Ceramic Towers

Ceramic Towers.

The aim of this one day project was to work in groups of 4 and each build a section of what would finally be a tower.

This started off by all of us having a chunk of clay, which we had to slam down on the table in order to get all the air bubbles out, because it could easily break in the kiln if there are air bubbles in the clay when it is fired. After this, we decided what section of the tower we were going to make individually, i chose to make the bottom section, Megan was the 2nd section, Johnny the 3rd and Josh built the top section of our tower. I decided to keep it simple and make my section square so the sections on top would be sturdy and secure. I then used lots of different tools to add patterns and textures to the clay. I used zigzag tools, wire mesh and i went outside to find leaves and twigs to add different patterns and textures to the clay. I really experimented with lots of different tools. Our overall tower was very textured because we all used as many different tools as we could to make it unique and different to everyone else's tower.  

After adding multiple textured to our bit of clay, we were given glaze, which is paint for the clay, which goes shiny when fired in the kiln.
There were four different colours of glaze, blue, red, green and black. I chose to use the red and blue glaze on my little section as i liked the colours they were when fired. I also added sand to the glaze on my section to give it a rough look and feel when fired.

The next thing we did as a team was to somehow put all of our sections together. This was challenging as when we blended the edges of each section together, the clay would loose the shape it was built into so we had to work around this and change our ideas slightly in order to make our tower stand on it s own.

When we had put all our tower together, we decided to add bits of thick wire through the clay to add more texture and materials to our tower which made ours look different to the other groups towers. We also added small bits of left over clay to our tower, and made little holes to look like windows.

These photographs are of all the different view points of the tower before it had been fired, as we didn't have time to put them in the kiln. Overall this one day project was really fun as we got to work in teams which we hadn't done before and i learnt how to create ceramic towers as had never used clay before.