SCA Studio 2 (CAST2002) Semester 2
Research Blog - Abigail Jarvis
520466962
14-09-2023 - Thursday
Begin Fruit castingI went in today to begin working on my fruit casts because with it being art week it gives me the best chance of consistently working on them, which is the best way to approach mould making, especially with fruit.I started by consulting with Canbor about the best methods to begin and how to position all the fruit. I started with the banana as it seemed like the most straightforward fruit. I find mould-making an incredibly frustrating process and very emotionally taxing for some reason, so in the morning session, I definitely got overwhelmed and almost gave up. But I continued and managed to prep the clay walls before lunch so that first thing after lunch I could pour, which I did. All the photos below show different stages of the process. I prepped all the first half of the moulds today so that first thing tomorrow I could begin to pour.I got the first half done and whilst it set was prepping the others, but I knew I wanted to complete the banana pouring today because they go soft so quickly, so the first row of photos below show both halves in the clay mould, with the dowels in the last showing the pouring holes.
The images below show the other fruits prepped and poured. The pear shows a bit of a cross-section, where the fruit is half-buried and the pouring pout is added on the side.I think in the future I prefer making moulds where the pouring spout is not on the join line, even though that is easier for removal, I just preferred the two where the pouring spout was on the top (banana and tomato)
15-09-2023 - Friday
Came in today to continue with the mould making, and began by opening the banana mould, as seen below.
I experienced some leaks pouring the other half of these moulds, but used some clay to quickly patch them before to could become a problem. I also just made a huge mess
But all the moulds came out wonderfully, and I left them out over the weekend in the sun to dry in the very hot weather.
And lastly, the moulded fruit, looking a little worse for where covered in plaster.
19-09-2023 - Tuesday
Test pourToday I did a test pour, using the earthenware slip, mainly because that was just what we had the most of in the studio, though I think I would prefer to use stoneware.
20-09-2023 - WednesdayMoved moulds to the windowsill to stay over the break whilst I move houses

05-10-2023 - Thursday
More casting and prep for glaze tests
Glaze info
Deco Underglaze in
- watermelon
- papaya
- mango??
- spearmint
06-10-2023 - Friday
Undergalze testing with 1, 2 and 3 coats
end of week update: 3 sets
10-10-2023 - Tuesday
Studio Gallery CrawlNotes from Vicky's lecture:
06-10-2023 - Thursday
More fruit casting! currently at 4 sets

16-10-2023 - Monday
yet again, more casting. Also spent the weekend beginning to plan out the next 2 weeks as after that point I need to stop casting and begin glazing and working out the install process.
17-10-2023 - Tuesday
hey, more casting
18-10-2023 - Wednesday
oop more casting
23-10-2023 - Monday
More slip casting :) I stopped taking photos because there's nothing interesting about the process. It's very repetitive
24-10-2023 - Tuesday
More casting! and also beginning to work on getting the underglaze on the un fired pieces so they can be bisqued. I chose to do the underglaze before bisque as that meant I wouldn't have to worry about the clear glaze reacting strangely, which has happened in the past.
25-10-2023 - Wednesday
hey guess what, more casting and glazing
stash update, some goodies in the kiln ready to go
26-10-2023 - Thursday
you guys will NEVER guess which I did today. more casting.
27-10-2023 - Friday
Final day of casting! from next week I will focus my attention on getting everything underglazed, fired, clear glazed and fired again!
30-10-2023 - Monday
Glazing time!!! and goodies out of the kiln!
31-10-2023 - Tuesday
The set up for today!
01-11-2023 - Wednesday
More glazing, clear glazing though!! I also packed a bisque kiln (middle image) and you can see all my fruit loaded up. Also packed a glaze fire in one of the test kilns! for the pieces I clear glazed today.
This was very scary
03-11-2023 - Friday
unpacked my test kiln today!! FRUIT!
06-11-2023 - Monday
All of my fruits have been bisque fired and underglazed, so now it's time to focus on clear glazing.I got a shocking amount done today, and what I thought would take me two days only took my one! So I packed and started 2 of the kilns (one for this and one for my elective). I had to sue the larger kiln as my fruit would not fit in the test kiln.
10-11-2023 - Friday
The kilns took a very long time to cool so I am only just now unloading, but fruit!!! Everything survived the firing an nothing got stuck so !! very good news. Now I just have to wait for install on Monday, when I'll bring in a little shopping basket to carry them around.
13-11-2023 - Monday
Install Day!
some small adjustments will be made tomorrow morning but for the most part! very happy with this.
14-11-2023 - Tuesday
Presentations!
03-08-2023 - Week 1
Hand Building TilesCanbora introduced a variety of techniques to make clay tiles, including the slab roller, mixing clay together, extruders, including natural materials and more.
And an addition two other tiles I forgot to photograph, including one large white and red marbled circle one, and a naturally shaped one making spirals out of marble clay and compressing together.
10-08-2023 - Week 2
Hand Building Tiles cont.
Built two more tiles, and also set the ones from last week in the kiln room to be fired.
Also set the below pieces to be bisqued as well.
17-08-2023 - Week 3
Discussing installationSpent today talking to Tim in the workshop about how to go about installing various pieces. Both Canbora and Tim were very into this bronze strip wire (?) and the ways it could be configured into a hanging solution.Also, the pieces that had been bisqued were then glazed and put in the gas kiln to be fired.
24-08-2023 - Week 4
Install dayStarted the day off in the workshop getting pieces ready to install and finding certain fittings for certain pieces.
Spent the first bit of the afternoon soldering the bronze brackets to the wood pannel shown below and the last hour of so installing carious pieces.The copper piece isn't quite finished, I'd like to paint the base white and polish the metal but for now it's okay.
29-08-2023 - Week 5
Hand BuildingCanbora began talking through how to approach hand-building large ceramic works. Some idea sketches are below.

