Tag: Art

Yesterday, all of the art was pulled from the shelves and given a bath to get the dust and spider webs off of them. All the shelves were wiped down and everything was put back again in a new eye pleasing arrangement. Why go through all this work when the art is not up for an exhibition? Because I’m hoping that you’ll stop by the studio for a visit and I want everything to look good when you come by! Artists spend a lot of time alone in their studios working away and most will welcome a studio visit and a chance to talk about what they are doing one-on-one with you. There’s no reason to wait for an art show to contact an artist about their work. So, feel free to drop me an email and arrange a time to come by… looking forward to seeing you at the studio!

I started the Nest Series around 2010 and only recently stopped making pieces from this series. They began as a technical challenge to cleanly trap one form inside of another and also to pay attention to the inside of the vessel. Traditionally the inside of clay forms are hidden from sight, in these pieces I love being able to see through the work, it creates a visual lightness in a medium that is physically heavy. In the course of making this series, I experimented with every type of hole, shape and possibility I could think of to find what was the most successful way of conceptually expressing the balance between protecting and trapping. Each nest has an item that is exposed to the viewer through its outer shell but also shielded by its webbing. In some, the inner items are attempting to escape but are then left vulnerable to the elements, I think that this is a human condition we all feel at one point or another. If you’d like even more info about this series, you can watch a video where I talk about the process of building and the conceptual aspects of trapping forms.

These pieces are hand-built, hand-carved and created with a process that fuses the inner pieces to the outer. They are made from high fired stoneware and each piece is original and unique. You can purchase pieces from the nest series in the SHOP while they last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the spirit of revisiting older but still very relevant work, I’d like to take the time to showcase some of my series, this time the lichen series. Sometimes work comes and goes in the studio so quickly you don’t have much time to live with it, but these pieces have graced the shelves of the studio for a while and I’ve gotten to spend time thinking about them and why I’ve made them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Secretly, I’m kind of happy that this piece hasn’t sold yet, I really love this guy and hope it goes to a good home someday! Its up on my studio wall, so I get to check it out all day while I’m working.  It was kind of a spontaneous build, so the longer I live with it, the more I get to think about why I made it.

While I was working on it all of the parts were laying flat on the table and they had the appearance of slick whale bodies with crustaceans growing on their skin- it seemed very of the sea. But as soon as the pieces went on the wall the feel about them changed to growing plants or a forest of burnt trees that had died and new growth was taking over and hence how the lichen series was named. I also really love how activated all the spaces in-between each piece is. This series is a study in the balance of duality, the pieces play with ideas of death and regrowth, the power of negative space and the contrast of black and white. Each lichen growth is fused in place by the glazing process in the kiln. These pieces are hand-built from high fired stoneware and each piece is original and unique.

If you’d like to add pieces from lichen series to your collection, click for more information.