I’ve been catching up on posting pieces that are currently on display at the Urbandale Art Gallery, and this is the last of those pieces. This piece continues my diagonal shift series and builds on a recent test fold. I continued the theme of cone-based diagonal shifts here, putting the test fold into practice in a finished piece. One of the challenges in designing this piece was volume and balance: all of my diagonal shift vases up to this point have had shifts that naturally tend to have similar volume on either side of the shift, so it was always fairly easy to make the piece look like the top and bottom halves were proportionate. (This type of visual balance is very different from the piece looking or being physically balanced – most of my diagonal shifts include small weights in the bottom so they don’t fall over!) For this piece, the cone on the top half is a lot narrower than on the bottom half, so I had to play more than usual with height to make sure the proportions looked right. This piece ended up an inch or two taller than most of my shift vases to get that balance.
