After watching the Great Pottery throwdown first week challenge, I tried to think about what would I make if asked to create a set based on a fond memory. I thought back to a visit to New York before Covid hit in 2019 and a couple of photos that I took there.
One is of a beautiful warm sunset taken from the middle of the wide road and some of the elements that just indicate that we are not in England. The water tower on a roof, or the style of the traffic lights and the feeling of space in the broad street.
The other is from inside the iconic Grand Central station, aside from the glorious architecture, is the amazing constellation ceiling.
My starting idea was to make a big bowl, so I had lots of space to paint and experiment, but I also wanted to sgraffitto the base silhouette of the buildings.
So I started with 1.5kg of white clay and gave myself 3 attempts to throw the widest biggest bowls I could!
Using the slip made whilst throwing I added some Black Body stain so I could apply the silhouette part of the design to the pot when the bowls were just a tiny bit drier.
Then when the black layer was fully dried, but not dried out, I started adding in marks and scratches to make the silhouette come to life, knowing that after the final firing the marks would be bright and white.
I also made some blue slip and painted the interior of the bowl and scratched in the Orion Constellation to reference the ceiling in Grand Central Station. Whilst researching the ceiling design I found out that the constellation is actually in reverse, but Orion is the right way round, so decided to put Orion both facing the right in one bowl and to the left in the other to play with the notion of the controversy over the stars representation on such a famous ceiling.
Link to history of the ceiling https://www.untappedcities.com/the-hidden-history-of-grand-central-terminals-celestial-ceiling/
I really liked the way these bowls had turned out, even just in Black & White and wanted to see if the design would work on something smaller so made three vases in the same style, this time without Orion inside.
After the set was bisque fired then it was onto the tricky underglaze decoration as I knew trying to make a sunset would be challenging.
I got out my ordinary paints and tested some colour combinations and took a while to realise that there is no green in either a sunset or sunrise, so a rainbow would just not work, so back to my original photo and take the colour cues from there.
I mixed up some secondary colours from my primary underglaze set and just went for it, I had decided to put the smallest vase through the entire process as a test, just to check that it was all going to work, didn’t want to put everything through the glaze firing only to find a problem.
I was really pleased with how it looked and hoped the transparent glaze over the top would make the colours pop.
I put a sky blue underglaze on the inside and a transparent glaze across the whole piece, inside and out and put it through a glaze firing to see if my idea would work or not.
Results
I am so pleased with how they turned out, really glad I did a little full test, and hope to make some more, maybe with a skyline a little closer to home 🙂
Tracey Tutt 
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