Cross-cultural Identity Through Clay, Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan. 4th of October to 4th of November 2018 (Glazing and applying digital transfers)

Applying 3-5 layers of clear glaze to un-fired stoneware tiles for a single firing to 1230c.

Once the glaze dried we then washed the base of the tiles with warm water.

All 30 tiles glazed and ready to be fired.

Unfortunately 20 tiles broke in the beginning of the gas firing process. It was upsetting to see this after our hard work, we thought it was the end of our project. Perhaps the result might have been due to the tiles not completely dry or maybe the flames were too strong. However all was not lost as 10 tiles survived and so we fired these again in an electric kiln which turned out fine.

Finished glazed tiles alongside digital transfer tests completed earlier.

A close up detail of the digital transfer tests. During our time in Germany for the XI International Ceramics Symposium Römhild 2018, Glücksburg Castle, Römhild, 5th of August - 2nd of September Wen-Hsi collected digital transfers for ceramics from an abandoned tableware factory. We decided to use these images along with images from Bristol in the UK and images from Shigaraki in Japan.

Applying the digital transfers to the tiles. As we have less tiles than originally planed we had to change our direction. Originally we planed on creating circular digital transfer images to arrange into a patten from large to small on a selected number of tiles. Instead we still cut the images into circles but arranged them in various sizes on five tiles. One tile focused on images to represent Taiwan, the second tile to represent  our home town Bristol in the UK, the third to represent Japan, the forth to represent Germany and the fifth consisting of mixed images representing all four countries.

Packing the electric kiln for the transfer firing.

Thank you Monika Patuszynska for helping Wen-Hsi find the digital transfers in Germany 2018.