Ken Adams

I began with a focus on glaze development, but my interest soon shifted to various hand building projects, which led me to discover paperclay. This in turn prompted an exploration of less conventional clay additive and material combinations, notably a lengthy examination of the creative possibilities offered by various porcelain slip and glass fibre fusions. Sculpural experiments followed using various types of metal wire and armatures. However, it was time playing with a commercially produced porcelain 'paper' that lay the ground for the rapid evolution of a technique that I have dubbed 'balloon casting'. Keraflex as it was called at the time (I believe it is no longer manufactured) was expensive and so I began to investigate how to make something similar at much lower cost. I shared as much on an Instagram post, and in a comment, glass artist and experimentalist Karen Lise Krabbe kindly pointed me in the direction of an Alfred Grinding Room paper on ceramic tape casting. By adapting the paper's methodology to serve my own purposes I succeeded in developing a flexible (pre-fired) porcelain. This was a defining moment. Although I had been using 'failed' (overly thick and gelled) casting slips on balloons for some time, a breath of air on the dry, pre-fired vessels and they would litterally fall apart! My new 'tape casting' slip formulation miraculously solved this problem overnight.

So, over the last few years my main aim has been to showcase the extraordinary textures and vessels that can be achieved using this somewhat unconventional balloon casting method. My idea has been to take advantage of the special properties afforded by ultra-thin latex, namely extraordinary expansion, and contraction, and use it to manipulate porcelain gels in various ways. In the process I have studied and documented the interplay between gel formulation, application, decoration, drying time, as well as balloon modification, in order to create unique textural work.