Monoprinting on Clay by Evelyn Ward
When I was in school, my focus was in printmaking, working mainly with collagraphy, a technique where the printing plate is made from a collage. I loved the way you could build up texture and then with a variety of inking techniques, achieve a surface with a lot of depth. This experience making collagraphs informs how I approach my clay surfaces now. For the last six years, I have been working with monoprinting on clay. When I was working with collagraphs, I’d sometimes cut up the plate so I could use different colored inks within the same print. I do the same thing now, basically making a flat version of the pot with newsprint (kind of like a dress pattern), then cutting that up into a design, painting those individual pieces of paper with different colored slips, and then transferring them onto the pot. When the paper is peeled away from the pot the colored slips stay, revealing the design. After the pot is bisque fired, I coat the entire pot with black underglaze, then wipe it away, revealing a lot of texture. I love the way every little imperfection shows up, every wrinkle, and every bit of slip that didn’t quite make it from the paper to the pot shows through to the bare clay beneath.
I love looking at old buildings, with the paint peeling and the metal rusting, and I hope that my pots have some of those same qualities. I live in Hurdle Mills and there’s no shortage of old barns and buildings around here. The effects of time on surfaces has always appealed to me on a visceral level. I see that as a starting point of where my aesthetic is, but then it becomes something different.
I came back to printing on clay after years of salt firing. About five years ago, when I was still salt-firing, I taught a class on surface design at Claymakers in Durham. I was really enjoying exploring different surface techniques for that class and was feeling more excited about the possibilities of those techniques than I was about my work in the studio at the time. It was also at the exact moment that my salt kiln had deteriorated to the point of collapse. I had been planning on building a new salt kiln, and after really thinking about it, I instead decided not to build the new kiln and to work with monoprinting on clay instead. This new direction was very scary for me since I had been salt or soda firing for about 15 years at that point. This was probably the most difficult decision in my career, but I thought—why be an artist if you’re not going to do what you want, why not let the work lead you?