Liz Smith's Ceramics

Discovery and Disappointment

2009-09-10T20:32:00.000-07:00

This probably seems ridiculous but since I added the pictures apparently in reverse order I am going to write my blog in reverse too. Starting from least finished work to most (but not yet) finished work.

Things have been busy and challenging this past week and a half. The weekend before last I went home on Friday to stay until Tuesday but when Monday night came I couldn't bear the thought of leaving yet. Thankfully we bought the tickets with frequent flyer miles and we were able to change the ticket for free and stay for one more day! For whatever reason that one day made a big difference and I was ready to return for the last stretch by Wednesday. I came back and jumped right in. With a little less than a month to go (minus the few days I will need to pack up all of my stuff) I was feeling a little panicked! So as I do each semester for school and as I encourage my advanced students to do I made a firing schedule in reverse order from the last firing I had to do which I scheduled for the 24th and then went backward to the beginning of the month...and so far so good, I am on schedule.

But since this is a reverse kind of blog I am going to show you my progress in reverse...

These first images are the grasshoppers I have made so far. Today was my last day to cast and I will have approximately 7 sculptures to work with. I have decided not to make the twig sculptures here as I think they will be virtually impossible to pick up and at home I will build them on my kiln shelves (I actually may make one just because I have the pieces cast...but no more than that). I was originally planning on making 10 of each piece but as the reality of bringing all of this work home (including all of the molds)dawned on me I decided to scale back a bit...

Grasshoppers

Multiplying...

They are like rabbits!...More and more of them!

At first I wasn't sure I liked the grasshoppers...they seemed silly but as I made more and more of them they became both funny and kind of gross...kind of like owning one or two cats is cool but owning 100 cats is creepy. I plan on glazing them with colorful but crusty glazes, I think it will help them become more awkward and uncomfortable looking...kind of gross and all over the place...and that is the goal. In Arkansas (in my opinion) summer is about hot, sticky grossness, it is uncomfortable, sweaty and inescapable...so I am trying to make these pieces have a similiar feel of overwhelming discomfort.

Below are details of what I like from the glaze firing of the snowballs and the birds. I was not happy about the results that came out of the kiln overall but there are areas of hope and excitment on many of the pieces. Forunately the exhibition I will be in here at NCC won't be until next May so I have time to really get these right...which is important as I will be showing with some other people whose work I really like and honestly feel like they are way out of my league...Carrie Esser who teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute and Ursula Hargens whose work I love and Maren Kloppman who everyone knows, beautiful work...yikes! you could look up the work of all of these women online if you are interested in seeing what they make. It is a lot of pressure! I should add that many folks here commented that they liked the work, which I appreciate, however they do not fit my vision of the project so I see them as unacceptable even if thet don't seem it to others.

This is an example of one of the things that caused my disappoinment and something I like all in one. This yellow glaze was actually a chartreuse mason stain...it is NOT chartreuse, and I used it a lot so instead of lush greens with areas of yellow and orange I got a lot of yellow....not spring lie at all. However, I do like the combination of yellow slip under this yellow glaze and may use it in smaller areas or in the summer pieces.

Below on this one you can see the other major disappointment in combination with what I actually wanted. On the left of the piece the overall color looks anemic, thin and too white. On the right side especially the little bird the green is applied over another green slip and is much richer...it is far more vibrant in real life than what it looks like in this image. It is interesting because these are all glazes I use on my pots and have only occasionally thought they looked thin and overly white but on these larger pieces it seems to be emphasized 100 fold!

You need to look closely at the next two images as they are white on white slip and glaze application. I really like them, they are subtle and pretty beautiful in real life but I think the glaze needs to be a little less shiny, a bit softer looking, like a satin matte clear for it to really work like I see in my minds eye.

This image looks a little grey but it is actually bright white. I love this detail...here I drew a pattern on the piece with a blue underglaze pencil and filled it in with an icy copper blue glaze then covered with a clear glaze...and the side of the balls where the glaze ran it brought the pencil down with it and on the top it stayed pretty sharp. I really like the variation.

This is one of the more heavily pierced pieces which I like quiet a bit...it brings a lightness to the form which I think could be effective in future pieces and in the overall composition of the large panels.

Here is a picture of me thinking about how these might look together...that will be a whole other big problem to solve!!!!!!!! I imagine at least ten pieces per panel that are all different but also have unifying elements...
Here are the some of the birds that I feel okay about...again the overall yellow coloring is absolutely not what I wanted...but once that problem is solved I think I will like them all hung in a group. These pieces seem to combine en masse more easily and successfully than the snowballs. I'm pretty sure it has to do with their outward push (visually the wings acting as directional lines away from themselves and towards other pieces where the snowballs are more internally (closed forms) directed, they close in on themselves rather than direct ourtwards. This happily works with the sense of the seasons that I am trying to capture but nonetheless will make for a challenging layout.

Below you can see why it will be important to have a darker background. Above the pieces pop forward more but below on the lighter background they disappear a bit. UGH see all that white and light colored glaze...FRUSTRATING!

Here are a bunch of the snowballs...ditto on the darker background

Here you can see the last two shots which are of the pieces glazed but pre-fired. It is hard to tell but each piece is 12 inches big and bigger, they look very small in these overhead shots. Those round black discs are 13" bats that we usually use when throwing on the wheel. So there you have it. I have been pretty disappointed since I unloaded the work this past Tuesday but I am pushing through and trying to get over it (the piece of chocolate cake I ate today acted as pretty good solace which was what I was hoping for). As we speak I am cooling a kiln full of these same pieces that I have fired lower to cone 05. I wanted the backs of the pieces to be glazed too so I flipped them over glazed the backs with a lower temperature glaze and am firing them upside down. I am hoping that the firing doesn't do anything to the glazes (make them craze(crackle) ) or to the pieces (it is possible but unlikely that they could slump).

So tomorrow I put together the last of the grasshoppers, unload the 05 firing and start decaling, china painting and lustering to my hearts content. I plan to load the grasshoppers for bisque Saturday or Sunday.

In other news the Northern Clay Center is having its annual American Pottery Festival which is their major fundraiser of the year. There is a HUGE selection of work to be sold in the gallery by some really great potters...I want to say there is something like 70 potters represented in total and I have gotten a preview of the wares...if only I were a millionare I could buy all of the pieces I like. There will also be workshops, lecture and parties to be attended. Walter Ostrom is speaking on Sunday which will be a treat to see, and there will be a party Saturday night with artists and collectors which should be fun!

A few weeks later Patti Warashina will be here to present a lecture at the MIA and she and Ron Meyers will have a formal conversation about a lifetime in clay the next day at NCC. That should be interesting as they have both had very long and distinguished careers in ceramics but their work is very different.

To all of my ceramics students...Minneapolis is an outstanding place to be if you are interested in ceramics. (Actually they recently became one of very few, if there are any other, states that has arts funding written into their constituion!!!! so really it is a great place for all artists to be). I had always heard this to be the case but being here and experiencing a bit of it has proved it to be true beyond what I could have imagined! You should all apply for a Jerome or Fogelberg fellowship here at the NCC and try to get in on this action! Or just move here ...you can't take a step without your foot landing in a clay opportunity!

Until next time...

Going home for a visit! Lots to do!

2009-08-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

The week has been crazy busy and I am trying to get this done before I go home for another long weekend! Horray!

After I unloaded my glaze firing at the beginning of last week I focused on spending the rest of the week making new pieces. I wanted to get a total of ten snowballs and ten bird sculptures and as of Sunday I accomplished that so all of the pieces, slip trailed and decorated went into the bisque on Tuesday! I broke a few pieces going in which was frustrating, they really need to be built on kiln shelves and then loaded without ever being picked up but I can't use that many shelves for so long here in a community studio. I should be able to repair most of them so I am trying not to be too upset. Here you can see a shot of all of the pieces post bisque that I will glaze at the beginning of next week!

This is a shot of the table full of bird sculptures and on the left snowball sculptures, There are fourteen on the table and there will be 20 made in total although they will not all work out the way I want.
Here is a closer shot of the birds. A couple of them broke so hopefully the bisque repair will work again...that will be the second thing I do when I get back from home (The first will be to pour all of the grasshopper and twig molds).

I am trying to stick to a strict schedule because I am leaving to go home on Friday until Tuesday and then really I only have three and a half more weeks to complete the work!. I needed to get those pieces bisqued and to start casting the other two seasons (Fall and Summer...twigs and grasshoppers)...the first of which I caste this Tuesday. I kept casting through Thursday but didn't get a lot done as I was having some problems with the molds, I was only able to put one piece together by tonight! However I got through my casting problem thanks to my friend Derek (he and Jeannie are my mold making lifeline) and a young guy here named Swen who knows some about slipcasting. So I have a bunch of parts stored until Tuesday when I return...I figure I only have that first week of September to caste fall and summer...then it will be all firing, glazing and decaling until the week before the end of the month! I can't believe how quickly it has gone by in terms of the work...yet it seems so long in terms of being away from home. So as always seems to be the case with ceramics no matter how consistently you work the #@!* always hits the fan at the end. So when I return I will be casting pieces, putting them together, glazing pieces (three more times once at cone 6, once at cone04 and again at cone 019), decaling and lustering, bisquing the hoppers and twings and all of the above firing again...gulp!