05-09-2023 - Week 6
Large hand buildingToday Canbora began to talk us throw hand building large-scale objects. I started making a large lemon that could either sit don't he floor or be mounted on the wall. I also have plans to make a large wall mountable ceramic lampshade but slumping some clay until it is leather hard.
03-08-2023 - Week 7 - ART WEEK
19-09-2023 - Week 8Was unable to attend this week due to moving houses.
MID SEM BREAK
03-10-2023 - Week 9
Rolled out and draped lamp in canvas swing type thing
10-10-2023 - Week 10
I didn't come in any sooner so the piece dried out but I'm going to go with out an remove the lighting aspect and just make it a ThingCarved down the edges of my dried out wall piece and got it ready to be fired, I don't know if I'll glaze it
17-10-2023 - Week 11
Couldn't attend this week
24-10-2023 - Week 12
Installed my big walk piece! I think it looks great, the shadow and light really make the work stand out!
03-08-2023 - Tuesday
Notes from today's lecture and seminar are in the images below, and class brainstorm tasks below that.
02-08-2023 - Wednesday
Week 1 Homework:
Read
https://transversal.at/transversal/0311/steyerl/eninteresting quotes:
- 'Why would one need a discipline if it wasn’t to discipline somebody or something? Any discipline can thus also be seen from the point of view of conflict.'
- 'the artistic research is ambivalently co-opted into state policies'
- 'Other methods of artistic research include situationist derive and workers inquiries, constructivist montage, cut-ups, biomechanics, oral history, deconstructive or surrealist anthropology, the diffusion of counterinformation as well as aesthetic journalism'Research
Art + Home3 resources:
1. Drusilla Modjeska's The Orchard, specifically chapter 3 in Sight and Solitude (Book)
- has some really interesting analysis on solitude within the home and feminized space
2. Marcia Tucker's Domestic Politics by Elyse Speaks (Journal Article)
- discusses 'craft' art and art traditionally seen as female and novel
3. Cyberspace meets domestic space by Marsha F. Cassidy (Journal Article)
- whilst the cyber stuff doesn't interest me as much, it discusses gendered space within the home and the role of womenThinking through materials:
- ceramics/clay
04-08-2023 - Friday
Week 1 Homework cont. + broader assessment researchModjeska, Drusilla. The Orchard. Sydney: Picador, Pan Macmillan Australia, 1994.Something to note about this book is its heteronormative view of the world and its dynamics. As a genderqueer person, this is a bit stifling, but for the context of the book it's extremely well written and I still see a lot of value in the text regardless of this hindrance.Drusilla Modjeska - The Orchard quotes of interest:
- Mentioned early on in the book (pg.15), an exhibition named "Hands, Windows, Doorways" about women's art. Two characters/people from the book discuss the exhibition referring to 'symbols of power and sexuality; the reality of power and sexuality'.
↳ the title of the exhibition refers to the home, and how women's identities are linked to the home, particularly in the setting of this book which was last century- Skipping forward to page 135 (and ignoring many other wonderful quotes not quite relevant to my interest), is the following. A brief visual analysis of Grace Cossington Smith's paintings, shown below.Left: self-portrait, 1948, oil on cardboard, 39.5 x 30.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery.Right: Interior with wardrobe mirror, 1955, oil on canvas on paperboard, 91.4 x 73.7 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales
I'm also going to include an image of the pages in Modjeska's book, just to save me typing out quotes/context. Don't mind the annotations.
06-08-2023 - Sunday, cont. from FridayHer analysis of Cossington Smith's artworks is a large part of what is inspiring me to look at the domestic space, particularly from a fem/afab perspective.the quote "In the self-portrait seeing and being seen are held in painful tension, a dark an punishing solitude that contains as much refusal as release (especially when looking at her use of colour in this painting which is dull compared to her other works which are bright); in the interior we see the fullness of a feminine space one so ambivently inhabited, and connected..."Specifically, the line 'a fullness of feminine space" is particularly powerful to me, because as a non-woman who is still quite feminine, I can relate to this particular description.
06-08-2023 - Sunday
more researchSpeaks, Elyse. "Marcia Tucker's Domestic Politics: Art and Craft in the 1990" The Journal of Modern Craft 15, no. 3 (2022): p. 295-311Abstract: While today process-driven work affiliated with craft, outsider art, and folk art is increasingly considered a viable politicized or conceptual practice, this essay focuses on the 1996 New Museum exhibition, A Labor of Love, in order to examine Marcia Tucker’s unconventional use of “domestic” politics to promote and activate objects often read as bound to their materiality. This article offers an analysis of the exhibition as a challenge to the politics of value that supports established aesthetic categories within the museum to enact a broader renegotiation of those values that extend beyond the museum’s walls. Marcia Tucker took craft’s conventionally domestic station as license to theorize ways in which quotidian strategies (both those undertaken by the artists, and those deployed by Tucker) could prompt controversy and debate. By featuring connections among artifacts based on questions of labour, the exhibition highlighted process as an issue infused with political meaning and potential. The aesthetic hybrids on display were, moreover, complemented with domestic structures for viewing and interaction; the introduction of music, home furnishings, and a domestic format enacted persistent references to private spaces. In this way, A Labor of Love aligned the museum within the larger framework of lived experience, forging a complex dialogue with agency and care as practised outside the museum.Things of interest:
