In 1975, not long after I was first introduced to clay, I decided to take a workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts given by Gerda Spurey, an Austrian ceramist who specialized in cast porcelain.

The course involved making plaster moulds in which to pour liquid porcelain, similar to the way Limoges porcelain is made. We made moulds from various forms: spheres using different sized balls, tubes cast from pipes, broom handles, etc. Then, once the moulds were dry, we cast the porcelain in them to get the original ball or tube shapes, which were then assembled into sculptures. We also cast plaster bats an inch or more thick on which we could dribble thin streams of liquid porcelain in various thin ribbons that could be assembled with the cast forms.

The next summer, 1976, Curt Spurey, Gerda’s then husband, came to continue teaching what she had begun.

I enjoyed both workshops, but realized that if I were to go into casting porcelain, I would have to convert my studio away from coloured clays, because porcelain is so easily stained or marked. I did put some of the things I learned, especially mould making, to use in other ways.

exploding form, photoed on glass at ‘Alberta Mud 77’, an exhibitionof Alberta ceramics in 1977.  (❋)

eye of sirius, 1975, cast porcelain, 37 cm h. Here, mounted on tubes, a large sphere holds a slightly smaller one in which an even smaller sphere rests on a bed of ‘lettuce’ (liquid clay dribbled over a plaster bat and dried until handleable).  (❋)