Here is the studio in full prep for when I get back. On the left you see some of the leg molds (there are 2-3 legs in each mold) in the back there are the grasshopper molds.

Below is the right side of the studio, a table full of sculptures waiting to be glazed, and a bunch of twig molds at the bottom right.

Here is the casting problem...The sunken in part of the legs is where suction was created becasue of poor venting. It is similar to trying to pour ketchup out of a full bottle, sometimes no matter how hard you shake the bottle it won't come out until you stick a knife up in there to create an air vent. You can't shake the mold like that or the piece would collapse, but the suction causes the still wet and thin skin of clay on the inside of the mold to pull in and collapse. Sometimes it would do this and no slip would pour out so the piece was solid (which is not what I want) or it would pour out and still collapse. So I had to drill some vent holes in the molds and make some of the pour gates bigger and it seems to have solved most of my problems!

Below is the resulting first piece...to be honest I'm not sure how I feel about it...it's pretty funny looking which might be okay. I am trying to not judge it all too much right now...I need to finish a few, get them glazed and then see what I think.
At the begining of the week I spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday working on the computer to try to get enough of a handle on Photoshop to generate some decals that I could send off. Anyone who knows anything about Photoshop would laugh to see the decals I made and to hear how long ot took me to make them...but I am getting there and feel like it is a big accomplishment to have gotten just this far. Luckily for me a nice woman named Natasha Poppe who teaches graphic design around here agreed to come over and give me a few pointers so I was able to finish some decals and sent them off to In Plain Sight...the decal making company which, it just so happens, is right here in Minneapolis! I was fortunate to have sent them when I did because they were running a big set of decals and put mine in with them so they were ready the next day! I went to pick them up and Brian Bolden...one of the two owners gave me a tour of their set up. It was pretty awesome, they were in the process of making a tile piece that must have been over 100 feet long and 20-30 feet tall. Each 12x12 tile had a section of a large photo from an image taken from the window of a moving car. The photo was broken up into these 12x12 sections and would be hung to create the full image. They also made their own artwork using the decal process. It looked easy, an old copier retrofitted with ceramic colorants printed out decals which were then coated with a layer of flux and run through a heat sealer (like a laminator). Then the decal is soaked, slid onto the tile and fired at a specific rate in a computer programmed kiln. The fact that it looked so easy is a testament to how finely tuned they have their operation. Anyway that was fun to see.

On the same day I picked up my vinyl cut patterns, which Natasha also helped me with, from the Fast Signs company in Downtown Minneapolis...the goal with this was to have some stencils cut without me having to cut them by hand. It is a start, they look good but not great...I think I am going to use them on my bisqued work...we will see how it goes.

On Thursday night a group of us went to see a show here at the Walker Arts Center called Dirt on Delight, an exhibition of ceramics. There was a huge stink about putting on a ceramics show at the Walker which is know as a cutting edge very contemporary art venue. I liked the show but at the same time had mixed feelings about a few of the pieces and the venue. I have been listening to a few of the pod cast lectures from the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland...my friend Heather Alexander told me about them...and they were definately in my mind when looking at the work within the context of the Walker. What kept coming to mind was a quote by Martin Puryear, a great artist who works primarily in wood, presented by Garth Clark a great ceramics scholar and gallery owner...Puryear stated (and I paraphrase) "an artist can create great work without great craft but a a craftsperson cannot create great craft without great skill". The jist of the lecture was about how the craft movement (not the makers themselves who are still vibrant and producing) is dying because of art envy...At the Walker there seemed to be both...work that was clearly very poorly crafted with the intention that the lack of skill was a part of the idea behind the art object and other pieces that were incredibly skillful and well crafted...I need to continue to think it through there were many pieces I loved and a few I struggled with. I think overall the idea was to include artists who don't normally use clay but have begun to include it in their process Beverly Semmes and Lucio Fontana, and clay artists (with great knowledge and skill with the material) Betty Woodman, Kathy Butterly, Ron Nagle who have always been exhibited in fine art venues and have never really been consideed "crafters"(as Clark called it). The ones I struggled with were those which were sorely lacking in craftsmanship...which makes sense as I am first and foremost a craftsperson ...Although there were some where craft was not a concern but also not a hinderance that I really responded to. Food for thought...I need to work on it all.

And here for all of you who read so far is a funny story, those of you who have been to art school will probably relate most directly and see what is so funny, those of you who aren't don't feel badly for me. On Tuesday as I was working and old professor of mine stopped by the clay center, it was great to see him, I liked him quite a bit when I was at SIUE as a special student (unclassified grad) and I respect his work...in fact I show it to my students as part of some assignment slide talks. Anyway he asked to see what I was working on...as he asked I started thinking...should I tell him it isn't finished yet, god what if it's terrible, what is he going to think and on and on. So he came in looked at the work for a few minutes and nodded...silently...he said nothing. I immediately regressed to an insecure 22 year old art student...it was crazy how quickly it happened. A student of mine commented on this when I posted it on Facebook, she said now I know how they felt when I critique their work but it is different...I've already gone through all of that, I'm 37, I've not been his student for 10 years and I've not been anyones student for 8, I get in shows, I have residencies, I make my living as a professional in the arts...and yet still all I wanted to do was to tell him I was working on it, it was in progress, it would get better. To those of you not in the arts don't feel bad for me...this is what it is like, and after years of school you feel just fine about it, and for those in the arts...stop laughing.

Here they are...

2009-08-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

So I didn't write a full blog on Sunday because I was firing a kiln and wanted to share the pictures of the firing results. So here it goes... this is kind of a long one.

First I have to once again say how lucky I feel to be here. While I miss Bill, friends, the animals and being home, I truly feel like this is a chance of a lifetime, I may never get it again! I was a bit fearful when I came here that I wouldn't feel inspired to make work, the studio work had gotten a bit stale at home and I wasn't making much, I was afraid maybe I just didn't have the animating passion to make objects anymore! That would of course result in all kinds of problems with my studio work and my teaching...If I don't have the passion to make my own work how could I possibly teach and encourage students to have it? Well in a nutshell I LOVE making work, all day every day! As I had hoped I just needed time and space to change, no worries about making work for galleries, no worries about applying for shows and exhibitions, plenty of time to make mistakes that inevitably come with making new things, and time to learn new processes (slipcasting and Photoshop). It is amazing how many hours are in a day when you have all day to yourself! It feels self indulgent on one hand and totally necessary on the other, I'll take that balance.

I know that to be happy I need to make things...it is a big part of how I define myself, not a hobby, not a passtime, but a requirement whether it results in success or failure. It sounds silly but being creative, having the time to make quality objects and mastering the required technical skills to make the work in the way you envision takes a lot of hands on time and practice...you can't just think an object into being...no matter how good the idea is if the execution is poor (and it can be poor in so many ways) the idea doesn't matter. The other part is that the idea takes time to develop...the seed of an idea needs time to grow into a fully realized thing...it can take days, months or years. Then both of these processes (the developing idea and the technical skill/making of the object) have to happen simultaneously! I don't think you can actually think and make at literally the same time (the idea would stagnate and the the making would look forced) but it is a back and forth and it can go in any order. For my project I came up with the idea first (of course in some ways it was linked to my pottery making), moved into the making, went back to the idea and changed/developed it further, went back to the making and so on and on. So the answer to the "problem" (yes UCA students I said "problem") has to be both concrete and fluid. Because of this back and forth failures happen, ideas change based on developments that arise, knowledge that is gained, mistakes that end up being great, critiques that are offered. Making work is a (life)long process that never ends with each object created...each new work if looked at with an open mind and a self critical eye offers information for the next piece. You also have to work through the inevitable failures...when your pieces fall apart, when they don't look as you imagined, when you have those moments feeling that the whole idea is stupid anyway, you need to push through it, you have to realize that at some point you thought and felt it was a good enough idea to start with so you need to allow it time to develop and you need to do the hard work to get to your vision. So with all of that being said here are my results from the week...I should say that I wrote the above before unloading my kiln...perhaps I am giving myself a pep talk based on the possible disasters that may come out of the kiln tomorrow!

This week I caste 4 new sculptures...three bird pieces and one snowball. I had problems with my last pieces, many cracked apart during drying (clay shrinks as water evaporates and sometimes the weight of the piece drags against the surface it is sitting on causing cracking) as a potter it is not a problem I often have to deal with so the ways to avoid it don't always come to mind until it is too late. The easiest thing to try first is to build the piece on sandwiched layers of newspaper and sand, that provides a flat but movable surface for the piece to dry on...there are other ways that I won't get into here. So my new pieces have been built on that surface and so far so good!

