There is a bigger story to tell than the one I am offering this week but the pain of it is still too fresh. In short, I am making the best of a bad situation and moving on. In place of that sad tale let me tell you more about a long term project previously mentioned.
I have fired on porcelain cookies for thirty plus years. They reduce the amount of warpage in the glaze firing by absorbing the stress of shrinkage. After, you are left with vitrified disks of porcelain to either discard or repurpose.
In the year 2000, I began turning the fired cookies into mosaic tile by glazing, firing and breaking it into small pieces. I presently have more than five hundred CD containers of processed material. In them is a wide array of colours and surfaces, a kind of glaze survey of the past eighteen years. At least fifty square meters of material has been processed, perhaps more.
I use a wire bender attachment made for a vice to break up the cookies. You get into a rhythm turning the handle until you hear the crunch, backing up, shifting tile position, turning, crunching, dropping the bits into the container and so on. The perfect mindless task when the need arises.
My goal is to be working on the first mosaic by January. A door panel that commemorates the disappearing elm trees in my neighbourhood. Thinking about designs and sourcing the other materials needed. Excited to think of the possibilities.
