Ceramic and Glass Screen. 1994.

As students in the one year BTEC Diploma in Foundation Studies in Art and Design, we had an organised day out in Blackpool and we were encouraged to draw sketches and take photographs of things that we found interesting. That visual research would then form the basis for a self directed project. In Blackpool I visited The Winter Gardens and The North Pier doing some sketches and taking photographs. The North Pier was built in 1863 and designed by Eugenius Birch.

​Back at college in the Three Dimensional Design area I had an idea to design and make a free standing ceramic and glass screen, based on my photographs and sketches of the cast iron ornamental seat backs that I had seen along the edges of the North Pier. The idea then developed into an ornamental object that could be wall hung.

​I worked out the design and traced it, transferring the tracing to my thick slab of rolled out White Saint Thomas clay. Using my non surgical scalpel I very carefully cut out all the areas that I wanted to fill with crushed coloured glass. Those negative shapes were placed to one side and I soon realised that the negative shapes could be reassembled to form the positive shapes for a complimentary wall hung ceramic screen. Please see my Ceramic and Plywood Screen back story for the rest of this complimentary wall hung ceramic screen story. 

​For the ceramic and glass screen I also added thin, long and small, lengths of clay to mimic the lengths of cast iron ornament as seen on the original North Pier seat backs. The whole was then biscuit fired. After the firing, the screen was then covered with a clear earthenware glaze, the crushed glass was then added into the cut out sections and the screen was glaze fired to 1150 degrees centigrade. The finished screen measures about 20 inches wide, by about 15 inches high.