I loaded all but two of the pieces into the kiln. I broke one piece going into the kiln...I brought the kiln shelves to my studio and put them right next to the sculptures so I only had to lift and move a few inches, then I carried the piece on the shelf into the kiln room, like I said I only broke one that way, and it may have been cracked in the first place. So I bisqued all of the pieces broken or not. I broke another one post firing when I was trying to drill holes in the back for hanging, the pieces are so fragile green that I can't flip them to make hanging holes and I want to be able to build them totally and then decide what orientation they should hang in, so I was drilling a snowball piece and the drill bit got all squirrley and the vibration made the piece jump and break into three pieces, one of which rolled off my stand and onto the table...awesome...actually...lame. The next thing was to try to figure out how to fix the bisqued work if possible. I have used a paperclay mixture to repair small non structural crackes but these were biggies...essentially the pieces where in two and sometimes three pieces! So I purchased this stuff called bisque fix...I think it is basically a room temperature glue mixed with flux ( a melting material that is glass like once fired and cooled). So this allowed me to glue the pieces together, glaze them and pick them up again to put in the kiln...did it work?

...(next morning)...the good news is the bisque repair worked and I didn't cry upon opening the kiln! although I did wake up at 6:30 am and got to the studio at 7am so I could look at the work without anyone around in case I did have to cry...here they are!

For those of you not familiar, this is what all of the pieces look like after they are glazed but before they are fired...you are looking at what will be light green, brown (the light brown you actually see is going to be the green part...tricky I know) dark green pink and clear. Because glaze colors are formed through a chemical reaction needing heat/melt etc. glazing can be the trickiest part of the process and one many people don't like. I always believe in facing the worst first...like ripping off a bandaid or giving an oral presentation...just get it done and out of the way, so here is the ugliest! I took notes on my slipping and glazing...that green was NOT supposed to be that color! It is the result of an unfortunate reaction between the slip and the glaze. YIKES!

While not perfect this one is closer to my goal for spring, overall it is too light and the pink slip on the bottom is not pink enough (it looks totally white in this image)

Detail of the part I like most

Here is my least favorite snowball set. I don't like the grid at all, but I do like the glaze combo on the bottom right just maybe not in that large of a section or broken up with decals.

If you can see it themotteled section on the right is what I like, nice variation in the glaze but too much on this large of a section I like this one quite a bit. The slip pattern was outlined (with GA28 for my ceramics II students then glazed with LET clear and copper over the top) and made the slip trailing less rigid/sharp edged which I like.

Detail...you can see how tight the slip remains on the dots to the left and how much runnier it looks on the curvilinear pattern on the right.

Another detail of the glazing I like so much

This one is okay...

I like this part the best

This is my favorite one of all of them

Very happy with this ...closer to my minds vision

All of the above pieces will have decals and luster on them so they are not yet finished. I have spent my evenings working on teaching myself Photoshop, it is not something I am enjoying but I really want to start designing my own decals. I don't want to make them myself, the process for multi colored decals takes a very long time and I would rather spend that time making more complicated objects, but I don't want to use only commercial decals anymore. To do this well I need to understand a little bit if not a lot of Photoshop. The decal making company needs the images in a pdf layout, and to fill the page with as many decals as I can fit, in the colors and configurations that I want...well photoshop is needed. The cool thing is the images are photographic quality so you could literally send photos, or drawings, or computer generated images or a combination of all three, whatever images you can get onto a 10X15 sheet in a pdf format you can have made into an exact decal. The sheets are expensive though so I am going to keep working on the images until I get what I want...here are some examples so far:

Snowflake sheet

Detail of bee pattern

Bee sheet not yet filled

Non studio news is that I bought a wonderful Warren McKenzie piece, he is a well known potter who has worked with Bernard Leach, taught at the University of Minnesota, and was the professor of many great potters of out time. He has left a big mark on the clay community, the Arkansas Arts center just had a big retrospective of his work come through if any of you saw it. His work is crazy collectable everywhere but especially up here in Minnesota. He has a belief that work should be affordable for all people, and so he prices it VERY low...the result was that people would come to his pottery sales at his home buy the ENTIRE kiln and then re sell it all for a much higher price. Because of that there are all sorts of rules, like you can only buy one piece a month, you have to be present to purchase the work and so on and so forth. Now the Northern Clay Center is the only place in Minnesota where you can but his pieces. I just happened to be in the office in back when his work was brought in and got to chose the first piece from the lot. It is a beautiful lidded jar a really nice example of his work and one that I will be happy to bring to school and show students...of course I paid literally ten times the price he had put on the piece but I feel it is worth it and Bill agreed. The ten times money goes to help support the clay center so it seems doubly worth it. Here it is...like most pots you need to experience it in real life to truly appreciate it, but it is a really nice one!

McKenzie lidded jar

Busy week - short post

2009-08-16T18:07:00.001-07:00

All work and no play is actually pretty great when you think your work is so fun, challenging and interesting! I have in fact had a very busy week... I have made 4 new sculptures that are not yet slip decorated, repaired multiple pieces (not all but a few cracked, I think I know why it happened and can resolve it) post bisque that had problems (we will see if that works), glazed 6 pieces which are firing as I write, and doing photoshop tutorials in the evenings to improve my decal making skills. The company that I am going to use to print the decals I make happens to be located here in Minneapolis, so I am going to get on that and make a few sheets, however the decal sheets are pretty expensive so I need to be sure they are what I want, plus learning photoshop by myself takes time!

Since so many pieces are in the kiln right now and won't be out until Tuesday and most of the other work I did this week isn't really picture worthy I am going to keep this one short and write a supplemental post on Tuesday with all of the images. Keep your fingers crossed for me, as usual the glazing could make the pieces glorious or hideous. More on Tuesday!

Sorry missed last week

2009-08-08T20:04:00.000-07:00

Well I missed my blog post last week because I was back home over the weekend and didn't want to spend what little time I had (only 3 full days) on the computer. So I will give an abbreviated update on the past two weeks. Bill told me the only way to build a following with your blog is to be very consistent with your posts, fortunately for me a following is not my goal.

Over the weekend I got to see Lulu go swimming with Bill while Buster and I stayed on shore. I think Lulu could have swam all day! Apparently Buster was brave and did swim with Bill a few days later...he swam across the lake but then didn't want to come back, it sounded like a challenge for all involved to get him back into the water and swimming in the right direction. Bill may never take Buster swimming again and Lulu will probably be okay with that! I also cooked like a maniac, I'm happy to not have to cook while I am here but I do miss it a bit.

Non- studio highlights were that I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art to visit their museum which has a great Chinese ceramics collection...I walked around looking at all of the work and taking notes on things I saw and wanted to try in my own work. The T'ang dynasty produced some outstanding ceramics and has a very distinctive glaze and color palette. You can look it up and most likely you will see horses and tomb gaurdians/warriors. The pictures do not do them justice they are exquisite in real life and this museum has a particularly nice collection. I am going to try to mimick the runny green, brown, blue, pink glazes on my spring pieces. I have some fake ash glazes that are sort of similiar and I think if it works it will look great plus have a nice tie to the history of ceramics...of course I will be combining it with a more European aesthetic with the slip trailing and decals I will be using so we will see if it works. I was also amazed as usual by the Ming dynasty work...and I loved the pieces that were made for the trade market...a chinese aesthetic popular in Europe in the early 19th century, recreated by European artists then made in China for the European market...confusing but wonderful work. There was a great small bowl that had pierced work throughout...like lace then glazed with a milky clear glaze so it was totally opaque where the clay was and translucent where the glaze filled in the holes...I'm trying that one for the snowballs...the piercing is taking me a long time though.

Here is an example of the first pierced piece I have made. It seems to look nicer in real life then in this image, I hope that is true. It will be all white on white, so different shades, textures, and glosses of white glazes. I am going to try my very hardest to add no color!

A detail of the piercing, you can also see a little bit of white slip trailing

The second pierced piece. This time with a little color

Detail again a combination of slip trailing and pierceing

There were many others beautiful things to see...a great quilt that had a repeating pattern but every once in a while the craftsperson making it threw in a non repeating element that was almost the same...it was a great way to break up the work...really wonderful. There is also a very nice Islamic art collection which is of interest to me. Islamic art typically rejects figurative images in artwork therefore they have an unbelievably developed and complex decorative tradition. It is so beautiful it makes my head spin, so it was exciting to see that work as well. I plan to go back a few more times, after a few hours I was full and couldn't receive any more information but I haven't yet seen all of the collections and I need to revisit the ceramics collection again in a while, I'm sure I will be open to seeing other things I missed this time.

