The ceramic totem pole – Maggot the Badger

A very fat and grubby little badger turned up in my garden a while back. I call her Maggot. She is quite scatty and distracted; she’ll quite happily bumble along doing her badger thing in my company for a while but then suddenly freak out and tear off into the nearest bush.

I have very mixed feelings about Maggot. First of all. I do not like to share my garden with badgers because they don’t believe in sharing; they’d dig up ALL my carrots, not just a few. And they seem to want to always place their latrines amongst my lettuce. But then again, she is very sweet.

So I decided to include her in my totem pole.

Here she is, bisque fired and painted with red iron and manganese oxide, ready for the smoke firing. I used white pigment for her stripes and claws. I feel her digging and tunneling capacity is a huge part of her essence so I emphasized the claws a bit.

And here she is, smoke fired and ready to be assembled into the totem pole… You’ll soon see the entire thing…it is almost finished.

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