These are porcelain paintings… perhaps better described as monoprint paintings on porcelain. But that’s not quite the right description since the image is painted directly onto a plaster batt – the heavy, chalky, highly-absorbent slabs used for wedging clay – from which the image will be transferred onto porcelain.
Taking a pot of black underglaze, a clutch of brushes, some clean water, it’s like painting a watercolour, holding in mind the ‘negative space’ where the lightest, brightest areas of the painting will remain. The underglaze (like viscous gouache) can be diluted to produce different densities of darks and shadows. The painting dries fast, but can be worked quickly or slowly, adding thicker layers or thinning with water.
When the painting is finished, the porcelain paper-clay slip (with a consistency somewhere between thick cream and thin porridge), is spooned evenly over the painting. It will quickly start to dry, but as the slip settles on the batt, more thin layers can be added to any grooves and hollows, so the image is coated in an even layer of slip. This is then covered with cling film and left overnight to firm to ‘leather hard’.
The next day the cling film is removed and the edges tested with a rubber kidney, gently lifting and waiting for the porcelain to peel readily off the batt to reveal the painting imprinted into the clay in reverse – a monoprint on porcelain!
It’s possible to add little touches of underglaze to the image at this stage – to deepen the tones or add a line. Sometimes air bubbles in the slip will have left little holes in the surface, and random scratches and lines in the batt will be captured.
The porcelain is fired just once, at high temperature, and what emerges from the kiln are porcelain paintings with a character entirely their own. They have a photographic quality of old silver nitrates; or charcoal drawings which look as though they might smudge to the touch but are in fact baked hard. The edges are uneven and slightly lifted, as though fragments from an ancient fresco or frieze.
They’re talismans, dream fragments. Pocket-sized memories of half-remembered, half-dreamt places.
(See Porcelain Paintings in Gallery)
Sophie Balhetchet