Talk and workshop with Katie Scarlett Howard

The day started with a slideshow and talk by Katie Scarlett Howard showing us how she started making brightly coloured, strangely manipulated but easy recognisable toys when she was doing her degree. She then moved to Cyprus to further her studies. There she became interested in the female fertility symbol and started creating figures with exaggerated breasts, tummies and hips but with fine details on hands and feet and serene expressions on their faces.
She the started doing a demonstration of how she puts her figures together. She works mostly with Potclay’s White St Thomas and Raku which she rolls in to slabs and cuts her pieces from that and join them together with cross scratching and slip.

She usually works on two or three figures at a time making the bottom parts of the legs and hands and head one day and then the finer detail like the feet, knuckles on the hands and face the next. She then starts on the main body adding the other pieces as she goes along. It can take three to five days to make a figure. Usually she has a basic idea of what the figure is going to look like before she starts but that may change as she works on the figure.

After lunch there was a hands on workshop where everybody was able to try out Katie’s techniques. It was a very enjoyable time with Katie helping and everybody talking and laughing one minute and being very quiet the next, deep in concentration. Everybody managed to create something, at different degrees of completion and went home with their work in shoeboxes and extra clay to finish.

A very enjoyable day with a big thank you to Katie Scarlett Howard.

Kari Brekke Weir.