I’ve been working away in my freezing cold studio building large scale Umbel pieces that are bases on fennel flower structures and I’ve started to make some progress. These pieces will be exhibiting at the Harris Center for the Arts Gallery during the NCECA (National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts) conference early next year. My plan is to have three of these in varying sizes installed and I’m about halfway through the second one. If you came by the studio during Open Studios this year, you saw the first finished piece (pictured below).
The second one is larger, five feet across and I’ve been playing with modifying the glazes on this one too. So my days are filled with cutting hundreds of feet of kanthal wire into bits and making -literally- a thousand tiny flower heads that will be placed into each of the larger flowerhead forms. I’m also testing glazes and building the flower body forms which are thrown on the wheel and then trimmed to create a rounded top to the form. In addition, my husband has been welding up the steel structure that all of these parts will get attached to. His math skills have been put to the test getting all the curves and spacing balanced but I think he’s doing an amazing job!
