Tag: Life In The Studio

I almost thought that there wasn’t a reason to even write a blog post this week about what was happening in the studio because for me it’s like Groundhog Day in here. Making hundreds of parts is tedious and monotonous and that’s about all that I’ve been up to. But then I scrolled through my phone photos are realized that I do have a few things to share. So here ya go…

These are the latest batch of Medusas to make their way out of the kiln and I’m pretty happy with them. I love the variety of their wire tendrils and how they add movement to the pieces. Right now these are resting on a towel in the studio but eventually I’ll get them all hung up so that they appear to be drifting through the studio.

I’ve also been experimenting with embedding my porcelain planktons into ice. The trick is making clear ice so that you can see the pieces, which I’m kind of getting the hang of. This is a small block, but I’m hoping to work towards getting a big ol iceberg going. If anyone has any tips or ice related info to share, I’m all ears… who knew freezing ice could be so tricky!?!

And yeah, remember all those parts, still working on that. The piles are getting bigger though!

It can be embarrassing to look back at work you’ve made in the past, like really embarrassing sometimes…but it’s also a sign that your work has grown and evolved. These images are from my first solo exhibit in 2006 at a gallery that doesn’t even exist anymore, it was a space that had a lot of challenges – mainly ‘how do I put sculptures on a wall?’ since that was the only space available to place work in and I was building very three dimensionally at that time.

But, that challenge led me to designing floating pedestals that my husband made and I still use to this day. It also led me to working with high temperature wire not only as a design element but also as a structural element to attach the pieces to the wall, allowing me to go big (and secure) on the wall. Lots of things were learned in the process of putting this show together.

I still have a few of the vines in my studio and get to visit a number of the other pieces at friends and families homes, I still think about what I could do better or different with all of these works, but overall I’m still pretty pleased with these pieces and really not too embarrassed.

The studio has been taken over with the process of prepping three 26″x72″ panels for the public art piece that will be placed in a new health care building here in Santa Cruz. I have literally been watching paint dry for days on end, building up the layers to get a beautiful blue surface to place my porcelain pieces on. I’ve finally been able to start on the layout of the pieces and get a nice flow between all the panels that mimics the Santa Cruz County coastline.

Once I’m happy with the layout, every piece will get adhered to the panels. Some of pieces lay flat but some have rods attached to the backs so they will be drilled into the panel and float off the surface creating areas of depth in the piece. Excited to see these finished and send them off to the framers for protective plexi boxes and their mounting hardware.

My days in the studio right now have been bouncing between a few upcoming projects but the piece that is occupying most of the space is a wall mounted work for a new health care building in Santa Cruz. I’ve been making all the ceramic parts and playing with size, layout designs and balancing all of that with the clients needs. It’s a really fun puzzle to work on and it’s starting to come together. It’s also amazing just how much work goes into placing artwork into a public space, like, a gazillion emails, testing, testing and then testing materials some more, plus all the design changes, to make it all just right. In the end, it will be so worth it to see the work shine in it’s space.

Below is the photoshopped version of what is to come, there will be hundreds of porcelain pieces placed on three separate panels mounted above this workstation that spans approximately 20 feet across. The final piece will get encased in a plexiglass frame to protect the pieces. The curve of the line is based on the shape of the Santa Cruz County coastline while the pieces are based on the skeletal forms of a variety planktons that live in all oceans. I’m pretty excited to start in on this endeavor, entitled ‘Marine Drifters’, and I hope that it makes for an enjoyable place who will work here and see the artwork on a daily basis.

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!