Donuts and Topology

"Donupology #1" With Waxing Brown Glaze

"Donupology #2" With Rutile Bone Glaze

Last Semester my experiments with throwing and altering led to a combination of throwing donuts and Topology, what I call "Donupology".

The first of these experiments is the image to the right.  I get my best ideas when I'm driving (as previously mentioned) and this one came to me on just such an occasion.  I had started to work with throwing donuts months before, (throwing and altering by cutting them apart and looping them over other closed forms). This was a whole different ball game.

The piece to the left was my second attempt, but I made the mistake of letting the donuts get too hard before trying to construct them.  It broke apart quite a few times. It is also more difficult than you'd think to keep the two donuts the same height and general width (not circumference).  This one did not fit these parameters and was hard to construct.  The other issue with these is that due to the precarious joints they need to dry really slowly, and need to be turned every few hours to make sure they dry evenly.

Two newly thrown Donuts soon to be made into a "Donupology"

 Practice makes perfect though, as they always say... I'm hoping that this next batch of donuts leads to a spectacular "donupology".

The final issue that will need to be resolved with the last one will be the firing. With the last two, the stilts ended up getting stuck to the bottom of the pieces.  After seeing that the glaze had run on the first, I decided to go with a very stable glaze on the second and wiped it thin to keep that from happening.  No such luck.  Although the glaze did not run, the piece may have been too heavy for the stilts to support it and it ended up bending them into the glaze. Ehren wasn't (too) mad, he just said, "That's what your materials fee is for." Thank God!"

Any tips on how to prevent this in the future would be greatly appreciated.  As a side note, I would rather not leave the bottom unglazed.  I would like it to have the illusion of being a continuous piece and I think a line along the bottom without glaze destroys this. One plus is that on this new one the stilts provide a really nice, stable support to help keep it from rolling. There's always a silver lining!