the dirt

Here’s the monthly wrap up of everything going on at the studio…

April Studio News

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Happy Throwback Thursday, here’s a few more oldies but goodies that I’ve discovered…

One of the best parts about being a ceramic artist is getting to play with fire. This is the amazing two chamber wood kiln we had at Hartford Art School, it makes my current electric kiln look like an easy bake oven. Contained within this firing was the majority of my senior thesis exhibit. I was probably delirious at this point because this kiln eats wood like a champ and fires for about 18 hours (which is actually very fast for a wood kiln) so you are constantly feeding it wood and there is hardly time to eat or pee between stoking it but it’s so much fun and the results can be incredible!

Who can’t stare at a fire and not be mesmerized? This is what about about 2300 degrees looks like and I’m sure that there were 6′ flames coming out the top of the chimney at this point too. If you’re not familiar with ceramics, the 3 triangle shaped pieces in the photo on the right are cones. They melt at different temperatures, so that you can tell how hot your kiln is, you can see the ones in front of the three left standing are practically a puddle.  The three left mean that this kiln is done when the middle one starts to melt and fall over.

This installation, called Changing Tides was in that kiln (you can see a few of them in the picture above right) and this piece was a part of my senior exhibition. I still have this piece hanging on my living room wall and still love it! The varied effects of the wood kiln can be seen on these pieces, they range from golden and toasty to charcoal grey. It’s been almost 20 years since these photos were taken, I think I’ve got to get my work into another wood kiln and start playing with fire again!

When I first came to California, I took a workshop at the Mendocino Arts Center with sculptor Stephen de Staebler. He talked of just grabbing pieces around his studio and reusing them on new work, which at the time horrified me. I had assumed that artists create a piece and that’s it, there’s a end to the process, that’s how you call a piece ‘finished’. But I’ve learned over time that you are never finished making art or working on a piece, there is always evolution but hardly ever resolution. One piece builds on the next and what you’ve learned challenges you to explore more. I’ve really come to like that this can be really exciting and exploratory for a series of work and now it’s become a normal part of the process for me.
Below are the same 200+/- pieces from the Hive Series installed in two very different ways.

I’m planning two large installations for the upcoming Clay & Glass Exhibit in Healdsburg CA and I’ll be reusing existing pieces to create entirely new works. Both pieces are from the Bone Series but one will be wall mounted and one will be suspending from the ceiling.  Below is a sketch of the wall piece I plan to create. The lines will be steel cables connecting the ceramic pieces together and they will be floating a few inches off the wall. I’m hoping that with gallery lighting, this will cast intense shadows on the wall and enhance the negative space between the pieces.

I love that while I’ve worked with these pieces many times before the outcome will be new and the process of installing will be honed. There is still the element of surprise, the danger of failure and the possibilities of learning.

The first time I took my art out into the world was also one of the first of many big road trips I’d done with my husband (although we were just dating at the time), this was probably circa 2000. It was actually his idea to bring along some of my work, so I really can’t take credit for this idea but we wrapped up a few pieces and tucked them in among all of our camping gear.

I just discovered the photos of the trip where we cruised up the coast towards Mendocino and onward to the Oregon border where we eventually turned south at Grants Pass. Then through Shasta and Redding and into Lassen National Forest, that’s where these photos were taken. If you’ve been to the studio, these pieces are still sitting on the deck by the succulents. Eventually we drove down the Eastern Sierras as far south as Mono Lake before heading through Yosemite and home again. This is some well traveled art!

All of this was before I had a real studio to work out of, before I had the idea to create work specifically for outdoor spaces and way before ‘where art & nature meet’ become my mantra. I love that over 15 years later, this idea still feels new and exciting. I love that my husband is still willing to fill a backpack with ceramic sculptures and haul it off into the wilderness. I love that I’m still discovering where art & nature meet.

The New Science of the Creative Brain on Nature

Outside Magazine | By: Carolyn Gregoire

I have always found a sense of focus and calm after being out in nature but this study proves that spending time on the trail is good for your creativity too. “In a 2012 study, for example, Strayer found that backpackers were 50 percent more creative after they had spent four days out on the trail.” read more…

#optoutside it’s good for your creativity!

Going through old photos and cds over the weekend and I discovered some gems, I’ll share some goodies with you over the next week of posts. The thing that was amazing was seeing the continuity of my work over a decade of making it.

The piece on the left was made in 2001, with some leftover clay I managed to snag, fired in someone else’s kiln before I had my own studio and carved with a sandblaster at someone else’s studio I was working at then. Basically, I was just out of school didn’t have the equipment or studio space but somehow I managed to create this piece and someone bought it the first time I exhibited it at a local show. And I still kinda like it, which is rare for older work.

The piece on the right was made in 2013. This one was made with a clay I knew would work best for this process, it was tended to, carried carefully around the studio, padded with foam as it dried to help insure its survival. It was one of over a hundred pieces in this series, had hours of trial and error to make it not collapse in the firing process. It too sold at its first exhibit and I still like it.

Over a decade of working with the same form, the same technique of removing clay, still trying to find the balance between the organic and geometric and still not sure if I’ve figured it out yet. I love that the process of learning and creating never seems to have an end.

More from the Nest Series here…