Baby steps back to blogging.

I’m participating in the ARTitudes 2009 Holiday Show and Sale at the old Tool House (8th & Q) in the Haymarket in Lincoln, Nebraska.  30+ crafters, artists, and makers are particpating from the area and suprisingly enough this is my first holiday show or sale.  So… if you’re local come visit!

The show dates and hours are:

Friday December 4th - First Friday Opening from 4:00pm - 9:00pm
Saturday December 5th - 10:00am till 5:00pm
Sunday December 6th - 11:00am till 4:00pm

I have had a few ideas/complainarants perculating in my head earlier this week but at this point they have lost all of the steam.  Perhaps after the holidays, once (potential?) business slows down.

(outside hallway)

(inside, during daylight hours)

Well, the issues with this imprompteau exhibition are glaring.  The display wall was visually too busy for anything other than large rectangular works.  My wall sculptures just dissappear and meld with the background.  I really need a plain white wall, such as….

or:

or:

Better.  Though considering the thrown-together nature of the show I don’t have a whole lot to complain about. (Yes, I could complain about not selling any of these, but at this point I’m so far past it that there is really no reason.)

Next up: The Artitudes Holiday Show and Sale: December 4-6 at the old Tool House at 8th and Q.  It’s a nice big, open space so I think I’ll have some fun setting up a display.

and these:

At least that’s what I was creating through August or so.  I switched from red earthenware to some white that I have  had laying around for a while.  I was still working with the same angular forms with a drippy, crackle glaze but this time in a lighter palate.

I have been undergoing this transition from functional pottery to sculptural objects for a while and I felt like the next logical step would be to make some gallery-appropriate pieces that could hang on a wall.  My other production-limiting factors still had to be dealt with, namely my teeny tiny kiln.  I had been creating squiggly line pendants for a while and found that making and glazing many smaller pieces separately allowed for a versatility and flexibility that I couldn’t achieve with forming larger pieces and glaze firing them all as one.  Thematically I had been reducing my work to basic, bold shapes (lines, circles, polygons) and these factors resulted in the following:

These pendants are assembled from what are essentially beads with only one hole. I started firing hundreds and hundreds of spheres in a variety of colors and then epoxied them together into larger pieces.  Some of the bigger beads (or balls) are thrown on the wheel and thus hollow, allowing for them to be hung on the wall easily:

I should mention that content-wise I had been pondering the connotations that lot of my glazes had - the black crackle glaze over green looked like dragon skin or the turquoise green resembled the Caribbean Sea.  This evolved into the molecule-like forms you see here - they are building blocks of a concept, in a way.  However the two pieces above are more studies in color than anything else.

As this work evolves I’ll write a bit more on where I think it’s going.  I have intentions of ceramic work that goes beyond formal aspects.

This blog post was a painfully difficult exercise in pounding out sentances.  I haven’t done this in a while.

What do they look like? Like abstract color swatches in the form of molecular models. Perhaps photos would help. My Wordpress dashboard is still all sorts of screwed up so I’m not quite sure how I can/will post photos or links or anything besides text. They will appear somewhere.

Oh and it’s Obama’s birthday, so happy birthday to the commander-in-chief. And myself.

We’d hang out on my patio, watching the birds, talking about our plans for the night and otherwise just chill. It would be a good life.