Help me give my students the ability to focus on creative slab-building in our art room/ceramics studio with a
Nidec Shimpo SR-3050 Full Size Slab Roller.
$1,550 goal
This project expired on April 2, 2025.
This project expired on April 2, 2025.
My Project
Students at my High School have the unique opportunity to select from a variety of intensive classes such as Ceramics class, which I have the pleasure to teaching. I also integrate ceramics projects into our general Art 1-4 classes, and sometimes other teachers ask for my help in providing inter-disciplinary ceramics projects for their classes as well. Ceramics students learn a variety of ceramic methods, including slab building. Hard clay slabs are incorporated with other building methods as well as used to construct geometric and intricate textured boxes, relief sculptures, dishware, and jewelry. Soft slab are used for various vessels such as vases, slump- and drape-molded bowls, and three-dimensional sculptures.
Because high school students deserve high-quality, appropriate equipment and tools to aid them in their creative learning and physical art-making efforts, the addition of a mechanical slab roller would allow them to achieve mastery in their ceramics techniques and fine-tune their sculptural and engineering skills with clay.
Currently, our students use wooden rolling pins on canvas-covered boards to manually roll slabs when needed. If students wish to build larger-scale or more advanced artworks with clay, they must roll multiple slabs, or larger slabs, which is extremely time-consuming and physically demanding. It takes a great deal of practice, trial and error, and time to learn to roll slabs that are of routine thickness and consistency. I've witnessed so much frustration during this hand-rolling slab process. It's difficult to keep students motivated when they feel like giving up. I often roll slabs for them to get them moving on to the sculptural part of the process, which is fatiguing for me also. We could eliminate wasted time, frustration, physical exhaustion, and faulty results with the addition this slab roller in our classroom We would be grateful for this piece of equipment.
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