Clay Sculptures with Queen’s College

Our new topic!

Last week, we began our new topic of Food and Farming in the UK. We were really lucky to have Queen’s College come to work with us, and we found out that our focus over the next few weeks will be to create our own clay pots, linking to food.

We began by looking at the work of British ceramic artist, Kate Malone. They have used food as inspiration for lots of their designs. Here is an example of a teapot that has been made to look like a pumpkin:

We agreed that this might be quite tricky to recreate but we were really eager to give it a try. In our first two lessons, we have focused on creating relief tiles. We started by looking at cabbage, and we knew that we would have to try and add clay to our tile, to create a similar texture. A key focus was the threads that ran through the leaf, which varied in size and shape.

On our next lesson, we used fusilli pasta to create different patterns within the clay’s surface, rather than adding clay to it. We found lots of different ways to use the pasta, in order to create a variety of interesting shapes and patterns. We then moved on to look at how we could replicate corn, with clay. We knew that corn was quite smooth and had more spherical shapes within it. Some of us could spot that the shapes of the individual pieces were often quite similar but there were a few differences between whether they had dried out or not.

We worked really hard and knew that we had to carefully score the pieces of clay that we were adding, to make sure that they didn’t fall off when we did the wobble test!

Well done for all of your fantastic work, Year 2. You have shown such great resilience within your art lessons. Well done!