Abstract: 

Slip Cast Sculptural Pottery 

As a ceramic artist, Longley’s interests are varied.  She enjoys creating time intensive, highly detailed sculptures as well as functional pottery such as mugs, bowls, and plates.  She wants to combine her love of sculpted detail and functional pottery, but the time needed to hand build one of a kind sculpted pottery is not sustainable.  The solution is a reproduction technique called slip casting, used commercially and by potters to recreate complicated forms that would be inefficient to create by hand. Liquid clay, or slip, is poured into a plaster mold. Some of the water in the slip is absorbed by the plaster and a layer of stiffened clay collects on the surface of the mold. When this layer is thick enough to form a cast, the excess slip is poured off and the mold is removed. The hollow clay cast is then dried and fired.  Longley created two sculptural mug prototypes each taking approximately 40 hours.  When the mugs were complete, she sent them to master mold maker Samuel Berner, who then created a five-part plaster mold for each mug.  These molds allow her to recreate the sculptural mugs more efficiently and freely experiment with colored clay slips and a variety of glazes.  This finished series will include a soup and serving bowls, plates, a pitcher, and a teapot.  The mug from this series was recently accepted into the Zanesville Museum of Art’s 77th Ohio Annual Exhibition, one of 59 art pieces selected from a pool of 474 entries. 

Biography:

Carrie Longley is a studio artist and educator. She is currently an Associate Professor of Fine Art at Indiana University East. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Wittenberg University and a MFA from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Her artwork investigates the relationship between the art object and scientific specimen, celebrating the space between illusion and reality. Her public art installation entitled, Worm’s Eye View is on permanent display at the Burkhardt Public Library in Dayton, Ohio.  Longley exhibits her work extensively throughout the United States and has received numerous awards most notably, the Ohio Art Council Individual Excellence Award, The Bobby Kadis Award at the Penland School of Crafts, and the William and Dorothy Yeck Young Sculptor’s Award.