Commemorating the mundane

I was teaching a lesson on the strange tradition of commemorative flatware.  We looked at very silly pictures of royal family members on Delftware and we also looked at more contemporary pieces to commemorate Elvis’s birthday, the Royal Wedding and so on.  The assignment was to throw a large plate on the potter’s wheel and then while it was bone dry the students would use the wax resist sgraffito method to draw an ornate design that would commemorate the mundane.  After the pieces were bisque fired we painted them in a variety of low fire glazes.  The result is a very silly and cheery plate. 

I created a plate along with my students and decided to commemorate my cat Roxie.  I chose to pose her as I usually see her, standing over her empty food dish looking at me with a disapproving glare.  Doing this lesson with my students has inspired me.  What if I made commemorative plates that were a little silly and stopped taking everything so seriously for a change?  My first few will be for dog lovers.  I’m very early in the process and I’m still not sure where this is going.  I may hold back and glaze them one color or I may go all in with the idea and make them very colorful like the plate above.  I’m not sure yet.