- the 'outliers' of art history providing a position of strength within the vanguard
- the historical roles of museums challenging aesthetic boundaries
↳ allows for the circulation of self-taught artists into aesthetic discourse
- arguing for the museum to be a space that is democratic, inclusive and unconventional
- the connection between who was the museum's audience and what aesthetic classifications were used are intimately connected
- mentioning an exhibition 'A Labour of Love' from 1996 by Marcia Tucker
↳ highlighting laborious art forms including fine art, craft, folk art and outlier art
↳ an artists' choice to work with techniques that are laborious should be seen as political
↳ the exhibition was modelled on the organisation of everyday life in its mixing of artifacts on display and sensory experiences (mixing of aesthetic artworks with functional tactile objects)
↳ removing these artworks from a museum's natural hierarchy of value and attention
→ domestic politics
- 'A Labour of Love' was designed to resemble a home in its exhibition format, with each room of the gallery space alinged a space of the home
↳ Liza Lou's Kitchen (1991-96)
- a quilt made by Jane Kaufman was placed on a bed rather than displayed on the wall
- craft mediums are seen as conservative in it's attention to tradition traditions
- 'The historical sphere of femininity, the home, is understood as "the realm of the insignificant, invisible yet indispensable"'
↳ so on the nose for what I
m looking at! viewing the home as a feminine space that is overlooked, yet without it we would suffer
- '... the home as "the place you leave behind at the start of something significant"'
↳ again! The home as something dispensable yet so linked with the identity of women
- "Is it possible to think about the everyday in ways that do not simply treat it as negative and residual?"
↳ reconciling everyday principles like order, home and habit with change (acknowledging 'messiness')
→ A Labour of Love
- Indira Johnson's Handwork: "Hands are the principal way that work is accomplished. My “hands” are a homage to the constant loving, caring and nurturing work that women do throughout their lives for their families..."
- Tucker's selection of works that reference time or duration in their making
- "Where excessive time spent on aesthetic work might imbue an object with meaningful value, the same is not commonly said of efforts performed during domestic labour or hobby work"
- the large scale of works included adding an additional layer of meaning to the exhibition (ie large ceramic works, although peculiar to look at, conveyed their intentions perfectly through scale and labour)
07-08-2023 - Monday
research cont.Cassidy, Marsha F. "Cyberspace meets Domestic Space: Personal COmputers, Women's Work, and the Gendered Territories of the Family Home" Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 1 (2001): p.44-65Abstract: During the early 1990s, marketing discourse in key US magazines attached a newly invented “feminine”; identity to the personal computer, fuelling a second great wave of home adoption. These public fantasies, which attempted to ease the machine into the pre‐gendered spaces of the American family home, drew upon a slate of postfeminist appeals, emphasizing the PC's value in women's work‐both income‐producing and family‐centered. This three‐part paper traces how Utopian expectations for a postfeminist work tool and recommendations about where to place it on the domestic map ultimately collided with the gendered constraints built into the pre‐established territories of the US home. The first part of the paper documents the addition of postfeminist work applications to a formerly masculinized technology; the second part reviews the marketing appeals that extolled the PC's potential to help a woman produce income, manage her household, and provide educational advantages to her children, all at once; the final part uncovers how these hopeful dreams were deconstructed by a second stream of discourse that failed to situated the PC comfortably within the domestic sphere, signalling fundamental vacillations about the micropolitics of homebound feminism.Things of interest:
- "commodity feminism" = marketing strategies using feminist values to sell products.To be honest this looks far to computer-based, there's some interesting comments about gendered home spaces but no explicit exploration of this, not even in a way that implies context.
08-08-2023 - Tuesday
Studio Notes and assessment details
09-08-2023 - Wednesday
word of potential interest: domesticana
10-08-2023 - Thursday
ProgressCame in early to uni to begin making my piece, the images and videos below show what I got up to!
I began by rolling out a think slab. I used a full 10kg bag for this as I wanted to be sure I could get an even thickness and a full cover of the bowl. I brought 2 bowls from my kitchen in and wrapped them to use as slumping moulds. For this bigger bowl, I added another layer of foam to make the bowl even larger, which Cabora helped me set up. The smaller bowl i skipped this step as it is for the pedastool. Both were wrapped in newspaper and the clay draped on top.
That was mostly it for the big one, just shuffling the clay so it sat smooth and trimming some of the excess off the bottom before wrapping it in cling film so it didn't dry out.
I repeated the process for the smaller bowl using the trimmings from the first
13-08-2023 - SundayResearch:
Faulkner, Kelly. "Domestic Space and the Construction of Identity", Honours Thesis, 1994. Edith UniversityLiterally everything this paper says is relevant.
14-08-2023 - Monday
Continued working on fruit bowl!
15-08-2023 - Tuesday
Studio Notes

