We are very excited to announce the latest studio addition, the tiniest gallery in Baja…
Galerita Rincón : a small space for big art
Newly installed just outside the Earth Art Studio gate, this micro-gallery will showcase mini-exhibitions each spotlighting a single artists work that rewards a closer look. It’s just one more reason to visit us!
We’ve been quietly working on this project all summer and are so excited to finally have it installed. And it lights up at night! Gah- it’s so cute!
Getting to Earth Art Studio takes some doing, you won’t just stumble upon us, but we think that the journey is just as much fun as the destination. You may not have dirt roads and cows on your daily commute but this is just a day in the life here in Las Playitas. Here’s a little reel I made for instagram, thought I’d share here too, enjoy meeting our local herd and discovering what a Baja traffic jam is.
This summer the desert plants on our property have been growing like crazy – I swear that you could watch them grow if you just sat down for long enough. The desert is opportunistic in that way, when there is water, the switch is turned on and everything goes for it. When there isn’t water, the switch is off and everything goes dormant and is questionably dead looking.
I have always made wiggly spiral forms in my work from the very beginning, so sometimes it feels so comfortable to go back to these shapes. These shapes are everywhere in nature from seashells to water flow to wood grain. Here I’m seeing the tendrils of vines creeping across the desert, the aloe leaves growing and lizard tails whipping. It’s so fun to take these newer inspirations and create older familiar forms in a new way and new combination. I’m not sure if I’ll make more of these or if they will evolve into something else, but I’m enjoying having them in the studio and watching them talk to each other.
A holdfast in biology is a root like structure that anchors an aquatic organism, like seaweed or kelp to a substrate, usually a rock or boulder, creating a literal anchor to keep the plant from being swept away in the currents.
Plankton in biology are defined as marine drifters. So anything that isn’t able to actively propel itself in a direction is considered a plankton, sometimes that might be at one stage of an organisms life, like a larval state.
In these new works, I love conceptually contrasting these ideas with my porcelain plankton inspired pieces delicately attached to a stoneware based keeping them securely anchored down. These pieces can be displayed on a flat surface or attached to to a wall. Come visit the studio to see them in person and pick one (or more!) out for your home.
After a summer hiatus from creating blog posts for the dirt, we’re back! While we are still experiencing a steamy, hot summer that just won’t quit here in southern Baja, we are ready to get back to business! We are loving what all the rain did to our desert, transforming it from bare branches into a verdant, lush jungle – plan a visit while it lasts!
Here’s some quick announcements about what’s been going on here if you missed them in your monthly emails:
I’ve been experimenting with the process of cyanotype combined with my porcelain plankton shaped pieces. The silhouette of the porcelain pieces creates an ethereal water-like quality and with the variations of exposure time and base material, there are a lot of variations to play with. It’s also got a ton of potential for large scale installation applications.
But, I’ve started off simple creating circular designs on tote bags – I’ve only made a few so far but I already love them! I’m debating between adding in an Earth Art Studio logo to the design and/or creating ceramic tags to hang off the straps, let me know if you have an opinion on this! Once I dial it in, I’m hoping to have these up for sale in the online shop soon and also available at the studio. Here’s a few pics of the first batch in progress.
It hasn’t rained in almost a year, and it would appear that most of the plants in the desert are dead. When you look out the studio windows, you see the desert in all shades of brown with leafless gnarled, tangled sticks, sparse and bare except for the green of the cardón cactus. But, what has amazed me about this landscape is that if you look closer, you will see signs of life everywhere. There may not be enough energy in a plant to put out leaves and photosynthesize but it might throw out some flowers for the pollinators. Sometimes the flowers are very short lived, wilting in the summer heat but they are there and getting their seeds ready for when the rains do come.
Last week we were overrun by ants that were carrying all their eggs to higher ground, trying to nest in our kitchen and furniture. They weren’t looking for the crumbs on the counter or the drip down the side of the honey jar, they somehow knew that it is the season of the rains and they needed to find a better spot to hide out their next generation. Life in the desert is a lesson in patience and opportunity, you see it in the birds, plants and mammals and I find it fascinating to watch.
Just this morning we got a light sprinkling of the first rain of the season – it was hardly enough to even be called rain, but in the desert every drop counts. As the season progresses, the storms off the ocean will inevitability come closer to land and the afternoon thunderstorms in the mountains will spill out to our area. We will be inundated with water, and for a time it will feel like way too much water. But it only lasts for a small period of time and the desert will soak up enough to last through the whole next year. Stay tuned as we watch the desert come alive again and turn from brown to vibrant green, until then, we wait for the rain.
Have you visited the online shop lately?
We have wearables, stickers, books and more available! We will be adding more products in soon for local pick up in Todos Santos but if you’re from out of the area, there are downloadable books and classes too!
You can also donate to our sculpture garden to help us keep it growing and share our space with educational groups!
It took me about four years of trial and a lot of errors to figure out how to make these porcelain urchin and medusa pieces consistently successful. Now, a small simple urchin form takes me about an hour to make and I have a pretty high confidence that it will make it through the kiln firing process. Although, larger and more complex forms can take much longer to create. Here’s a little time-lapse video of the process…