The plaster form I made two summers ago has been sitting in various places in my studio waiting for something to happen. It's a dress/figure, about 20 inches tall, the result of playing and playing in wet plaster. I made it during Tom Spleth's mold-making class at Penland. I even finished casting the mold for it here after the weight of bringing most of it home destroyed my muffler. Last year, I threw out the mold, finally realizing I didn't have the facility/space/knowledge for casting slip. I kept the form, intending to someday throw thin slabs of porcelain against it, cut them before they shrank too much, then wire them back together once fired. Like a dress-maker or restorer.
When New Year's plans were made for my daughter to have two friends over, I realized I probably wouldn't be participating in some of their activities, so the studio loomed accessible for the last hours of 2010. The thought of beginning "production" of the vessels I plan to make in 2011 was somewhat attractive, though the plaster lady silently stood her ground, going nowhere.
It's like those motivational time-management writers and speakers who tell you to imagine you only have a month or a week to live. You cull your list. You do those things you'd always wanted.
It was a wonderful night. I rolled very thin slabs of porcelain and dressed her, then I textured the dress with stamps, stopping a few minutes before midnight for sparklers and sparkling grape juice with the girls. Thirty minutes into the new year, it was back to the studio. My joy was only completed, of course, by having my daughter close by, greeting the new year with her, and knowing she and her sweet friends were having (nearly) as much fun as I was.
Though underslept, I was up with excitement the next morning first to make waffles, then to find places for the seams and holes for sewing the piece together. The twelve fragile sections are in the bottom of the kiln now after two days of finishing. If this experiment doesn't pan out, I may have to learn slip-casting or make some clay molds. Either way, the plaster figure has been touched and not forgotten in 2010, and I had a blast of a New Year's Eve. Tomorrow being the first official "work" day of the new year, I begin production work reinvigorated once more by the versatility and expressive potential of my wonderful medium.
