The Empty Bowls Project

Empty Bowls Project 

The Empty Bowls Project is a different take on the solution to ending world hunger, and it was formed in 1990 by one school who wished to donate to a food drive in their local district. However, what separated this food drive from others was the fact that ceramic students would create the bowls and sell them along with soup and bread. Each bowl would go for around $5, and the money raised would go to a charity of ones choosing. This idea spread throughout the world, as it not only helped out a good cause, but it also set a challenge or task for ceramic students who would create the bowls. In our own take of the Empty Bowls Project, TAISM students currently or formally enrolled in a ceramics class would create the bowls and sell them along with provided food for a relatively small amount of money. The money would then be sent to either Dar Al'Atta, an Omani hunger prevention organisation, or to other charities that donate the money to neighboring Yemen.

In order to contribute to this project, I personally created 4 bowls, however, one of them broke, one was thrown out, and one exploded in the kiln when it was being fired. This left me with one mug that I could truly call my own, as I had made it, under-glazed it, and then glazed it again all for the food drive. While I did paint two other bowls that weren't created by myself, I cannot take full pride or responsibility for those bowls. However, in my mind, it shouldn't matter who made the bowls, as it is all going towards a good cause, a cause that may help to end the suffering of many starving Arabs in the region. While I do not know anybody personally who is currently starving, many of my friends have fled Yemen due to the war and the famine that rages on near the provinces of Aden, and so this whole project feels very personal to me. 

This project is one of many that proves that art can help further our society as a whole. Normally, people believe that the solutions to our world come from engineers or doctors or sometimes even politicians, but when people realize that art is about creativity and problem solving then populations will start to realize the true value of art in our society. While art definitely is about producing eye catching works, sometimes the work can be eye catching in a different way to most art pieces, as most works of art rely on well crafted brush strokes or intelligent productivity, but in this project, not only do the bowls have interesting designs and look overall very intrinsic, but they are also eye catching in the sense that they bring awareness to the hunger issue plaguing our world today.     

Links to more information: 

http://www.daralatta.org/ 

https://www.davisart.com/Promotions/SchoolArts/PDF/EmptyBowls_10_07.pdf

https://www.carbonvalleyhelpcenter.org/home.html

Leo's Slab Project

Leo's Slab Project 

THE SLAB PROJECT

What was your thought process?

When I first started thinking about creating a slab with additional clay that had been imprinted or scored onto it, I thought it would be a fairly quick and simple process. However, I had no idea what I wanted to base my project on, and so I went for a simplistic idea of creating a turtle shell, however I soon realized that that would be too easy, and so I went for creating a 3-dimensional project and created a cylinder. However that didn't work out, so I contemplated my options and decided to go with a basket. I liked the 3-D idea, but I couldn't create a cylinder, so I created a rectangular prism. One I had a good basket styled starting point, I thought about what to add to it, and thus I came up with the idea of drawing the product moment correlation coefficient equation onto the side of the basket and a bunch of 1's and 0's in a binary styled format to symbolize these things being thrown away. While this project might seem a bit 'different' than typical projects, I had come up with a project that symbolized my attitude to some things I had learnt while studying in the UK, binary and  statistics. Since these ideas were been 'put' into the 'waste' basket, it symbolized me forgetting these concepts as they don't help me and I don't need them anymore. 

Reflecting on your slap: 

Overall, my slab project did not turn out the way I wanted it to, however it did help me broaden my understandings of art and thus increase my already immense amount of respect I have for potters and people who work with clay. The reason this project made me realize the true value of determination paired with a creative mindset is because I could not sculpt a slab that not only looked good, but also meant something on a deeper level for either the artist, myself in this case, or for other audience members. This made the overall project very different than any other artistic project I have ever worked on in my life, as normally with drawing, one can derive meaning and paint meaning by simply remembering an image or redrawing an image that has been photographed or drawn before. However, with the slab project, one is not simply copying or developing a two dimensional piece that supposedly has meaning, instead one has to create a three dimensional object with meaning on all surfaces of the project, Since I was creating a box, I needed to have creativity on each wall of my box, as well as having the bottom shaped to resemble the most meaningful part of the box, as boxes normally serve the purpose to keep the most valuable or important things on the inside as to add a bit of mystery to the whole idea. While I tried to add meaning to each wall of my project as well as the bottom, my project did seem a bit unfinished, however I shall always remember it for it taught me a valuable lesson about ceramics; creativity needs to be represented on any side a viewer would look at it from, no matter if it be the walls or the bottom or the legs of a ceramic sculptor, which only a select few can manage to achieve.  