I gave my slide talk last week and it seemed to go well, about 25-30 people came and other than it being sweltering hot in the room where I presented, the talk went smoothly. More than anything I received a lot of comments about the UCA student work that I showed...I don't usually include student work in my slide talks but considering that I spend at least 50% of my time teaching it seemed like an appropriate addition in this venue. The audience was really impressed and one woman asked me how I got my students to make such great work...I responded that I didn't really know that many of the students were simply very talented and driven. There was an art historian there from the University of Minnesota, he took notes and we will meet again to discuss my work some more; he does a write up about each McKnight artist for the catalog that is created at the end of the year...I will be very interested to read what he has to say about my work...the thought of someone else describing it is both weird and exciting. I also have to go to a professional photo shoot, can you imagine! for the catalog, I hate having my picture taken so I'm not looking forward to that.

This week I went to the Minneapolis art fair, it is supposed to be one of the biggest art fairs in the country. I wasn't super impressed, there was a lot of work but most of the ceramics leaned toward the standard production pottery aesthetic...great if you only desire hand made work...not so great if you are looking for unexpected, imaginative, innovative or complex work. I did buy a few pieces from a guy who has a website unklethirsty.com, he is doing some interesting stuff with vintage decals, silkscreening and decals he has made himself. I also loved the work by a woman named Amy Arnold you can check her out at peepwool.com...I may go back tomorrow and buy a piece from her if not I could buy from her website or from her Etsy site.

In the studio I did the same thing last week that I did this week. Happily the 200 lbs of clay I ordered finally came in on Tuesday...so I got off the plane, took the train back and went straight to the studio...the beauty of bringing nothing on the plane (traveling to home is easier than traveling from home). It is a straight shot from the light rail to the studio (I would have had to walk past the studio to go to the house where I am sleeping so I just decided to stop at the studio). Up at 4:30am in LR, to Minneapolis by 10:30, in the studio mixing slip by 11:30...I did go home at around 7 that night, I was pretty tired. Anyway the slip was delivered to my studio that morning so I mixed up a whole bunch of it and caste molds for the next three days. This Friday through Sunday I put more of the pieces together and decorated to my hearts content. In all for my firing on Tuesday I think I will have 10 pieces ranging from 10" to 24" and most have some colored slip and some slip trailing (decoration) on them. It is proving to be challenging to get the patterns over such complicated forms but I am working on it and hope it will get easier as I get more used to it.

Here is a shot of a spring piece it is kind of hard to look at with the black bat it is sitting on but I have to avoid moving them or handeling them too much at this point as they are pretty fragile pre bisque firing

This is a detail shot of the back of the bird, there are two areas on the sculpture with this slip trailing pattern on it (remember this is just the first step in the decorating...if all goes well there will be two or three more layers!

Another set of birds, I don't have a detail of this one...try to imagine all of these with translucent bright runny green, brown, blue and clear glazes...unless you are familiar with T'ang dynasty work that probably wounds pretty bad...just trust me.

This is the biggest bird set so far. That shelf it is sitting on is a 12"x24" kiln shelf. I had to build it right on the kiln shelf because it is so long and fragile, that way I never have to pick it up again until it is fired. They are all sitting on newspaper to help them shrink without having friction against the shelf as they get smaller which can cause cracking. Sometimes we put pieces like this on sand which acts like little rollers as the piece shrinks, also you can use shrink slabs which are essentially slabs of clay that shrink with the piece. You can also seeprops that are there to support parts of the piece as it dries.

Detail of the big set...the hot pink line is sharpie marker, it will burn out in the firing, I thought I wanted to put something there but decided against it.

I am trying to get some motifs that I have drawn, some copied and recombined, put into adobe illustrator and then I will be able to take them to a sign shop and have them vinyl cut. Then I can use them as stencils on the pieces. Once I figure out how to get them into illustrator and fix them up it will be much faster to have them cut by a shop then for me to cut them by hand. The look similar to the stencils I showed in the last blog made of picnic table plastic but they are black. Once I get the stencils cut I will post some images

As I mentioned, I load my first bisque on Tuesday. I am a bit worried about getting the pieces into the kiln in one piece. I made one of the larger pieces on a kiln shelf so I don't have to pick it up again until it is fired, hopefully I won't find out that I should have made them all on kiln shelves! Keep you fingers crossed for me on Tuesday if you think about it and I will report back on my success (hopefully) next week!

Molds are done...now the hard part!

2009-07-24T20:09:00.001-07:00

I finally finished all of the molds on Monday (that is assuming they all work, which I think they will)! I was glad to get them done and be finished working with plaster. I spent Monday evening totally cleaning and mopping the space to be rid of plaster bits. The next day I spent half the day driving to get huge rubberbands to strap the molds together (I had been using large office type rubber bands about 1/2 inch thick but...when you stretch those around a mold and one breaks and thwaps you in the face it hurts so I invested in some real heavy duty mold strapping bands, no more welts on my chin or cheeks). It was an interesting trip, the clay center and the surrounding area is a bastion of liberal and progressive politics, Obama stickers everywhere, anti-war and universal health care signs in every yard...when I arrived at Minnesota Ceramics a clay craft and pre-made mold shop (picture a lot of molds of Jesus, gnomes, butterflies and santa clauses) it was like another world; the woman at the counter was actually arguing that Sarah Palin would have been a great president if it had come to that and Obama wasn't even smart enough to present a speech without a video prompter in front of him. Well...what to say, I just bought my rubber bands and left. The rest of that day was spent cleaning half of the molds and strapping them together.

Tuesday I poured scrap slip into the cleaned molds to be sure they were free of plaster, plasticene and excess mold soap (and got my haircut...I think it looks good). I also used the scrap to cast a few extra forms so I could do some initial experimenting on the forms without wasting my good slip. I was sad to learn that Continental Clay was out of my claybody so I will have to wait to make more casting slip until next week.

Wednesday was a disaster, I spent the morning mixing and pouring the good slip into the molds...I had a feeling it was too thick but ignored it because I had measured its specific gravity a few days before and it was good, well I should have followed my gut. Usually after I pour the slip into the molds which in total takes about 30 -45 minutes because I am filling about 10-20 at once, the slip needs to sit in there for 20-40 minutes depending in the size of the mold (meaning I can pour out the first one right after I finish filling the last one) to get the appropriate thickness for the wall of the piece. Well the slip was WAY too thick and wouldn't pour back out of the molds, it was clogging the pour spout and I was trying to dig it out, it was a mess and getting everywhere when I decided to scrap the whole effort. I decided to unmold the pieces so I could reuse the slip but to do this I had to unmold forms that were 1. full of liquid slip 2. not dry or strong enough to really retain said slip. So to get a mental image think of a water balloon totally full of a liquid that is runny but thick and sticky...maybe like motor oil or Caro syrup... now imagine the balloon is made of something more like oh I don't know...totally soft thin clay...now to get back to reality lets say you are a visiting artist who is getting paid to make this work and be a "professional" and just as you are lifting this squashy ball of liquid slip out of a mold, it bursts all over you, your hands and your studio and your ears hear..."and this is Liz Smith she is our McKnight grant recipient..." A tour of 20 people standing in the doorway of my studio space and slip in pouring out between my fingers and down my apron into a pool on my feet as I hold an exploded and deflated cricket body in my hands...yeah... really... that's what happened, sorry I don't have any pictures. Thursday afternoon I fixed my slip following my awesome exhibition of artistic skill and technical prowess (and about twenty minutes of clean up) and spent Thursday and Friday morning casting pieces and putting them together.

Below: Box of balls and flowers

Below: Balls, birds and flowers assembled equals four sculptures. Details follow

Below: Tip - your deflocculated clay mixed with a combination of epsom salts and water equals "slip goop" no scoring and slipping necessary...it seems to be pretty strong so far! If you want the recipe e-mail me.

So I have four objects put together from my good clay and two from the test clay, now the really hard part begins. How to start applying pattern and decoration to these complicated and undulating forms? I started trying to carve a pattern on a test form on Thursday evening...it was a disaster, the "snowball" forms are the simplest of all of my planned sculptures and I couldn't get a straight line when I went over one sphere to the next. Then I borrowed a tip from Kip O'Krongly, the woman here whose work I admire, she uses thin plastic tablecloth to use as cut stencils, they are softer than the paper stencils I use and therefore bend more easily over a curved surface however it still wasn't what I needed, they didn't seem to stick enough to the form to create a clean line. I went home that evening discouraged and sure I would never be able to complete this project with any success. The next day I went to the studio and decided I would just "play" with my second test form and try not to care that what I was making (and what everyone was seeing) was a mess...all of my test ideas on a single piece (I only had this last test piece) it was a monstrosity by the end of the day but I had worked through some ideas regarding how to apply pattern, use the plastic stencils (they are much more adhesive when wet)

Below: Stencil cut from plastic picninc tablecloth (4th of July theme)

Below: Two shots of cutting out a different stencil

Below: Two shots of applying the stencil then coating it with colored slip and following slip trailing the outline of the stenciled pattern (ignore the color choice this is just a test)

and to test slip trailing with a variety of slip mixes and application tools (slip trailing is similiar to squeezing mustard on a hot dog, but with slip instead of mustard, with a much finer tipped squeeze bottle and hopefully with a little more skill and intention).

