New Altars (Quick Pics)

A few quick and dirty pics of new garden altars, just out of the kiln this afternoon.

I want to start with a detail shot, just because I love this glaze action going on here:



Damn. Check that out. That is Annie's Mix clay with a wash of iron oxide then a run of glazes: Archie's base, ice blue, mottled blue, blue purple, cactus crawl, and blue crawl. The strange bare clay protruding bits are meant to hold the kinds of bits and pieces that outdoor altars seem to collect, rocks and feathers and such. We'll see how they work. If they work.

Anyway, here's the bigger picture:



This is one of my favorites of the five I fired yesterday. It's much calmer in person than in the photo. (Note however the crack that runs along the middle of the floor. That, I think, is the result of my impatience when working with too soft clay. I put the feet on the piece too soon then tried to dry it standing and uncovered which made it dry unevenly, front to back, ultimately causing the split.)

Here's the next altar:



This is the same clay and iron oxide wash, glazed with mint and gun metal green. I added shelves to this one, though I don't know how I feel about the shelves. We'll have to see how they function, I suppose. I like the little windows though.



This next altar is my egg altar. No joke. I made it about six inches deep so that it could hold an ostrich egg my mother gave me a few years ago. It will be joined by a ceramic egg I traded for at the studio. I imagine other eggs will come along with time.



Picture it in your mind, an ostrich egg standing in for The Madonna.

And a bit of vulval detail:



I wanted the interior to be pink, obviously, so I layered Archie's base over white. The most simple glaze combination of the lot actually.

This is what i called my wild card:



I don't think it photographs well; it's visually very chaotic. Mentally, too, it was very chaotic to build. The four pockets on the side and the single long pocket on the front (though it's hard to tell from the photo that there is a pocket in the front) are meant to hold cut flowers.  There are seven glazes on this altar, three of which I'd never used before (or had only used on miniscule test tiles): black, saturated iron, red gold, blue crawl, saturated gold, lustrous jade, and textured turquoise.

Detail: 



I like this altar if only because it is the least like me.

And this, the largest of the five:



Cracked right down the middle in the glaze firing.



There's probably a lesson in that.

I had a hard time photographing these things. The late afternoon sunlight was a little too intense and the inside fluorescent lights too dull. I had a hard time getting the true colors of the glazes right. Maybe I'll photograph them again once they're in place in the garden and have started doing their work.