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“Pulse of Life,” 6.5 inches (17 cm) in height,
porcelain with fiberglass, fired to Cone 10 in an electric kiln, glazed with
terra sigillata, then salt fired to Cone 06, with sticks tied with gut.
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October 15, 2007
Exploiting the Nature of Clay with Fiberglass
by Nancy Baele | Read Comments (0)
In today’s Ceramic Arts Daily, Paula Murray
explains how she uses fiberglass to balance the physical and the spiritual
while creating her porcelain pieces. BackgroundInfluencesMentorProcessesBACKGROUND
From a high shelf in her Quebec home, Paula Murray takes two black
and rust, elongated pots. She places them beside a vessel from her latest
“Fragmented Earth” series and laughs at her beginner’s luck, saying the two
pots are held together by wood ash and glaze. They mark the first step in a
singularly focused journey: to balance the physical and the spiritual, and to
show, through porcelain’s fragility and strength, parallels in nature and in
the human experience. “I believe the artist’s role is to try to understand this
life force by articulating it and giving it form. My intention has always been
the same. I want to make objects about the nature of being in and honoring the
natural world.”
INFLUENCES
Murray
spent four years at sea, sailing from Canada
to South America with her husband and two
children. What she has absorbed from her close connection to seas, rivers and
lakes, and from living in and walking through forests and along shorelines, is
reflected in the sky and earth colors of her glazes and in her forms. She hastens
to make clear that when she is working she is conscious of symbolic elements
but she does not like the intellectual pretension that often accompanies an
analysis of a potter’s work. “First and foremost, there is the physical act of
making a pot,” she says. “It demands a long apprenticeship, and respect for the
materials and the process.”
MENTOR
 The first significant step in her apprenticeship
began at Sheridan College in Toronto,
where the late Ruth Gowdy McKinley was her mentor. “She had a quiet, strong
personality and never worked at a frenzied pace,” Murray explained. “She was a powerful
influence on me because of her reverence for craftsmanship.” When she left Sheridan, Murray
worked twelve- to fifteen-hour days in shared studios, perfecting her skills in
throwing, casting, handbuilding and firing. Eventually, she and her husband
were able to build a studio beside their home, where she continues to devote
herself to the exploration of porcelain’s possibilities.
PROCESSES
Fifteen years ago, she began experimenting with
incorporating into clay a type of fiberglass, called “surface veil,” used in
wooden boat restoration. At the time, it was a solution to a technical problem
for a sculpture entitled “Nautilus” that consisted of 33 large porcelain arcs
that needed to be strong enough to be removed from the mold and transferred to
the kiln without breaking. Since then, she has evolved the technique to exploit
the warping, stress lines and patterns that can be created by the fiberglass. FOR MORE INFORMATIONSee a term you weren’t quite sure of? Then visit
the Ceramic Arts Daily Glossary. To see more of Paula’s work, visit www.paulamurray.ca.ON WEDNESDAY
Read about Paula’s four-month cycle used to develop her series of artwork, stabilize the forms over several electric kiln firings, and finally glazing
the work and firing it in her salt kiln.
Read more about these related topics:
Functional Ceramics Functional Pottery Ceramic Art Techniques Ceramic Artists
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