Monday, May 28, 2018

When Soft Happens

  
The clay I'm throwing today is so soft that I can plunge my hand into a 25lb slug of it and as quickly as I withdraw my hand the clay fills the void.

I inadvertently set a 25lb bag of this clay over a crack in the concrete floor of my shop for a few seconds. By the time I reached for it again it had slipped almost entirely into the crack. If it wasn't for that little twist tie that closes the bag, I might not have recovered the clay at all.

When I threw it down on the wedging table it splashed.


 I can only assume that when the clay factory was mixing this batch of clay up they did so as your typical one-part-per-million holistic apothecary might add his placebo into solution. I'm sure they added clay into the water when they were making this batch. I mean, I assume they did. It's not JUST water. It's at least cloudy.

The only way I've been able to throw shapes out of it at all is by joining it in hypostatic union (a term I appropriated from my college theology classes for its useful ambiguity. Don't worry, though. The theologians won't be offended at my pilfering their term. They don't understand what it means either)...
....anyway, I joined the clay in hypostatic union with a cloud of dust that I keep swirling above my wheel.

So, this lump of clay is lying on a psychiatrist's couch and he says, "Hey doc, I can't help but feel I'm being manipulated."

I'm torn with my choices regarding this wet clay. I may have to leave it to air dry for a while and then wedge it back up. Or I might put it in a very large tub and soak in it for a while while I ponder the problem.

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