Clay Nautilus

Just for the sheer perversity of it, I decided to make a nautilus sculpture in my most recent clay class. Since the class was only 6 weeks long and in summer (while it was really muggy and the clay most difficult to work with) I see in hindsight that I was being foolish and deluded to attempt this. While I won't relive the whole experience, the nadir was when I came to class one day and, because the moisture in the clay had moved around [no really, it does that: if clay is almost dry in one part of the sculpture but very moist in another, the water will relocate more evenly throughout the whole of the sculture--unless you wrap up the different sections of the sculpture differently--which I didn't do...but now I would...] and so sections that I needed to be dry and strong became wet and weak. And so I found it at the start of one class after a long holiday weekend collapsed into a big, 30-odd pound blob. I was rather dissapointed. But, unlike most things in life, unfired clay can be forgiving and Addie, my genius teacher, helped me stuff it with newspaper and we got it back on track, more or less. I still see sections in the walls that are bumpier now than they were before the disaster. Here is it, post-disaster, and almost dry. The plastic vegetable bag wrapping on the edge is there to keep the very thinnest part from drying out too quickly and cracking (which is what happened with my 3 story house, see earlier post). So what have I learned about working with clay? The real artistry lies in knowing how to wrap clay in plastic to control wandering water.
Here it is after surviving its first trip through the kiln. Guy, the kiln man at the FIA, said it needed to be in an especially slow fire otherwise it would have exploded (I must confess that I like hearing that my pieces make the lives of others difficult--what is the point of making something insignificant and unremarkable?) so it not only needed to be alone in the kiln but had to be fired for almost 48 hours. Since the semester had long ended, I didn't have time to glaze it yet, so it is actually rather fragile right now. Here it sits, on one of my grandmother's towels that I remember using when staying at her house more than 30 years ago, in our basement on my work table. Once the next semester starts I will get it back to the FIA and glaze it. [I HATE glazing. It's hard work.]