was very overwhelmed by it and with joining a new program and trying to get a grasp of why I was in the program, I left Nerikomi behind. But it never left my brain. Over the summer, I went on a road trip out west, and this trip brought me back to my fascination with Nerikomi. I wanted to find a way to create the patterns I saw out west, specifically the layers of the Badlands in South Dakota and the different types of rock in the Grand Tetons. Suddenly, all I could see around me was pattern and color. A flower wasn’t just that, but layers upon layers of colors.

A common theme throughout my practice since first semester is control. Originally, I was hand building pieces and controlling every aspect of the building process but then would “let go” by atmospheric firing. This semester, the theme of control changed when I began exploring Nerikomi. The same ideas of control during the building process stayed the same but Nerikomi is a lot more meticulous and unforgiving than white stoneware. Maintaining a clean space, keeping colors separate, slicing, stacking, and repeating to create patterns. This was also my first time working with porcelain and learning porcelain has been almost like learning clay for the first time.

The repetition and meticulous planning is almost addictive. I will spend two weeks prepping to create a piece like “piecing myself back together” for the large possibility of messing up or something going wrong (like cracking). After finishing, I will then look at what I messed up, how to fix that mistake, and restart again. There were simple mistakes like compression issues but then other more complex issues like firing temperatures, different shrinking rates, and more.

Now at the end of this semester and beginning to work towards my thesis show, I am firm in the idea that I will be doing Nerikomi for it. I still have a lot of work to do (and a lot of mistakes to make) but seeing the outcome when it does work, it unlike any feeling I’ve had in my clay journey thus far.

Artists I am looking at/influenced by: Courtney Hassman, Scott Dooley, Betty Woodman, Maria Ten Kortenaar, Francis Priest, Cody Hoyt, Judith de Vries, Chris Campbell, John Gill, Sam Chung, Lydia Johnson, Elaine Monnin, Babs Haenen, Julie Moon, Claire Miller (IU MFA Grad), Kōsei Matsui, Kim Dickey, Bodil Manz, Jun Kaneko, Vince Pitelka