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.