The Product:  

As you can, the product did seem a bit unfinished or rushed, however the project did seem to turn into the sort of image I had in mind when I was contemplating what style my project would take on. Overall I stuck with the main idea; 1's and 0's at the bottom to represent binary, a concept that I learned but have never used, and some walls stating, "waste", to represent how I feel about the whole concept of binary.

 

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Welcome to Leo's Ceramics Blog!

THE MUG PROJECT

So what was the project?

In this particular project, the mug making project, we had to use the wheel in order to create four mugs, two of which had to be similar to one another, using various skills we developed through a good part of this course. 

What did you learn?

Not only did we learn how to properly use the wheel, but we also learned how to center a wedged piece of clay and how to develop the basic shape of a mug from there. We additionally learnt how to attach a handle to our mugs as well as how to trim them once they were in the leather hard stage. These steps were undeniably hard for me personally, as creating mugs that appear similar sounds simple, however the process requires time and effort that I previously didn't think was needed to accomplish the mug making process. At times I even became frustrated with the project, as some of my mugs dried into the bone dry stage before I had the chance to add handles to them, lengthening the process. The handles also became a challenge for me, as I couldn't create strong handles that matched any of my mugs. While I did finish the project in then end, I had to engage a fierce determination within me in order to do so, strengthening my skills as a potter while increasing the amount of respect I have for other potters and their work.  

What was the process? 

Step 1) 

• Wedging the clay. Once I wedged the clay into a good starting piece, I centered it the best I could but pushing and basically hitting it into the bat on the wheel. However, this is only the first step of centering, and in order to properly complete the centering procedure, I had to push it into the bat with the purpose of making it as flat as possible. Once I did that, I then continued to push up the walls of the clay until I had my centered spherical cup on my bat.

Step 2)

• As we can see here, this step is the aftermath of pushing the clay walls up to create a cylinder. To test if it was centered, you can see me holding two fingers to the mug to see if they move or not.

Step 3)

• Once I was happy with my centered cylinder, I started to push my two thumbs into the center to create the hollow part of my mug where the liquid one is trying to drink is stored. 

Step 4)

• As you can see, after I had increased my cups depth to a satisfactory point, I measured the distance from the base of the mug to the top of bottom part of my mug using a needle tool.

 

Step 5)

• After I was happy with the basic layout of my mug, I needed to increase the height of my mug by putting two fingers, one on the inside, one on the outside of the mug, which forced the mugs walls to move upwards to create a taller mug. This step also decreased the distance thickness of the walls of my mug.

Step 6)

• After getting my walls to a point in which the cup would be able to hold enough liquid to satisfy one in one sitting, I smoothed out the rim of my mug with my thumb to create an even and smooth rim.

Step 7)

• At this point in the creation of my mug, I felt that it was good enough to take off the bat and leave it to dry into the leather hard stage of clay. This first step in getting my mug off the bat was scrapping any excess clay of the bottom of the mug using the needle tool. 

Step 8)

• Once my mug had a clean bottom, I needed to remove it from the bat using the wire tool. I used this tool to help in the removal process by slowly rotating the wheel while moving the wire through the clay.

Step 9)

• Once my to be mug was off the bat and my wheel was cleaned up, I put my mug into a plastic covered tray to make sure that while the mug dried, it wouldn't dry to the point of the bone dry stage.

What would be the next steps of creating your mug?

The next step to completing the mug would be to trim the bottom of the mug to get a smooth and stable bottom that can support the mug. Once you have trimmed your mug, you can score your art work and attach a handle using slip. You can also add hard clay to the handle and mug to make the handle more secure.

THE SLAB PROJECT

What was your thought process?

When I first started thinking about creating a slab with additional clay that had been imprinted or scored onto it, I thought it would be a fairly quick and simple process. However, I had no idea what I wanted to base my project on, and so I went for a simplistic idea of creating a turtle shell, however I soon realized that that would be too easy, and so I went for creating a 3-dimensional project and created a cylinder. However that didn't work out, so I contemplated my options and decided to go with a basket. I liked the 3-D idea, but I couldn't create a cylinder, so I created a rectangular prism. One I had a good basket styled starting point, I thought about what to add to it, and thus I came up with the idea of drawing the product moment correlation coefficient equation onto the side of the basket and a bunch of 1s and 0s in a binary styled format to symbolize these things being thrown away. While this project might seem a bit 'different' than typical projects, I had come up with a project that symbolized my attitude to some things I had learnt while studying in the UK, binary and  statistics. Since these ideas were been 'put' into the 'waste' basket, it symbolized me forgetting these concepts as they don't help me and I don't need them anymore.