Below: Stencil, slip, trailing and carving all on a test piece.

So after Friday I felt better but still overwhelmed about how to begin on Saturday when I was going to start on my "real" pieces. The forms are so complicated...how/where to put on color or pattern first? I went home and continued to read a book I have started a couple of times but am really getting into while I'm here. "Ornament: A Modern Perspective" by Robert Trilling and there I found the answer to my question of where to start. He talks about ornament as a mixture of pattern (repeated form and shapes in a structured layout) and motifs (visual imagery often laid over the pattern in a way that sometimes does and sometimes does not follow the general direction of the pattern) it is a mixture of creating control and chaos through layering and design in a way that again may or may not adhere to the form to which the ornament has been applied (think vase, armoir, upholstry)...here I read about what I have been doing all along with my pots. Taking a form that is curved, often with no discernible front or back, breaking it up into segments, applying pattern and then applying motifs. But with this work I want the visual result to be more intense, more overwhelming and complicated. So I have begun by breaking up the spherical forms into sections of color, for whatever reason this makes it much easier for me to "see" where and how to apply more overlapping pattern and from there it will build up and up, layer over layer.

Below: Shots of the three "snowball" pieces and where I will start from tomorrow

Below: A detail of what I am thinking of as one option, carving into the form.

Now tonight I am worrying about the type of patterns I will choose for winter...? I have included one of a number of images here that I am using for inspiration but most of them, as this one is, are created from plant and flower motifs which is not what I want to use for my snowball forms...I don't know...I need to work on it.

Below: Pretend this has been properly footnoted and don't show Prof. Morales my blog! An example of an old wallpaper pattern, I love the overlapping of motif over pattern.

One of the great things about living in this part of Minneapolis is (as I mentioned before) the large Somali population. Many of the Somali women wear traditional dress which is called (I think, a hajib...forgive me if I am mistaken), they are Muslim and many are fully covered in fabric from head to toe...and the fabric!...I would love to ask some of them about the aesthetic that goes into their fabric choices, all I can say is that it can be dazzeling. The women who choose to wear patterned fabric often put together combinations that are outrageously vibrant in color choice and absolutely eye popping in pattern combination. Tonight when I came home there was a group of about ten women walking towards me...I tried to take their picture as a group but it does not do them justice, I did ask one of the women if I could take her picture and she consented...her outfit is a stunning combination. The group was so overwhelming as a mass of moving pattern and color! my eyes were overwhelmed! With this kind of inspiration around me every day I should have no problem completing this project!

Below: The backs of the group of Somali women, you can barely get a sense of the riot of color and pattern.

Below: Look at this beautiful outfit! I love that she is wearing two pieces of green fabric with different patterns (one is over her shoulder) and I think the white ruffle at her feet is a remarkable detail. It should also be noted that the white spots of fabric on her headscarf were actually silver metallic sequins!

I will be going home to Little Rock on Friday until next Tuesday morning...I need to get a lot done before I leave but I am very happy to be able to see Bill and the animals and be home for a bit. So until next week...!

Molds are almost complete!

2009-07-19T18:44:00.000-07:00

This has been a pretty productive week but I am about two molds short of completetion...I was hoping to have all of the molds done by today so I could clean out my studio of all things mold production and move onto clay! It is important that the clay and any plaster bits, trimming and powder do not mix. As my students know clay is always shrinking from the moment it hits air until it is fired the final time, the problem is that plaster doesn't shrink and so if the two mix the clay shrinks around the plaster and causes cracking or in the firing the plaster pops out of the clay and leaves a hole. Because of this it is best to have a seperate plaster room away from the clay, but as that is not the case here I just have to be sure to clean really well when I am done making the molds.

In terms of blogging I will spare you details of the studio work this past week as they are quite similar to the previous week with a few exceptions. I was able to cast and bisque fire a few small test pieces which I will glaze fire on Wednesday which is the soonest that I can schedule the test kiln becasue other people are using it. I am doing this so I can test my glazes on this new claybody.

Below: Mini birds and flowers hung up against my mini backdrop image...now imagine these decorated like my pots (sort of) and below that is a detail. I added flowers to these and I think I will try that on the full scale sculptures too, I just need to find some flower molds.

I was also able to cast, using scrap slip, two of the grasshoppers I have been working on...no legs yet because those molds are still wet. I have to wait for the molds to dry out (I have fans on them to speed things up) otherwise the water will not absorb from the slip into the plaster which is how the skin (wall) of the clay piece is formed. When I first cast both grasshoppers yesterday they ripped as they came out of the molds which sent me into a moment (or entire sleepless night) of panic. I was worried that I had made all of my molds wrong (I have probably made 14 molds so far...gone through over 300 pounds of plaster!) so you can understand my concern. Thankfully the next day I recast them and both came out beautifully. It is typical for a first cast, which is always a scrap cast to clean out the mold of any remaining mold release and bits of plaster, to not come out right. Molds become "seasoned" with use, I knew this but it did not keep me from worrying. I had also not let the clay sit in the mold long enough before I poured out the excess slip so my walls weren't thick enough AND I had tried to pop them out of the molds too quickly so the clay was still too wet . Each piece (and mold) has its own timing needs depending on the molds wall thickness, how damp the mold is (if you are making multiple casts) and how thick you want the clay piece to be. Long story short at least two of the molds work which is promising.

Below: The grasshopper body (seems like a small accomplishment I know but it is actually pretty exciting to me...I will be able to cast up to 16 grasshoppers in a single day (plus other molds) which will make putting the sculptures together very fast.

Other than that not much else went on in my studio. On Friday there was an opening in the gallery featuring the artists of the Northern Clay Center. It is a nice exhibition as it showcases a range of work from instructors to studio artists to work from the kids classes. Studio artists are what the people who are renting permanent work space are called here. There is a range of types of spaces from a shelf rental in a community space to small and large individual or shared private studio spaces. There is a long waiting list to get into the private and semi private studio spaces and as I understand it there is also a jurying process involved. The studio artists spaces are completely seperate from the four large rooms where classes are taught. Some of the studio artists work is very accomplished...post graduate school or similarly experienced while others are seriously commited hobbyists who also make nice work. At the moment the work of Kip O'Krongly is my favorite, she handbuilds functional tableware out of lowfire red earthenware...I plan on getting some of her work before I leave!

Below: This is Kip's studio, she is VERY neat. She was awarded a Fogelberg grant for this coming year at the clay center which means a free studio and materials for a whole year! Her work is great, I will try to ask permission of some of the artists to post images on my blog in future weeks.

That same night two artists, Hide (pronounced He-Day) Sidohara and Linda Cordell came by (from upstate New York...does that count as "coming by"?) to drop off some of Hide's work. Hide was a McKnight recipient two years ago and Linda went to LSU, graduating a year or two before I arrived. If you are interested you should look up their work, just google their name and ceramics, it is very impressive! I hope to bring them both in as visiting artists to UCA in the near future. Linda is also very good friends with one of my best friends and so because of all those connections we went out to dinner together. It was really nice and great to get a chance to talk with them. I haven't had conversation that long with anyone in person since I have been here!

There are going to be mini artist presentations this coming Tuesday so the studio artists can introduce me (and whoever else wants to attend) to their work and then next Tuesday I will give my presentation; they have me scheduled for an hour and a half! I know I can talk that long I'm just not sure anyone will want to listen that long...typically talks run about 45 minutes with 15 or so for questions. It will be intersting because most people have only seen me making sculpture...well really only molds, and the majority of my talk is about pots so we will see how it goes. So that is what's up in the studio right now.

I took a few pictures of where I live and my commute...They are really not that interesting as I am truly not doing anything other than studio work and yoga class. I eat all of my meals at the studio, picking up the days food on my walk there...it is annoying that the co-op doesn't open until 8am but I am there every morning right as they come to the door! I am enjoying going to yoga everyday...One Yoga is the nicest facility I have seen with the best teachers I have ever had...by October I expect to be able to move into a headstand and a backbend! (maybe).

Below you will see Josie's house where I am living...my room is where the three windows to the right of the door are.

This is the street that I walk down...the green building to the left of the street in the distance is the Co-op

Below: The Co-op

Here you will see some urban wildlife "Citycus rabbitus"...this rabbit lives in the yard of a church across from the clay center. I see him (?) every morning.

This is a cool sculpture/jungle gym in the park next to the clay center. There is a very large Somali population here and many live in an apartment building facing this park. Every evening parents are out playing with their kids, it is fun to watch them playing on this troll scukpture coming out of the ground.

Finally last but not least, this is Milo, he is the official Northern Clay Center cat. He lives in and around the studio but is not allowed in the gallery. Sometimes in the morning if I am the first one there he comes and lies on my work table.So hopefully next weeks post will have new and exciting clay images to show you and from then on I will be in a frenzy of making sculpture and working on decoration techniques and ideas. I am looking forward to it!

Week one!

