Studio Visit: Rhythms of Daily Work

sections of my large drawing cut up and ready to be copied

Good afternoon friends, I hope you're enjoying your weekend so far!

When working on a large scale ceramic mosaic there’s a whole lot of process. I’ve had a Hawaiian landscape pool house mosaic in process for about 5 months now and there is still much work to do. In fact, in this last 7 weeks until the project is complete the intensity is ramping up.

I’m fully immersed in the cutting, glazing, firing, and assessing results on a daily basis and in this post I’m going to show you an average day -yesterday in fact - in the life of this project. If you want musical accompaniment while reading this, scroll to the bottom and then back up to continue.

In case you’re new to my blog or to this project and are interested in scanning some images to see what’s led to this point, here are a few recent posts showing the drawing phase, some clay cutting and some glazing

Each day work towards this mosaic represents 4-6 hours of my time and begins with a look at the kilns to see where they are in their cycles and what the results are.

Today I have a bisque in its slow “pre-heat” phase and 2 glaze firings that are cool and ready to unload. With a bisque firing I’m taking clay that is more or less dry to the touch and heating it to 1923 degrees F. This firing and cooling cycle is about 18 hours and once unloaded these tiles are ready for glaze.

Below are 2 kilns of tiles that have just undergone glaze firings to 1863 degrees F.

Usually when I open a kiln of glazed work, I'll loosely arrange the pieces together to get an idea of how it looks.

Although it mostly looks like a mess, it helps me enormously to see what I've glazed so far altogether or at least near the other parts.

Over time these seemingly incoherent parts will start to make more sense.

After checking the kilns and putting together glazed tiles I sometimes dive right into more glazing especially if whatever comes out of the kiln inspires the next steps, and today I wanted to put another coat of glaze on some of the tiles to darken the color.

Projects like this one require my focused and undivided attention so I try to take care of other work and odds and ends in my studio first. Then later in the day I turn off the ringer on my phone so I can dive in to the cutting and glazing which require deep attention and focus in order to make good decisions and work efficiently.

Today I need to cut up more of the drawing into sections. I take these to my local copy shop and make copies that I’ll use to transfer the images on to the clay prior to cutting. I make 2-3 copies of each section at 100%, at 103% and some sections that will have high shrinkage will be enlarged to 106%. This actually takes a few hours since once I’ve made the copies I tape the drawing back together piece by piece as well as trim and tape together the copies I’ll use for transferring the images on to the clay. Above I'm starting to cut away the area to copy.

Next I’m ready to begin cutting some tile:

Most evenings I finish the session with packaging up clay slabs I rolled the night before in plastic and rolling some new ones, loading the kilns and cleaning up.

And I’m inspired by @opheliafu’s sharing of the music she listens to while working. I choose depending on what I'm doing and there are tasks during which I need silence and can't listen to anything. Yesterday when I could listen while I worked, I chose from the two audiobooks Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel, and The Alice Network by Kate Quinn and my music selections were Mutual Benefit (Love’s Crushing Diamond), Belle & Sebastian, Beulah, Grimes.
Here is (single song) Mutual Benefit's Advanced Falconry:

Have a great rest of your weekend and as always, thank you for your support of my blog, it's keeping me going!

@sndbox Steward