Ceramic Review: Masterclass with Lisa Hammond

[Music] my name's Lisa Hammond I've been a possitive for 35 years plus maybe a bit now I started when I was at school then went on to work in Covent Garden for Kenneth Clark briefly before I went to college so I've been at Mays Hill for about 22 years now I decided to have this place with teaching in mind actually so I started taking on apprentices pretty soon afterwards so I've had about 12 now it's a very important part of what I do I guess the major thing we do here which is pretty unusual is we do soda glaze in London and we have a large trolley kiln which we soda glazed in and then a smaller one every single pop comes out differently so a few years ago I decided to actually make them completely different so if you look at the breadth of work that I made now you'll see that each pot is approached uniquely not just in its making although they've got similarities but it's also the glazed surface because the nature of the kill makes them different anyway so I encourage that now the soda glazed pots we use three clays mixed together obviously we're in London so we don't really have their space to to mix our clay from from raw but we mix a lot of commercial plays together to get exactly what we want so we never use a clay straight I've been using quite a lot of black clay and hyoeun clays in the last probably four or five years that kind of came out of first using she knows and red she knows and using iron underneath and so I was very interested to try and get a white Chino on a black clay and also now more recently a red clay which is this it's actually a stoneware but we again we don't use it straight we mix it with other clays our firing is pretty pretty hardcore you know we're firing Taccone 12 flat and we're up at high temperature for quite a long time so they they really have to be strengthened up they wouldn't wouldn't take it so I guess we're a high temperature for at least seven or eight hours and I think that's partly what gives the surface that we get because where everything is really well fused and melted so the bowl that I've made with the pouring lip it's actually it's thrown bowl with the turned foot quite a straight foot which is quite unusual for me but these are based on rice bowls and they're quite a low-slung curve which i think suits this kind of shape very well with the spout on then what I do is I throw the basic shape very simple Bowl and then I also throw what will then become the pouring lip which is a little cylinder thrown off the hump which I'll then cut in half at a later stage when it's leather hard so that the foot is turned on the bowl and then I construct the two together and then later the whole piece will be carved i decorate in in many different ways but one of the ways I use is a hakama brush which is basically a bunch of rice straw and that will give you a great texture another way I like to decorate the large pots is I dip the head of the the pot in slip first of all and then I use a thicker version of the same slip and and literally scoop it up and put it on with my hand so in quite a sub gesture I've got a real gesture to it so they're very fluid they're done very fast and I think quite dynamic because of that about nine years ago I set up a charity called dr. Plata and it started with a very simple aim was to help people train and to help fund students to go to other Potter's and that's worked very well but we've discovered that that's actually not enough now the many more closures of colleges have happened and we're now looking at setting up a training school in stoke-on-trent so my future I think is going to be for a little while is working alongside making my own work is to to get the school up and running and that's my hope for the next couple of years to get that running successfully [Music]

Channel: Ceramic Review

Views: 68,503

Rating: 4.9392791 out of 5

Keywords: ceramic, ceramics, ceramicart, art, pottery, bowl, throwing, shino, sodaglaze, craft, design, tutiral, tutorials, masterclass

Id: 16-J-AKxNbI

Length: 4min 46sec (286 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2016