2009-07-09T20:07:00.000-07:00

I have now officially been in Minneapolis at the Northern Clay Center for 12 days. So far (other than Bill leaving on Tuesday) everything is going really well. I was able to get some work started after Bill and I moved everything into the studio last week, he did some work on his computer while I did some work in the studio, and he had meetings all day on Monday. One of his meetings was with the McKnight foundation, the same foundation that is funding my stay at NCC, they have invited the panel to submit a grant proposal for some environmental work in Arkansas which is great news!

Now that Bill is back in Arkansas I seem to be falling into a simple schedule, wake up at 7am, breakfast at "home", walk to the studio, on the way stop at the food co-op and pick up lunch and dinner, arrive at the studio by 8/8:30, work until lunch, eat, work until 3, break for 1 hour (reading or lying in the park), work until 6/7pm eat dinner, 8/8:30 walk home, video call (skype) with Bill for an hour, 10/11 bed...next day same thing. It is amazing how much more time there is in a day when you don't have to cook meals or worry about house/garden chores! I think I will probably stick with no cooking, the food co-op has lots of organic salads and meals that they make there and if I'm careful they aren't too expensive. Meals only take about 15 minutes to get out and eat so virtually all of my time is spent making work! This morning I went to a yoga class, so that will be added to my daily schedule. There is a great place here called One Yoga, it is a non-profit yoga studio that is committed to making yoga affordable to everyone. they have a sliding fee that is based on your income and a reasonable three month membership that allows you to go to as many classes as you want seven days a week, if I were to go everyday that I am here (which is my plan) it comes to about $3 per class. It is a beautiful space, the classes are an hour and a half long, and at the beginning and end of class this morning when people were setting up and leaving one of the yoga students played guitar! It was really great.

Last week I prepared my casting slip, I tried to turn my usual throwing body into a pourable slip but it definately did not work, fortunately I had anticipated this as a possibility and had pre-ordered a dry mixed slip from Continental Clay here in Minneapolis, when I mixed that one up it worked like a charm, the question now is whether my glazes will "fit" the claybody...I really hope they do because I don't have time to re-formulate glazes. I also made a mold of a twig (fall) but I decided I needed to get going on the grasshoppers as I assumed they would be the most dificult.

So I started on Monday, I made a basic form out of soft plasticene (an oil based "clay" that will never dry out, wrapped it in thin paper and started to cover it with medium/hard plasticene. The harder plasticene holds detail better and in less fragile in the mold than the softer kind.

Below:Inner soft plasticene and harder outer shell

Below: Largest grasshopper positive, I decided on all of the others to get rid of the textured details. I got so wrapped up in trying to make the real grasshopper that I forgot I wanted to add non-grasshopper texture and pattern on the final pieces.

Below: Clay bed that I will carve out (see the outline) in order to bury the plasticene model to its mid point

Below: Building up (or "blocking in") the model. The clay has to come to the exact middle of the piece all the way around and then come out in a flat plane perpendicular to the model. I am blocking off the head which will be a third part of the mold.

Below: The first side has been cast in plaster, now to pour the second side

Below: I pour the plaster through a sieve which removes any dry plaster particles and diminishes the chance of having bubbles in the mold

Below: Grasshopper sandwich...the two halves are poured, now for the third part. If you can see the "cheeks" of the grasshoppers face on the top and bottom...those would be undercuts if this were made as a two part mold, the clay would pull apart as you tried to lift the top of the mold off because it would hook onto the "cheeks". This third part will be pulled off of the clay mold first straight towards you, then the top half will be lifted off and the grasshopper will be removed (hopefully intact).

I am heating the plasticene under a lamp so it is easy to work with and then shaping it like clay with my hands and some rubber tipped tools. The first grasshopper is a little over 12 inches long (it will shrink about 10%-15% once fired) After getting the form done (which took two days) I spent a half a day trying to be sure there were no undercuts on the piece (these would not allow the clay positive to be removed from the mold without tearing) then I made the mold. It is a three part mold with the seam running down the middle of the body on top and bottom, and the third piece for the front of the "face". The first mold took me all day to make and it weigh 50 pounds!, I made another so I can hopefully be sure that at least one if not both of them work, for the second I diminished a bit of the grasshoppers wing texture so they will be a little different from one another. That mold weighed 50 pounds too! I need to start lifting weights as well as taking yoga if I want to keep this up!

I have made two molds of a second grasshopper, smaller than the first and am working on the third even smaller one. It is my plan to have at least three grasshoppers of varying sizes. You may notice that the grasshopper is missing its legs, I have to make those seperately as they would be impossible to create attached to the body in a single mold, so each leg/or set of legs will have its own mold and will be attached after they are caste in clay. I hope to complete the second body at caste it tomorrow and to build some more legs.

Below: The hoppers (aka legs)

It is my hope that I will have all of the molds completed in about two weeks so I will be done with plaster and can begin casting all of the molds in clay. Once this happens I will be casting all of the molds at least once a day so production will be quick. The tricky thing is you can't know that a mold "works" until you have made a clay caste, and you can't make that caste until the mold is dry (plaster is a mixture of about 1 part water to 3 parts plaster so a 50ish pound mold has about 16 quarts of water in it that needs to evaporate). I am (of course) hoping the large grasshoppers work, especially since I have deconstructed the plasticene model and would have to completely re-make it if the molds didn't work which would be a real pain.

I haven't really met a lot of folks at the studio, I tend to be shy in these circumstances, not very good at initiating conversations and most of the other artists who are there a lot are either working or don't really talk to me when I am working. There have been a few visitors though, mostly when classes are toured through the spaces, or sometimes larger outside groups, I am introduced (as are the other artists if they are around) and there is a bit of conversation. Yesterday(I should be careful what I wish for) a fellow came in to talk who was very nice but after more than an hour I started to wonder when he would finish talking...it cut a bunch of time out of my morning and got me off schedule with my mold making. Which was okay in the end but I did have to stay until 9:45 pm to get done what I had planned for the day which was a little later than I wanted to stay. I hope that I will be able to have a little more interaction with the other studio members but we will see...I also have a lot of work to get done (as do they).

The woman who owns the house where I am renting a room is very nice, her name is Josie and she is also an artist, who used to work in clay and is now writing a childrens book. At the moment her son (Otto) and daughter in law (Olive) are here too; they are also artists, dancers, but I believe they may be more like performance artists rather than traditional dancers like ballet or jazz. The have done performances around the world and are currently curating a performance for the Walker Art Center which is a really big deal...a fantastic museum dedicated to very contemporary art, so when I get a chance to learn more about what they do I will report back on the blog. I don't see any of them too much as I am out of the house for a majority of the day. Josie also has a very sweet dog named Maple who is a little basset hound I think, she was a rescue dog and is as cute as can be. I will try to include neighborhood, people and general non-studio images in the next blog.

Skypeing with Bill is fun, he walks around with his laptop and shows me the dogs and the garden, it makes me feel better to be able to see him and home when we talk. I went for my first bike ride this evening after leaving the studio early...about 6pm, walked home changed and rode until about 8pm, they have great paths all through Minneapolis, no real hills and a nice rails to trails greenway where a lot of people ride. I think because warm(ish) weather only lasts three months everybody gets out all at once! It is the same way with the plants, in Arkansas they come at a slow but steady rate from March through October, here they all shoot up at once and are glorious for the short time they are out!

I will update again next Sunday!

2009-06-28T05:19:00.000-07:00

Well here we are in Minneapolis!!! The high temperature today was 68 degrees...heaven!!! While I am sad to leave my family and friends in Arkansas I am NOT sad about leaving 105 degree weather...in June...what will July and August be like!?! This has been the hottest June on record in the state and I still have enough northerner in me to really dislike the heat! As we were loading up the truck on Saturday full of 200 pounds of plaster, 300 pounds of clay and another 150 or so pounds of plaster molds in this heat the (probably overly simplistic) thought of.."I should have been a graphic designer...all I would need is my laptop and some clothes" did enter my mind and few times!

Bill (my husband), who is far more tolerant of the heat, was more than willing to get in the back of the truck (with the cab on) and shift around clay and plaster for 2 hours between noon and 2pm! I think he must be crazy but I certainly feel lucky that he is because it was really helpful!

The truck half packed...

As of this Sunday morning we had the studio only half packed, I still needed to load all of my clay tools, mixed glazes, and other miscellaneous items that I think I will use. I am taking a no limit approach to moving the studio but have limited myself to one suitcase for clothes etc.!

It was hot again Sunday, Bill felt like it was worse than Saturday, so packing up the rest of the truck required some air conditioning breaks but by the evening we finally had the truck packed to the gills....Bill couldn't fit in his bike but was over the heat and kind of done with packing. After waking up Monday at 5am! he was revived and willing to successfully repack the truck so he was able to fit on both of our bikes!!!

