A series so new, it doesn’t even have a name yet!
If you saw the video I posted yesterday, I was stretching out clay into long lengths and wrapping them up into circles. I really loved the texture from stretching the clay and ended up making a bunch of these guys, until my studio table was nearly full of them.
Once they were leather hard, and had enough strength to start playing with how I might compose them, I started standing them on edge by their sizes. While I’m still not really sure of all of their possibilities since they’re not strong enough to really experiment with yet, lining up the concentric circles are pretty dynamic visually.
Now I have to think about whether they will be wall mounted, freestanding on a pedestal or the floor. I would also like to take them outside to do an ‘in the field’ photoshoot with them.
Right now, I’m drying them and getting them through the bisque firing, although I was kind of excited about rushing them through and I lost some to explosions because they were a little too wet (whoops!). I’m also testing some glaze options but I’m leaning towards a matte black tone. I’m also considering putting holes in these to hang them from before I glaze fire them. I was hesitant to commit to cutting holes while they were wet and if I decide to make holes, I’ll drill through the bisqued clay with a Dremel tool but I’m going to play with them a little more first.
This is a little out of the ordinary of my typical process of making, normally I have some inspirational ideas, create some mock-ups and decide if I’m going to go for a big installation. This time I just went for it. So these pieces, don’t have a name yet and I don’t know what I’m going to do with them exactly but there is something that is really working here and so I’m following my art intuition and seeing where it leads me, glad you’re along for the journey.
More to come…
It was also a lesson in how dependent I am on my website and when its down and you’re told that you may need to have a judge sign off on paperwork to prove that you are the owner of your site, it’s pretty daunting. There was a moment that I thought it would be down for months, which is pretty much death to a small business. I’ll spare you the dramatic and traumatic details but in the end through a series on back-ass ways and strangely enough a knowledgable and capable tech who recovered an email address that’s been defunct for over two years, I was able with the click of a mouse get my site back up again. I generally take things in stride but this time, tears of woe turned to tears of joy in an instant.
