3D printing for all! :D

This is amazing - anyone can make a 3D object in CAD software, send the design to http://www.shapeways.com/ and order as many or few copies as they want of the design printed in 3D! You can even sell your designs through that website. This would provide a fantastic way of mass producing bread and butter type work, and you get a choice of material to have your design printed in, even ceramics, glass and precious metals. Although, at the moment it is not clear whether you get a choice of finish with the ceramics. I'd be really interested in trying this out for myself. I wonder if they can print origami? Actually, I wonder if I'd be able to construct it on a computer.......

I found out about this through Michael Eden who was asked to give a talk at uni. He's a ceramicist who has gone from throwing and slip trailing to using modern technology and computers to make his work, and he's created some fascinating pieces based on coil potting (but 3D printed of course) and the codes used by smart phones to access websites and info. I love the intricacy and detail he can achieve as well as the heavy cyber influence, since I've been looking for a way to involve the more gadgetty and robotic side of modern Japan in my work to contrast with the traditional.

Cyber teapots

The results of playing in solidworks - the first (and made in a hurry - I was about to be thrown out) pictures of my new cyber teapots.

Having got past the problem of creating a sieve over the spout (for leaf tea lovers) and cutting off excess extrusions, I've been playing with the handle ergonomics and form. Next I'm going to try and pierce out the flared foot ring at the bottom of the teapot, as I have never tried a wrap feature tool before - I want to know how it would work to wrap a series of patterned cut outs at the base. Then of course I need a lid.

The pot on the left has a smoothly arching handle (arch created using the spline sketch tool and the mirror entity tool to get it symmetrical) with a slightly sickle moon like profile to create a dip in the upper side for the thumb to rest in (and because I wondered what a cross section different to oval would look like). This was turned solid using the swept boss tool (basically it tells the cross section to make a solid extrusion that follows the path of a line you draw for it).

While using this I noticed a twist option on the swept boss. I got curious, so I tried a twisted handle next. This was a bit more complicated, as I discovered it would only work on a line with no joins in it. It had to be drawn in one go, and splines are not the most easily manipulated lines, so it probably isn't too symmetrical (and it certainly isn't round at the top!). However, once you get past that, it's quite easy, you set the swept boss to twist along the path and control the amount of twist by telling it an angle to twist by. I engineered this one so that it has a levelled out section at the top for holding the handle by. I really like this effect as it's visually quite striking, so I'm going to experiment with it some more on my next handles.

If all goes well, I hope to be able to design a teapot for the Wedgwood Museum shop using this software and then create a mould using 3D printing so I can batch produce them! The Wedgwood Museum is a huge collection of ceramics spanning the entire career of the Wedgwood ceramics company from the 18th century to the present day, based in Stoke on Trent: http://www.wedgwoodmuseum.org.uk/home








Wedgwood is one of the most famous names in British pottery, with Josiah, the founder, having been a great innovator and scientist, developing new materials and techniques to create their signature blue jasper ware with white relief moulding (so, my use of software to create Wedgwood inspired teapots seems somewhat fitting). However, when the company went into administration, and after a long (and continuing) court battle, the museum has been found liable for paying the debts of the Wedgwood company pension fund: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/interiorsandshopping/antiques/9001313/Wedgwood-family-call-on-Attorney-General-to-save-their-museum.html
This is a huge shame, as this museum is unique in that it shows the creative and technical progression of a single maker/company through history, and as a result there are things you can learn from viewing this collection that you can't from most museum ceramic displays. Most museum displays show a range of ceramics from a range of makers, sometimes from one time period, or sometimes over history. These can show you ideas and techniques from the different times, but it's harder to see the progression as every maker   specialises in their own techniques and styles.

So, the Wedgwood museum is asking artists to create pieces to sell in the shop to help raise money to prevent the collection being sold off, and this is how I got involved. Anyone interested in supporting the museum should visit their website above.

CAD CAM - computer aided defects and computer aided mayhem

I'm sat in the computer room at uni with solidworks right now, and, hallelujah, I've found out how to create new sketches and planes within the software! This means I can finally freely work in 3D with curves and varying shapes. Sort of.

Anyway, I've been playing around to test what I can get the software to do, and here are the results!

A lidded maple wood box with lid and raised butterfly decoration :3

This is the first thing I made a couple of weeks ago. This is actually less complicated than it looks - all you have to do is draw a square, extrude it (so it's a box), shell it (so it's hollow), and then you can select one of the sides to draw the butterfly on and extrude that as well. Same principle for the lid. The fun starts when you start involving curves....