The truck packed absolutely full

We hit the road by 7am which was 2 hours later than planned but the ride was still pretty cool the whole way to Kansas City (of course we were both partially deaf upon arrival from the wind that had been whipping our ears from both open windows going 80 down the highway (Bill drove). It is here that I should add we drove my truck... beat up as it looks it does only have 128,000 miles on it but alas no air conditioning (being a true Northerner I thought A/C was for wimps and promptly sold the unit that came with the truck (but not installed) when I was in graduate school (I needed the money). The truck drove like a champ! I have since learned that A/C in the South is the equivilent of heat in the North...and I love it!

Lunch on the way to K.C.

We were tired and hot when we arrived in KC so we didn't really do much other than take naps, eat dinner, shower and sleep. We woke again at 5am to hit the road to Minneapolis! We stopped for breakfast in downtown KC before we left town and someone tried to break into our truck cab! Bill...the real hero of the story...had packed the truck sooooo tightly that the thief who had opened the back of the cab was thwarted, unable to pull Bill's bag out of the pile! It was full of Bill's clothes so the thief would have been disappointed but Bill was happy he still had his shirts and boxer shorts!

The ride to MN was great, a cloudy day which made for a cooler (less windy) ride. We made it into town around 2:30 checked into a hotel (where we are staying for the first 2 nights) and went straight to the Northern Clay Center. We were given a tour of the place by the residency director Sarah Millfelt, she intoduced us to all of the folks in the office, many of the artists working in the space and the gallery director and assistant. The gallery space is beautiful, broken up into a large two roomed retail space, a third and fourth room for exhibitions, at the moment last years McKnight residents and McKnight fellows. The building is huge, as I said large gallery spaces, 4-5 huge communal studios where community classes for adults and kids take place, a big kiln room with 4 gas kilns two of which are soda kilns and about 7 -8 electric kilns, a glaze room, a ceramics library, a clay storage room, about 20 or more private studio spaces where people are juried in,a communal kitchen and of course the Mcknight residents studio. The McKnight studio is minimally outfitted, a space with a few tables and some shelves facing huge windows that look out into the parking lot but it will be perfect for what I need.

Bill in my new studio space above and below the wall of windows on the other side (a little like a fishbowl)
Above is one of the three or four community studio spaces and below is four of the studios gas kilns, two are soda kilns

Below is one of two retail gallery spaces and below is one of two exhibition rooms, you can see the doorway to the other space in the back.As we were touring the spaces and galleries I was getting anxious...the feeling of pressure that comes from being surrounded by so much good work and so many talented people and I'm supposed to be this (sort of biggish deal) resident. It felt like (and continues to feel like) graduate school all over again. In my mind I am thinking "how did I get here?...all of these people are so talented" I just had to keep telling myself that I've got them all fooled, most don't even know what my work looks like and was just really lucky, so if I just work hard enough maybe I will make something good enough to not look like I don't know what I'm doing! It is an odd thing to be in a field where there is no "right" answer, there is very little in the way of proof that you are good or talented beyond technical skill, and it is hard to explain a good idea ahead of time, plus no one cares what your good idea is (unless you are in school)...they want to see the results of your good ideas then there can be an assessment. The problem is that the process of getting to those results in this environment all happens in public, and with certain expectations of success (I often equate it with writing a paper with the entire class watching the whole process over your shoulder from beginning to end, not just reading them the third, fourth or final draft...they can see if you can't spell and don't know proper punctuation!) On the other hand that environment can drive you to do better and work harder. "Work harder do better" is going to be my mantra...of course at the moment with Bill here (which I am very happy about) it is a little difficult to jump right in and work like a maniac! But I have time and so I will enjoy our time here together and then work work work.

Within and hour or so of arriving we unpacked all of the truck...Bill again, a hero! and that took some serious time and muscle. After all the supplies were in the studio we left the Clay center we went out to dinner with an old girlfriend of Bill's who happened to be in Minneapolis for a few days and Tuesday was the only night we could all get together. She is very nice but it is here that I should mention it was also Bill's and my second wedding anniversary! Yes I am the least jealous and most laid back wife of all time...and to be honest we were both so tired and dirty from unpacking the truck that a big nice anniversary dinner was not on the rada

Wednesday we went back to the studio to learn about kiln sign up and material usage (how to schedule firing in a very busy studio and how to keep finances straight when using Clay Center materials) and to arrange the studio. We had to run out to get a few supplies, I covered the table which was wood and covered with red clay with padded vinyl like I have at home and mixed and measured two kinds of casting slip. I am trying to turn my commercial clay (the clay I use to throw with) into casting slip which requires that I slice it up, dry it out and reconstitute it with water and sodium silicate or darvan 7 (both are deflocculants which make the clay liquid without adding as much water as would be required without the deflocculant). I also ordered 50 lbs of premixed dry clay from Continental Clay supply which is nearby, I will test this one too. To test it means to see if it fires to the tempuratures I want, that it has the required durability, and most of all that my glazes "fit" (they don't crack off or craze, fine crackle lines in the glaze) etc. I will mix those, cast some pieces and do some glaze tests and we will see how it goes.

The living situation (I think) will be great! We are going to Josie's (the woman who I am renting from) tomorrow. We drove past her place though and it looks great! It is bright blue, 5 blocks from the Clay Center, two blocks from a natural food co-op and both her house and the Center are surrounded by Ethiopian, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants and groceries (they sell injera in the grocery)...heaven on earth I think! It is also a block in the other direction from a bike path that goes around the river! Bill is sure I will never go beyond a 5 block radius from the Clay Center and he may be right!

Tonight we are relaxing and tomorrow Bill will drop me off at the studio and go off to find wireless internet so we can both get some work done. We are also going to Josie's tomorrow to meet her, see the house and drop off some clothes, then we are staying with a friend of Bill's through Sunday. Monday Bill has work meetings (one with the same McKnight foundation who is paying for my residency) and he is back to Arkansas on Tuesday morning. Wow! this will be the longest that we have been away from each other in the 6 years we have been together. I am glad I have a flight back for the weekend at the end of July!

One week and counting

2009-06-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

I am going to be off to Minneapolis in exactly one week! I haven't gotten nearly enough done in my attempt to be very prepared to jump in immediately upon my arrival at the Northern Clay Center, I still feel like I have a lot to do to be even minimally prepared! I continue to work on making molds which is the most time consuming part of the project, but must be done first. I was hoping to get all of the molds made before I left...I think I will only have half of them done! I will describe and include images of this process below.

I am thinking about what to pack...I will be renting a room in someones house and we will be sharing the kitchen, bathroom and living spaces so really I only need to bring clothes, toiletries and some things I can't live without, like my espresso maker. The real challenge is to try to anticipate what I will need for a three month span...that is a long time and a lot of potential weather changes. In terms of my studio I plan to take essentially everything except my wheel, my kiln and the building! I figure my poor little truck can hold about 1000 lbs worth of materials...I have 500 lbs of clay and plaster alone and (anticipate needing to order more)...everything else will be molds, tools, clothes, my bike, etc.

So this week (and really for the good part of the summer so far) I have been making molds. As I mentioned in my first blog the project will be broken up into 4 seasons, each season comprised of a different set of forms. Winter will be masses of snowball like shapes some of which have a texture and some will be smooth (although they will all have an uneven snowball like surface...not perfectly spherical). The snowballs are forms that I have made myself from beginning to end. Spring will be masses of birds, the birds come from commercially produced molds, so all I had to do was buy them and I will "pour" the clay into the molds to make multiples. Fall will be made up of twigs, here I have taken twigs chosen from when we cut back our corkscrew willow tree. It ended up being the perfect tree because it has a relatively smooth bark with just enough texture to look branch like but not so much that there would be challenges with undercuts when making the plaster mold (I will describe an undercut when I get to the images). In the case of the twigs I have taken an existing object and made a mold of it in order to get a ceramic replica of the object. Finally, summer will be made up of grasshoppers, here in Arkansas when things get really hot (right now if is 99 degrees F. and it is only June) we get a ton of grasshoppers and they eat all of my plants right down to the stems. I associate them with the sweltering, withering heat of the summer and the death of my garden not only because they aid in its demise but also because they are really bad in late July and August when if they haven't killed the plants the heat almost surely has. This is a time when going outside feels like the sun and heat are searing your skin and the leaves and grass smell as though they could combust into flames at any moment. For summer the grasshoppers will be my forms...this will be my greatest challenge as I have to make the molds for the grasshoppers by hand (using plasticene, a non drying oil based sculpting material) in a way that will both look like a grasshopper and not have any undercuts which would make removing them from the mold impossible. I will also need to make seperate molds for the grasshoppers legs and to make a few grasshoppers so I have multiple sizes...so keep your fingers crossed for me.