17-08-2023 - Thursday
Beginning to attach details and handles.
18-08-2023 - Friday
I don't have any photos of this day but I just continued to work on bowl details and making the foot of the bowl which I for some reason didn't document.I also extruded some glaze test pieces so they can dry and be fired.
21-08-2023 - Monday
Before by throwing wheel class I attached the foot to the base of the bowl.
24-08-2023 - Thursday
Today Canbora helped me move my piece onto a bat with an open base so the inside could dry as well as the outside.
25-08-2023 - Friday
Today I put some glaze tests into the kiln to check the colour of some underglazes, and hopefully they'll be out and ready so that on Monday the body of the bowl will be ready to be bisqued so as soon as that's down I can start glazing.
26-08-2023 - Saturday
Some more points of reference and research
Also an image from my visual journal from last semester where I brainstormed some ideas about how to make this a broader series.

29-08-2023 - Tuesday
Found out I couldn't get an extension today so I had to pull some strings and cancel a shift at work later this week so that I could get it done.Spoke to Canbora (had a breakdown) and got him to put the kiln on to bisque so that it could be out as soon as possible. There wasn't much else I could do straight away

31-08-2023 - Thursday
The fruit bowl was ready to be taken out of the kiln this morning, so I began to paint the underglaze straight away. I finished the green section this morning.
01-09-2023 - Friday
More glazing today, got stuck in at 9am and didn't stop till about 4pm. 3 coats of most of the colours, blue was a bit harder to tell so it's mostly 2 coats. 2 coats clear over everything.I very annoyingly forgot to take a photo of the blue glaze before I started on the clear.
03-09-2023 - Sunday
I found on Facebook marketplace a good table to present it on, so I drove to Randwick to pick it up and dropped the table at uni. Heres a really amazing photo of it. It's at uni so I can't take a proper one.

04-09-2023 - Monday
Upon checking on the kiln this morning, there were multiple cracks on the surface and although this wasn't my intention, they work in with my concept when looking at precarious gender roles within the home.
The risk of things like this occouring increases with the thickness of the piece and I can see how to improve upon this int he future.I am still happy with the final work because the cracks tie into the concept of this piece.
05-09-2023 - Tuesday
Due Day
'Fruitless"
There are so many ways this piece can be read and paths I could continue to explore in regard to this and the other tiles in the collection, so here are a few of those concepts:- gender constructs within the home (my focus)
↳ looking at conventional traditions in regards to women's roles within the home and gendered spaces, ie the kitchen, domestic labour, gender politics
↳ also interesting to look at this with the overlay of 'fruit' mentioned in the title, especially as a sort of euphemism for pregnancy and the 'fruit of labour' mindset. This is something that my next task might explore more
- queerness
↳ the bold, obnoxious colours, the kitsch style of the 80s/90s and the aligning queer subcultures, ways in which queer people had to hide etc...
- still life
↳ the fruit bowl, the symbolism of fruit and bountifulness, the table, cornucopia, etc