Time is flying!

I am already on my third week being out of school and working on this project!  Yikes, days are going by so fast!

A super brief overview of the project is this.  I am working with a great community group in Gould Arkansas, called the GCAC.  During phase one, I met with the group to ask if they would be interested in working with me on this project.

 We talked about what it was like living in a food desert, where the closest grocery store is over ten miles away and there is really no public transportation.  They shared their stories and concerns with me and then agreed to work as collaborators on the project.  I went down to Gould again with a student, Hunter Oden, and we gave disposable cameras to all of the GCAC members.  Hunter and I took photos that day too when we went on a tour of the community with the mayor and another GCAC community member (Rosie).  We gave the rest of the group about two weeks to take photos.  On our third return we picked up the cameras and brought them back to get the images developed. Hunter and I filtered through the hundreds of images taken by GCAC and us to pick out the ones that most fit the goals of the project, then began putting the images into photoshop and working them into decorative patterns that we could turn into decals and other images that we could use for silkscreen image.

During all of this I was also working on the first (failed... not awesome) prototype for the tableware.  Soon after all of that was completed I was too pregnant to continue so the project was put on hold. During the "holding" period I researched how I might make a thin solid cast tray and came upon the idea of using a concrete vibration table which the molds would sit on while they were being poured.  Slip is thixotropic which means that it stays liquid when agitated and "sets up" under static conditions.  In theory (keep your fingers crossed for me) I should be able to pour this very thin (1/4") undulating tray without "choking the mold" or in other words without the slip setting up in an area of the mold before the whole thing is filled therefore resulting in a partially cast tray.  A friend of mine asked me the other day why the clay tray won't crack in the mold over the curves as it shrinks in the mold while it is setting up...good question and I don't know?!?  I don't think it will because the curves of the tray are pretty shallow and domed...but it is always good to have another thing to fret over...keeps you on your toes!!!

So here we are.  I have had a number of contacts with people and organizations interested in helping with the fundraising component of the project which is really exciting.  It is also really overwhelming because I have to make the work first and it has to be good!  This is the first time the work I make is aligned with a commitment I have made with other people.  It feels like a lot of pressure but not (yet) in a bad way, although  do have nightly nightmares of all of the problems I might have and what I might do as a contingency plan!

So this week!  All of the material is here for the vibration table, which is what I will be using to create these solid cast trays, and now we (as in the royal we, because really our awesome technician Robby will be welding it for me) just need to put all of those parts together and we will have an industrial strength vibration table for a quarter of the cost. If it doesn't work for me at least the UCA art department will get an awesome vibration table so we can cast concrete!

In the meantime I am finishing up the positive for the tray, trying to get it as perfect as I can and trying to imagine all of the things that might go wrong (so I can fix it before it does).  I am purchasing the plaster tomorrow and so I hope I will get the mold made by the end of the week (we are going out of town for a few days) so that pushed my schedule a bit later into the week.

The NEW project - The Power of Ornament and the Politics of the Table

The project is not actually brand new.  I got a grant over two years ago and began to work on it...about a month later I found out I was pregnant with our second little munchkin! So I worked on phase one until I no longer could and then took a 14 month hiatus. Now that things on the home front have settled down a little bit I am off to the races again.  I completed and just received a second grant from my University Research Council  and am going to try to finish the making of this body of work in the next few months!

To save some typing I will cut and paste a brief abstract of the project from my proposal, try not to fall asleep!  Below that you will find a few images of my progress so far.

 Non-Technical summary

I am exploring the power of art to engage and inform community and to effect

change. I am creating a series of at least one hundred table settings that address the issue

of food deserts in a local Arkansas community through the use of form, imagery and

ornamentation. Food deserts are defined by the US Center for Disease Control as

”…areas characterized by poor access to healthy and affordable food…(which) may

contribute to social and spatial disparities in diet and diet-related health outcomes.” 1

Upon completion of the series I will use the settings as the centerpiece of a

community awareness and fundraising event highlighting food deserts in Arkansas. The

basic structure of event will be the advertising and selling of tickets which will cover the

cost of a meal and a table setting. There will be speakers presenting information about

food deserts and possible solutions applicable on a local and self-sustaining level. After

the meal the event participants will take home their table setting that will act as a visual

reminder of the problem of food deserts and food accessibility within the state and

hopefully keep the participant engaged in the issue.

All of the funds raised from the sale of the pieces will go towards finding a

solution to the food desert situation in Gould, AR, the community working in

collaboration with me on this project. I hesitate to state the exact use of the funds raised,

as I believe strongly that the community will best know how to spend the funds in order

to address the issue in their community. We also need to know how much money we

have to work with which is obviously tied to the success of the pieces and the event. Our

initial discussions have covered the possibility of using money raised to start a mobile

grocery store, a new development trending in the search to find sustainable and grassroots

solutions to the problem of food accessibility.

This URC grant will help support the completion of this proposed body of work

titled The Power of Ornament and the Politics of the Table. Primarily the grant will fund

the cost of printing custom designed decals which have been created from photographs

taken by Gould community members and will be used as a part of the ornamentation on

the table settings. The money will also be used to purchase of a small motor for a

vibration table that must be built and various other materials, listed in the budget section,

required to complete the project.

1 Julie Beaulac; Elizabeth Kristjansson, PhD; Steven Cummins, PhD,

“A Systematic Review of Food Deserts, 1966-2007” Preventing Chronic Disease: Public

Health Research, Practice and Policy, Volume 6: No. 3, July 2009,

http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2009/jul/08_0163.htm (accessed Feb. 21, 2012).

2

The image above is a prototype for the tableware.  I was trying to make it hollow cast but it failed miserably...and at about the same time it failed I had a baby!!!  So trying to figure out how to make this is task number one on my list of to do's to complete the project!  Below you can look at an example of a decal pattern made using images taken by the community members of Gould Arkansas and laid out in photoshop by a very talented young graphic designer Hunter Oden, now an alum of the UCA art department at the time of this project he was a student who worked with me to get this done.  Technology, especially Photoshop is my nemesis and it would have taken me far too many un-enjoyable hours to learn how to use it to create these decals.  Below that you can see an image, taken by Sam King a Gould community resident, that I will use for a silkscreen that will also be laid on the tableware.  And so there you have it my progress from the last grant.

So I am about to re-start this blog with a new project but since I never actually posted images of my final project installed back in 2010 at the Northern Clay Center titled "The Garden" I will do it here and now...three years later!   (If it is any consolation I did the installation while pregnant and now have one three year old and one 15 month old...they have been my most fantastic recent "projects" that I have been working on lately!

I should also let any students know who have looked over the earlier blog posts for this body of work...I used not a one of the pieces that you see in the posts of the work that I made at the Northern Clay Center in this final piece.  Every object you see in the final installation was made after my residency at home here in Arkansas.  I was on a steep learning curve in a short three month period (about equivalent to an academic semester)  in Minneapolis, teaching myself how to slip cast and trying to experiment with surfaces on forms that were complicated, so I took bits of what I learned from each of those pieces and re-made all of them so the final pieces were cohesive and as close to what I wanted as possible!

The panels are each about 10 feet high by 3 1/2 feet wide made entirely of glazed and slip cast objects.

This is a small detail of the surfaces applied to a few of the pieces.  The twigs had glaze, gold luster and one of a kind decals, the snow balls had glaze and slip trailing, the birds were straight glaze and the grasshoppers had glaze, underglaze pencil drawings and gold luster.

NOW...OFF TO THE NEXT BIG PROJECT!