Here is a brief-ish photographic overview of the mold making process:

This is a clay ball that has been covered in plasticene and then pressed with a hand carved clay stamp to make texture. The clay ball is used as a form because making it of solid plasticene (especially as I have made about 15 -20 in varying sizes) would be expensive. I will make the grasshoppers in the same way, plasticene over another form probably also made of clay. The plasticene allows for a crisper texture and since it never dries is re-usable. Once this is made (called a positive), I will build up a clay bed approx. 1-2 inches beyond the sides of the ball and to the exact middle of the height of the ball. This is where it seems easy but is actually kind of tricky. Just keep in your mind that it has to be to the exact middle and I will explain later.

Once the clay bed is made it is closed in by cottle boards. The boards are clamped tightly together to form walls around the form which allows plaster to be poured in. What you are actually seeing below is the first plaster side already poured (the white stuff surrounding the ball is plaster). Note the clay that runs up the corners of the cottle boards, this keeps the liquid plaster from oozing (sometimes pouring) out the sides...also known as a plaster disaster because once the dam breaks it is hard to keep the plaster in. Once the cottle boards are set in place you can pour your plaster (which is mixed up in a specific ratio of water to plaster that allows for maximum durability and water absorption). You pour the plaster into the mold until it is approx 1-2 inches above your positive. Again because you want even water absorption the walls need to be the same thickness all around the mold if possible. After the plaster has set up, which takes about 30 mintues you unlock your cottle boards, flip your mold, remove the clay bed and then lock it up in the cottle boards again. As I mentioned above what you see here is the mold after the first plaster has been poured, it is back in its cottle boards, all the seams are sealed up and I have made my plaster keys (the depressions in the plaster that aids in lining up the mold parts when completed).

Here I have made a dam half way through the half sphere. A more talented and patient mold maker could make a ball mold in two parts but to be on the safe side and because my spheres are not perfectly round I have chosen to make them all in three parts which allows for some leaway in terms of undercuts, although it means I will have more seam lines to clean up on the caste spheres. You can see that I have poured the second of three parts, the wavy lighter grey line in the middle of the form is the clay dam that will be removed before I cast the third part.

Below you can see the mold two thirds complete and out of its cottle boards. Each time you pour a plaster part you need to coat the plaster mold in mold soap or mold release. This creates a film between the two plaster parts which would otherwise completely stick together rendering the molds useless.

I probably shouldn't show so much detail because I will hear from my professional mold making friends but as I tell my students it takes time and practice to get better. Here you can see the bubbles from the mold soap, which needs to be cleaned off before I pour the plaster or the bubbles will show up in the mold. You can see also how tight the seams against the form and between the mold parts is...this is because when the mold is complete liquid clay (slip) will be poured in and if the seams arent tight the slip will come right out of the open seam.

Below you can see two three part ball molds. Jeannie and Derek don't laugh...I will clean them up so they look better and in some cases are lighter to lift. I have chosen to make all of the ball molds as seperate three part molds instead of including multiple balls in a single mold which would allow me to make two to three balls in a single pour. I am doing this to keep the weight of the molds down, since they get heavy when filled with slip and they have to be lifted and turned over to drain the slip back out.

In this shot I have poured the liquid slip into the pour gate, I have simply drilled a hole that is the same size as the funnel I am using to create the pour gate. The molds are held together by the rubber bands you see around them, this is adequate for the smaller molds but the larger ones will requires tie down straps (like what you use to hold stuff down in your truck). If the plaster molds are completely dry it takes about 10 minutes for the slip to be ready to drain back out. The way it works is briefly as follows... The dry clay is mixed with a combination of water and sodium silicate, the sodium silicate allows the slip to flow without the addition of too much water, the alkalinity of the clay is such that when sodium silicate or another deflocculant is added the clay particles become ionized,the electrical charge produced causes the clay particles to repel each other and therefore flow with less water (the clay particles don't settle in the bottom of the bucket but rather stay in suspension in the water). This also allows you to pour multiple castes in one mold becasue there is less water to be absorbed. SO...once you pour the slip in and some time elapses the water is drawn out of the clay and into the plaster mold, this results in a drier thin skin of clay which coats the interior of the mold, the longer you wait the thicker the skin gets. Once the skin is the thickness you desire you pour the remaining slip out of the mold again through the pour gate. Then you wait longer 30-60 minutes or more depending on how damp your mold is, and finally you pop your clay piece out of the mold by pulling all of the mold parts away and you have an exact (hopefully) hollow replica of your original positive! Because the slip is liquid and the mold parts have to be pulled away undercuts which I mentioned above are a challenge. Take a simple sphere for example, if I had made a two part mold and the first or half had not been perfectly centered to middle of the height of the ball the plaster mold would have come up far enough to cover the ball as it curves to its widest point and then past that it begins to curve to its smallest again at the top. Imagine having done that in a two part mold...as you pull the two parts away from the ball it would rip it in half on the side where you went past the widest centerpoint...get it? ...Maybe?

Voila! multiple clay spheres ready to be cleaned up and made into a sculpture...I will patch the hole which is a result of the pour gate and when necessary clean up seam lines. The forms will then be massed together like you saw in my maquette images on my first blog and fired, glazed, decaled and generally made more beautiful...
These are a little more interesting...I think...two twigs on the outside with their ceramic twins on the inside, note there is some shrinkage and will be even more post firing due to water leaving the clay etc.
Closer shots of two twigs and a ball

Can you see some of the nice detail...the bumpy texture of the bark and a few places where new leaf brachnces were starting to grow!

So there you have it...a pretty detailed version of my mold making...It takes a long time to make the molds but once they are done you can make the clay casts pretty quickly, you can pour all of the molds at once and in an hour have 10-20 pieces made and then do it all over again.

It looks like I am going to have to spend some time when I first arrive in Minneapolis making more molds which is what I wanted to have done by this time but it didn't happen (I'd like to think partially because it took about three weeks to get plaster as the only distributor in Arkansas which is right by my house in Little Rock had it back ordered.

Well it is late but I wanted to get this complete since I am hoping to write each Sunday (I know it isn't Sunday but we were in Washington D.C. this weekend so writing this blog was out of my reach). I'll try to write again this Sunday...the night before we leave for Minnesota!

McKnight Residency Journal

2009-06-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

I am going to try to use this blog to let friends, family and any of my interested students keep track of my McKnight Residency progress. I proposed a rather large sculptural project for the application and learned that I received the award last year, a good sized monetary award and use of a private studio at the Northern Clay Center. I will be leaving for Minneapolis, where the Northern Clay Center is located, in 2 1/2 weeks and will stay there for 3 months in order to complete the project!

I have been seriously thinking about and working (as time allowed during the spring semester) on the project since around the end of January (while trying to get some pots made at the same time). What I have right now for the most part is a vision of the end project in my mind, some pretty general sketches, a lot of notes, a lot of glaze tests, maquettes, and some technical accomplishements (in other words nothing much worth seeing yet) but I will include images of the process as well as the (hopefully more beautiful) end product.

As a very brief overview of the project my goals were the following....

1. To do a lot of experimentation with decorative surfaces and to break my decorative choices up into sub groupings that would determine imagery, color, aesthetic etc. I chose the sub groups based on my visceral response to the seasons where I live now (oppressively hot summers but beautiful, lush and wet springs ...Arkansas) and where I grew up (freezing cold, quiet winters and outrageously colorful and crisp falls...Connecticut).

2..To see if I can achieve a visceral response (how those season feel) from the viewer through visual imagery alone.

3. To do a lot of technical experimentation applying decorative surfaces (drawn, decaled, carved etc.) on a 3-D and textured form...work that could also be applied to my pots when I return.

4. To make a large piece that would take up the equivilent of 3 months or more working time as this is an opportunity I may not have again for awhile

5. An added component since I started working...learning how to make molds for slip casting.

In the end I envision 4 large patterened wall panels (4 seasons) with multiple sculptural objects all of which will be highly decorative. Below you can check out examples of some of the first bits of progress in the process. Please keep in mind these are process images for my own records so they are not meant to be viewed as professional quality images!

The roughest of ideas and notes in my sketchbook, ideas for the winter panel.
color choices, form texture and surface ideas
Background for the Winter panel
maquette (model) cut to scale for the background panel on masonite board
Close up of a maquette for the winter panel. I may use Kera Flex porcelain sheets for the "snowflakes" but they are quite expensive and may not come in sheets large enough for my needs.
Background for the Spring panel
same cut to scale
A maquette of what the sculptural objects may look like on the panel (those are mini slip cast birds from commercially made molds)

These are the full scale birds from commercially made molds in a very quickly thrown together maquette. (obviously the proportion to the background is way off)

As I mentioned in #4 I intend to make all of the forms from molds using a process known as slip casting. This is a new process for me so there has been a learning curve but I am getting the hang of it. My molds aren't beautiful but they will get the job done. I will use some commercially produced molds but 90% will be molds that I have made myself. at the moment I have made about 10 successful, mostly small molds and probably 5 unsuccessful ones...I have 400 lbs of #1 Pottery Plaster though so that should be plenty for all of my molds plus a few mistakes. I will post my molds making progress in a few days. Hopefully I will get faster at creating these posts!Now off to work, I have many more molds to make!