Nov 26th, 2019 : Carved Pottery

[xoxoxoBruce]

Sean Forest Roberts owns and operates Forest Ceramic Company located on Orcas Island, WA.
He produces some very unique carved ceramics from multiple layers of colored clay slip.

The 29-years-old artist says that his passion for pottery was born in high school, where he tried the craft for the first time. "I am often asked about my art background, and I inevitably tell my story about studying chemistry at Carleton College, with my serious hobby of ceramics, which started in High School with a love of throwing pottery on the wheel. I think it’s a fun fact that I have never taken an art class other than ceramics, and my formal education in ceramics was very minimal.

My ceramic knowledge is self-taught, and I am most interested in exploring processes that are not common knowledge. I continue to learn every day through my experimentation." While the artist has been doing ceramics for 15 years, for the last 7 years he's working on colored porcelain.

On his Instagram account which has 359k fans, Roberts often demonstrates not only the finished products but also the whole ceramic-making process. Through the captivating videos, the artist demonstrates the surprisingly satisfying process of carving pottery. The carvings reveal a mixture of different colors and vary in shapes and sizes.

"The process I use is called slipcasting. The first step is to create a prototype form on the wheel, then create a plaster mold of that form. Once the plaster mold has been made, it can be “cast” a couple of times in one day, using slip—liquefied clay—to recreate the original prototype form. After casting there are 10-12 steps to undergo for each piece, and it takes about a week to have the final product out of final glaze firing," Roberts explains.

Most of the carved pieces are made with 5 layers of colored slip(clay), but there's a couple pieces on his website (The Lab) that are 29 and 30 layers.

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