New work coming out of the kiln

I’m finally getting some of the work I started last year finished. There’s still a 3-4 more I need to finish, but I am encouraged and feeling energized by the results so far.

Pilgrim Construction with Zepplin

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good:  Ship of Fools (I’d Like to Know Where You Got the Notion), was accepted into the Clay West International Ceramics Competition at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, at Utah State University, going on now through Feb 6th.

The Bad: The piece arrived shattered into many, many pieces.

The Ugly: So… the piece is dead, I have nothing in the show, and I’m still waiting to see if UPS is going to pay the insurance for the work….sigh…

WC Open Studios This Weekend

The Art Department Faculty at Wheaton College is holding an Open Studios event this Friday from 3-5pm and Saturday from 10am-2pm at the Old Scripture Press building. If interested, you can download the brochure here.

Some new work: Fall 09

My sculptural work has been heading in a new direction recently. I think living in Chicago and being surrounded by all that steel construction is finally starting to seep into my thinking. I’m not exactly sure what is happening with this new work, but I think it has something to do with structure, construction, webs, entrapment, diagrams, associations…and probably some other things. None of the pieces pictured here are completed (I’m still working on the surfaces, none of these are glazed, and one I am still constructing). Some are already titled. Let me know if you have suggestions…

Still Life with Human Chromosomes

Venus Construction?

a work in progress

Pilgrim construction

Speech

 

Some new pots- The Good, and the Needs Work

This summer I spent some time experimenting with some low fire pots and glazes. After some quality time in the glaze room (and the test kiln), I came up with a cone 01 look that I thought looked nice, both in clay color and glaze/ underglaze quality. I made some cups with some little drawings on them for the “first run.” Some of these cups are now available at my new etsy store.

Wasp head man cup

Reindeer Cup

three cups

I have to admit I left these sitting around a long time after the bisque run because I wasn’t that excited about them. When I finally started glazing them last week I was a little more interested. And I was really happy with them when they came out of the kiln. Look for some to be offered at my new Etsy store soon.

The pieces I was REALLY excited about have stencils and masked lines on them. They relate to my current sculptural work, which is exploring a kind of structure/web/diagram-like imagery. Unfortunately, the white slip I used burned out more than I expected, and I had some cracking/ pitting on the surface (due to an unwise mixture of slip/ terra sig that I made). You can see it on these cups…

A little opax in the next batch should solve this problem. I’ll be trying it out soon.

More pictures on the recent work page…

Sneak Peak: New pots

A few large pots in progress. They are in the kiln now (finally!)