Glorious Glaze Shopping in China

Glaze shops here in China are magical places where rainbows, spectrums and candy have distilled and separated themselves. They have melted into pots, tubs, and plastic water bottles for you to take home and splatter all over your ceramic greenware.

This is my dear friend Shelley from Adelaide who is on this artists residency at the Pottery Workshop with me. Here she is checking out the ming blue colour variations in the underglaze stains. You pick the colour from the fired sample and then they go out the back and bring you your own little tub to take away.

It is a hive of activity here at "Paint Town".

A section of the shop with glazed samples on the shelf for customers to choose from. I was surprised to see a piece by famous Japanese artist Yoshimoto Nara. Does he produce sculptures here in Jingdezhen and one mysteriously found its way into this shop and on to its shelf? 

Stains R'US. Yummy. Actually I bet they dont taste as good as they look. I enjoyed some of the colour therapy/healing benefits of the colours as I stood here and gazed.

Did you say you want white glaze? We have white in about 100 variations. This is some of the crackle options, which I am quite hot for.

Ming blue, of which Jingdezhen is famous for. Jingdezhen is where the ancient porcelain Ming vases have come from.... 2000 years of porcelain making.

From the kiln this week

Last week I had some fast refresher lessons in ceramics. My new friend Simon Suckling (Brisbane, Australia) who is also a resident here at the Pottery Workshop has been such a great help in answering all of my silly questions.

THANK YOU SIMON!!

Here are my glaze samples... I really like the colours, however the glaze is very runny. The kiln man told me off (in Chinese sign language) when I picked up my goodies because my pieces had stuck to his kiln bricks. My friend Kosta likes these the most. He thinks they are very wabi-sabi (HELLO THAT IS A BIG COMPLIMENT).

Here are some mark making and underglaze stain samples.

Here are some underglaze stain samples... I quite like the results as they appeal to my rainbow obsession, but the application is a bit wishy washy in some areas. Ill keep trying. I will be overglazing with some gold lustre when I can face breathing in those toxic fumes for an hour. China's pollution is bad enough for now.

Well thats it from the kiln this week. Watch this space for more...