... however, this one behaved because it only curves one way! This time I was checking to see if I could make solidworks revolve a profile (kind of like a cyber lathe), and it would seem that it's very similar to the software I first learnt with, so no problem.

This is what I was doing this week - experimenting with creating a "lofted" extrusion. This basically means you create a solid form which is a merge between two drawings - in this case a kind of splat shape and a circle. It was at this point I found out that the "insert new plane" function was hidden under the reference geometry menu in the features part of the program, instead of in the menu showing the planes in the sketching part of the program. Also that new sketches are created by right clicking a plane and selecting the sketch icon. Now able to create two parallel drawings, I was able to do this. I think it will take me a while to get used to the different layout of the software, but I had fun shelling this form out to make a vase and then turning it into hyper reflective turquoise glass vase. 

After that I had a go at cyber spaghetti, aka a swept extrusion. This is pretty much where you draw a profile, then draw a path for that profile to follow so you get a long wiggly solid sausage, but I'll post a picture later. It turns out there's a fair bit of control with this feature, you can control the path the profile follows but also how it curves around the path. There are similar controls on the lofted extrusion, so I found a new way to create teapot spouts which is pretty handy. At this point I was able to go back to the virtual teapots which were causing me so much trouble before, and trim the excess spout poking into the main teapot body and cut the sieve at the base of the spout to drain the tea leaves. I even started on a handle. Definitely progress :) 

Well, I'll have to wait a bit to show you the rest as I've been kicked out ready to lock up for the night, so goodnight!

Tokoname, virtual teapots, and writing in Japanese

Hello again!

A fair bit has happened over the past few days, so I'll try and start at the beginning.

Well, I've been busy trying to investigate new teapot designs and decoration since I came back from Japan in October (but more about that in a later post). There was so much amazing stuff out there, and I spent two weeks surrounded by ceramic artists from all over the world, so I've gone on a bit of a tangent since I returned so that I can try out all the things I saw. One of the things that stuck in my mind the most was watching Magdalene Odundo work. I learnt about her in my first year of university when we were taught about smoke firing and burnishing pots, and it always struck me that despite using the coiling method, her pots always looked perfectly symmetrical and round, as if they'd been cast or something. When I actually saw her working, it was nothing like that!!! Her clay was just as rough surfaced and lumpy as everyone elses. What she does, is smooth and shape the surface once the pot has stiffened by paddling it with a piece of wood, before she finishes by polishing the piece with tumbled pebbles.

Magdalene Odundo making a coil pot at the ISCAEE conference at Tokyo Gedai University

She uses this paddling method a lot. While we were doing a group project out there, she showed our group how if you made an enclosed bubble, you could then pat it into shape to your hearts content, knowing the air pressure inside would stop the pot collapsing. Chris Archer (lecturer at an American University) was doing this too, but with thrown bubbles. I guess the fact that we were making bricks for the project also inspired me, as my latest teapots I'm making are square, using this technique. 

My spiral brick in the wall made in the group project

The wall under construction and completed :)

I've already made one small teapot this way, and the last few days I've been trying to construct another, larger one. It feels very much like trying to shape a partially deflated football! On the plus side, I can cut the lid straight from the teapot body for a perfect fit. However, one thing I have discovered is that it is not easy to make a big enclosed thrown shape, and that they do not like to be tall shapes. So, thus far, the teapots have been very unlike my usual style and are short and squat! Size and shape will have to be worked on next. 

My first square teapot

...

After that I did some more work on the computer aided design software we're meant to be learning. It had all started out so well, with me playing around with the features and getting some cool looking simple objects, so I was excited to have another go this week. I thought, why not create a mould or two I could use to make batches to sell? Then I remembered that I have in fact hated CAD software since college :P

This time, I tried to make a teapot on the screen, but this being unfamiliar "solidworks" software, and not "prodesktop", I don't know how to use it, and failed when trying to trim the excess spout that appeared on the inside of the pot. Most frustrating. Why don't they make it possible to create new sketches on one plane like sensible people (wait, am I actually calling prodesktop sensible?)? That way I could make a separate cutting profile to mirror the profile of the inside of the pot. Leastways, it has now annoyed me to the extent that I won't let it go till it obeys me! Next plan of campaign: don't try and rotate a hollow profile for the pot, rotate a solid profile, and shell the entire solid teapot afterwards. I will not be defeated by a computer!

