This year, I joined Hakatere Ceramics and Pottery Ashburton to learn more skills and make art with clay.

Pocket is a handwork piece that I formed after the noticing the canvas pattern left from rolling the clay. I carved the stitching and added clay for the stud features and after drying, I bisque fired the piece.

The club held a Raku Firing day and so I glazed Pocket with a copper glaze on the studs and another glaze I have forgotten the name of. Raku Firing is exciting. The work is heated to over 1000 ºC and then quickly removed from the hot kiln and placed into a combustible material and starved of oxygen to produce a myriad of colors in the glazes and black where the clay was unglazed. The results are often unexpected.

Pocket has been entered in the Ashburton Society of Arts’ 59th Annual Exhibition and is available for sale at the Ashburton Art Gallery from 4-28 July 2023.