Clay is not usually thought of as a sketching medium. In fact, ceramics are the ultimate in delayed gratification: you make the pot, then wait for it to dry, then fire it in a kiln. Only once you open up the kiln do you really know what you’ve done.
But there’s at least one way for a potter to sketch: by using slip. It’s not a very complicated material – just clay mixed with water, to about the consistency of heavy cream. But you can do wonders with it. My friend, the terrifically talented potter Michelle Erickson, pointed out to me after reading my post below on “drawing a line and following it,” that this is exactly what you do when making slipware. Here’s an eighteenth-century plate in the V&A, made by dripping lines of light-coloured slip in rows over a layer of dark-coloured slip, and then dragging a tool (maybe a comb or feather) across the surface.
For the purposes of this blog, though, the most important thing about slip is that you can draw with it. Traditionally this was done using a clay pot with a quill sticking out of it as a pouring spout, but here is Michelle using a more modern squeeze bottle technique.
For more great images like this, check out the article that Michelle and ceramic historian Rob Hunter wrote about all the marvelous things you can do with slipware. The medium has a freshness to it that no other type of ceramic can match. As you can see from the below plate, now in the Chipstone Foundation collection in Milwaukee (where I used to work) sketching in clay has always brought out the inventiveness in potters. 17th-century potter Ralph Simpson’s truly weird take on a game of cat and mouse wouldn’t have been quite the same in any other medium.
You still have to fire a pot like this, of course. In fact, you can tell that the iron in the dark slip that Simpson used ran a little bit when the glaze was heated to the melted point. That’s the sort of effect the people who love ceramics, like me, really go for. As is the feeling that you can follow every little decision, every swoop of the quill with which Simpson dripped his slip, all these centuries later. The magic of slipware, at least for me, is the way it fuses the quickest of sketches and the most permanent of materials into a single, arresting form. And you can eat off it too!