Fungi & Shell-form

Another off-cut of wood given to me by Meir Weiss was this lovely piece of spalted beech.

Once again I wanted to use the wood in combination with a ceramic form which would compliment the wood. Since spalting in wood is colouration caused by fungi, I decided to create some ceramic 'fungi' which would emerge from the wood; I enjoy looking at fungi when walking the dog so had a pretty good idea how I wanted this to look.

Fungi - Ceramic and Beech (30x30cm)

I made a mount for the work from MDF and 10x18mm plywood which I primed with White Gesso Primer. I had planned to paint a mottled green background for the work, but decided that this would detract from the simplicity of the ceramic and wood forms, so have simply painted the mount with white acrylic. I sanded the piece of beech to a fine finish then polished it with beeswax before gluing the wood and ceramic fungi to the mount. Mounting the work has taken quite a lot of time, however, I feel that this has been time well-spent.

I have also been very busy making a mount to display another new ceramic piece.
The starting point for this piece was from an image shown to me by my tutor, Sue Mundy of some work by the ceramicist Anne Hirondelle called 'Sixfold', shown below.
 
I liked the shape and played around in my sketchbook with various ideas building upon this image; the more I drew, the more my images looked like giant cowrie shells! So I decided to continue with this 'shell-form'.

Here is a picture of the piece before firing

I had thought that I would mount this work on a plain white MDF board, but when I had prepared the board and put my the ceramic 'shell-form' on to the plain white I realised that more background would enhance the finished piece. After a lot of work with filler, metal scraper, sandpaper and paint I created a mount to compliment the 'shell'.

Shell Form - Ceramic & mixed media (30x30cm)

My intention was to create the ripples in sand left around an object when the tide has retreated.
Funnily enough, after completing this mount I came across the work of a silversmith in Wales, Rauni Higson who creates beautiful silver objects inspired by nature, one of which is this silver platter which is inspired by the sand ripples left by a retreating tide.