Ceramic and Plywood 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 Glass Screen back story for the rest of this particular story.

​For this complimentary wall hung ceramic screen, I thought that it would be interesting to make a plywood base and frame and then to assemble the positive ceramic cut out shapes in a mosaic fashion, to mimic the design of the Ceramic and Glass Screen. So the clay shapes were covered with different coloured slips, biscuit fired and then they were covered with a clear earthenware glaze being glazed fired to 1000 degrees centigrade. The glazed fired shapes were then glued into position and the gaps between them filled in with white tile grout. The finished screen measures about 17 inches wide, by about 14 inches high.