...

By Friday, I had Japanese class and we were taught some new kanji (characters adopted from the Chinese language). To my amusement and delight, the kanji character meaning craft, is also the same as the katakana (the japanese writing system used for foreign words) character used at the start of my name. Art is officially a part of my identity!

My name in Japanese is Emirii. That character shaped like a capital I at the top is the katakana for E, and the kanji for  craft.

It makes me wonder if there are lots of cases like this? I know that some kanji characters are built from other smaller ones, but are there lots of double entendres in the Japanese language? Sensei pointed out that the character for cheap is a roof over a woman. If you keep your wife at home, then she won't be on a shopping spree!

The kanji meaning cheap

It would be interesting to find out if I can build something creative around this idea.

...

After Japanese class, I got back, and finally got the email I'd been waiting for. Okuda Tomoko san, a potter from Tokoname in Japan, had written to update me on what was happening. I met her at Hatfield Art in Clay, and she offered to let me go and be her assistant for a few months in Japan. However, there had been a problem and it was no longer certain I would be able to go. Thankfully for everyone involved, it turns out that everything should be ok, and the situation should be able to be resolved very soon (I really hope so!). This means I can book the plane tickets! I can't wait.

Traditional Japanese oribe glaze on a bowl made by
Tomoko san. It is a copper glaze and has a beautiful
subtle crazed luster all across its surface.

Tomoko san makes light shades and oribe pieces (you can see some of them here: http://www.artinaction.org.uk/artist-630/Tomoko-Okuda), and has her own shop in Tokoname, a famous pottery town near Nagoya. I would be helping her in her studio, mixing clay and whatever she needed, and in return she is going to teach me about Japanese pottery techniques. This is going to be the most amazing work and cultural experience ever! She has been saying that her mother will enjoy talking to me because I can speak Japanese (so I've been studying hard!) and that she will show me some Japanese life as well. I am hoping to arrive in time to see the hanami, the cherry blossom viewing festival. It is a concept utterly alien in England, yet such a famous and huge event in Japan, going out to see the flowers and celebrate their beauty under the trees with a big party! I think that despite the big futuristic cities, they still live in a greater harmony with nature than Westerners do.

I don't know much about Tokoname yet, but it's very old, and there seems to be a great scope of different styles of pottery there, unlike other pottery towns I've heard of, such as Bizen. I haven't yet been able to find out what Tokoname's trademark is (Bizen's is to wrap rice straw around the pots and fire it incredibly high, giving a kind of red streaked, incredibly hard pottery). As well as Tomoko's work, I love some of the teapots I've seen being produced there. Some have gorgeous patterns painted up the side, like this momiji (maple leaf) design by Houji, similar to what I want to achieve. You can see a bit of the variety here at http://www.yuuki-cha.com/japanese-teapots?zenid=4bcb03e3c9b4060d45459ec1fdca1515 .

I think one reason why I want to learn Japanese pottery is the natural effects they achieve in the clay. There is such a depth of texture and colour that the pieces look incredibly tactile, and the pieces have a kind of understated grace and elegance. It's hard to explain how it makes me feel exactly, but peaceful,  happy, and strangely at home definitely comes into it. If I think about it too much, there is almost a bittersweet melancholy to it, as if they remind me there is something precious I have lost. 

...

Finally, this weekend I made some haircombs with a few of the crochet flowers I made previously. They're meant to be a kind of mix up of the current English fashion for crochet flowers and the traditional Japanese fabric flower decorations that went with kimono. I'm really pleased with how vibrant they look in small groups! I'd wanted to see what it would be like to make a matching accessory to go with the teapot cover I'd already made, and start building up a kind of range. Being relatively quick and easy to make, they won't cost so much, so hopefully I can sell several to people not wanting to spend big amounts of money. I'm not too sure about the combs, as though they're traditional Japanese hair accessories, I don't think many people necessarily know how to wear them as they're not very common here (I couldn't figure out how to get them to sit in my hair either). So, I'm also looking at hair elastics and pins as well, so people can use them as corsages. A lot of people wear crochet flowers on hats at the moment. These combs I'll probably donate to the third year undergraduates to raise money to take them to New Designers in London, and see how people react to them at the sale. 

Anyway, I guess that's everything up until now! Until next time :)