Event 3 Blog

Image 1: Spanish Art Village Scenery


This past weekend I visited the Spanish Art Village Center in San Diego, located between the SD Zoo and the SD Natural History Museum. I went with my girlfriend for her birthday and it was a super fun experience. Their studios are open 7 days a week and we got to go to every single shop where there was an artist working on a piece while visitors enjoyed their work and bought stuff as well! It’s one thing to be able to see these incredible pieces and another thing to be able to interact with the actual artists as well. One particular piece that stood out to me here that I thought would be great to highlight for our class was the crystalline glazes that one artist was selling. Her name is Sarah Parent and she works out of her home in Encinitas where she throws and makes all the original art ceramics, then I bisques them and brings them to her studio in San Marcos where she does all of the glazing and firings.


Image 2: My Favorite Pieces

Her crystalline glazes specifically were something I wanted to highlight because they are the perfect blend of art and chemistry (Do 2020). Glaze crystals spontaneously form and grow in molten glazes over a long period of time (Knowles 2004). Crystalline glazes are formed when zinc and silica combine at high temperatures and start to form crystals in the matrix of the glaze. The uniqueness of each piece stems from the specific metamorphosis that occurs. I learned that silica and zinc combine at 2320°F and spontaneously form crystals, just like a geode forms crystals when the molten minerals cool (Kigai 2019).  These crystals nucleate and grow in the kiln when held for long periods of time. Rings can form when held at slightly different temperatures. In nature, these crystals are called Willemite (Taijing 1994). 

Image 3: Crystalline Vase

Through reading a bit more about crystalline glazes, I learned about some of the famous artists that pioneered this field. Crystal formation on the surface of ceramics has been occurring all throughout history and was commonly seen as a flaw (Borgia 2002). That was until the late 1800s when technology enabled this process of crystallization to be manipulated by artists. I would definitely want to learn how to make one of these in the future.  

Sources:

Do, Quang Minh, et al. "The Novel Crystalline Glaze for Decoration of Ceramic Pottery." Materials science forum. Vol. 987. Trans Tech Publications Ltd, 2020.

Knowles, K. M., and F. S. H. B. Freeman. "Microscopy and microanalysis of crystalline glazes." Journal of Microscopy 215.3. 2004.

Borgia, I., et al. "Heterogeneous distribution of metal nanocrystals in glazes of historical pottery." Applied Surface Science 185.3-4. 2002.

Kigai, Ingrid N. "The genesis of agates and amethyst geodes." Can. Mineral 57.6. 2019.

Taijing, Lu, and Ichiro SUNAGAwA. "Texture formation of agate in geode." Mineralogical Journal 17.2. 1994.

Images:

Vo, William. “Spanish Art Village Scenery.” 2024

Vo, William. “My Favorite Pieces.” 2024

Parent, Sarah. “Crystalline Vase.” 2024 https://sarahparentpottery.com/sarah-shop/crystalline-vase


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