I'd Follow the Black Rabbit

In July I attended a workshop at Baltimore Clayworks called Into the Wilderness with Beth Cavener Stichter. This was probably the best thing I did all summer. It's not often I blog about things other than my own art, so heads up, she's good.

This three day workshop included a demonstration of Beth's building process, which she has spent a great deal of time developing and is very specific to her style and materials.

The first day was spent entirely on maquettes and armatures. I always knew sketching and maquettes are important to the artistic process and the development of ideas, but I never spent much time with anyone working on these things. Beth builds multiple maquettes with an oil based clay and bamboo skewer armatures. This gives her the ability to move the armatures many times, leave them out for observation without worrying about drying, and the skewers act like a skeleton maintaining realistic looking joints. The maquette is all about the gesture and roughing out the form.

This is an improvement for me, as I hadn't imagined oil based clay, and my maquettes are often little gestures that always are broken somehow just a few weeks into building. The skewer skeleton is genius.

Her armatures are a work of engineering genius. I've attempted to use piping for armatures before, but it wasn't appropriate for the way I build. Beth builds solid, packing clay around the pipes and using a 2x4 for shaping. People have suggested building solid to me before, but it never made sense. Building solid figures creates a much more realistic muscular structure that I couldn't get to translate in coil building. I guess I just needed some one to show me how to do it because I couldn't visualize how building solid then hollowing and compressing would work in my head.

The next day Beth continued her building demonstration and gave an in depth lecture with a power point that illustrated her entire process complete through firing (which is something we couldn't do in a 3 day workshop). I've already adopted some of her firing tips for my own work. I had to take off the legs of one of my pieces to make it fit in the kiln, and I used her techniques for including registers on the pieces and supporting the reconnection points to prevent warping during firing.

The last day was essentially a big q&a session with Beth. We talked about everything form the concepts behind her work to the many epoxies she uses (and why). We also covered her surface techniques. Beth often paints her sculptures, which if you've been following my posts, is something I'm experimenting with. Her painting process was so much more involved than mine, but I learned I should probably use a primer and should probably try thinning the paint and using some smaller brushes.

I wish I could write down everything I learned, but my time and attention span are waning. Big lessons I learned from Beth: she doesn't sculpt anything or put anything that's not necessary, she works a lot like I do for a conceptual standpoint, maquettes maquette maquettes, support support support, and sculpt with shadow. I also need to practice my mark making. Beth's gestural mark making is one of the most seductive thing about her pieces.

She also has me thinking a lot about my use of the figure. There are certain things a figure can and cannot do. There will always be a certain psychological alienation of the viewer from my figures because when do we ever see a naked person in the middle of a room. She uses animals because they are familiar and can be anthropomorphized, but different enough that the viewer can identify psychologically without being entirely vulnerable.

I'm still working out a lot of the information I got from the workshop, and I'm completely frustrated that grad school has started thus limiting my time to have my hands in clay. But mostly I'm excited to give some of Beth's techniques a try and get really big with my my lady figures.

For those of you choosing not to go to Beth's website (although you really should) here is a taste of some of her work:

Rebel Forces

Here's an update on the last piece finished for my senior exhibition. She's called "It's not sexist, it just looks better."

What inspired this piece was a comment my old figure sculpture professor made. He was explaining to us that when sculpting the female figure, we should make the head smaller than is proportional. As part of his explanation I directly remember him saying, "It's not sexist, it just looks better."

Let that one sink in for a moment.

I decided with this piece to leap from the half life-size scale I had been working with into a life-size scale. This was also my first attempt with painting my figures instead of glazing. I see technical flaws galore, but for a first attempt, I'm happy with how she came out. I'm really exciting about the paint, because it allows my mark making to come through in a way glaze and terra-sigillatta don't.
With this piece I also decided to play with proportions. I am fascinated with how manipulating or mutating the body affects the viewer. For me it often creates an unsettling, visceral response I can feel in my body. So I exaggerated the head, hips, and spine. Her position is slightly defensive, but her gaze is aggressive. The hand on the chin is a nod to Rodin; if I'm screwing with male sculptor's perceptions of female sculptures, I almost have to acknowledge Rodin and his posse.

From here on out my sculptures are just going to get bigger.

Senior Exhibition

Oh this post is embarrassingly overdue. But in my defense, life has been nonstop since graduation (I had this silly delusion that it would slow down at least for a moment). A lot of great things have happened: first sale of a figure, first gallery show at the Meltem Birey Gallery in Philly...first day of grad school today! Yes, I'm working on my Masters of Art in Teaching at MICA now. In the next month or so I will have images of new work to post from my MAT thesis "Before, Behind, Between, Above, Below"

My senior exhibition was titled "What is Woman?" located in MICA's Decker Gallery consisted of four figures dealing with various aspects of gender construction. It seemed like a tremendous success to me, and I got some great feedback.

This is the artist statement I had posted at the show:

The figure is a natural form of expression for my thoughts. Ideas manifest themselves as bodily gestures. The female nude is a deeply rooted representation in the history of art, which establishes a cultural context within which I must work, while providing a springboard from which I can develop the concepts of my art. When creating my work I also consider that human experience begins in the consciousness of the self and body in relation to objects and space. The gesture of the figures is an element the audience can feel, relate to, and ponder.

My work is concerned with issues of feminism in Western society, particularly sexual power structures and gender binaries. Gender is a misconceived notion by society at large. What is Woman? Through whose eyes are we seeing our gender, our world, and ourselves? How should we define gender? My figures aren’t answers to any questions, but they are the results of examining how we interact with, respond to, and act within those socially erected structures.

Education is power, so I read everything from Simone de Beauvior to daily blogs to learn about feminist issues. I also spend time observing and gathering information about gender and sexuality from contemporary culture, including movies, music, the media, and politics, as well as the people in my daily life; peers, teachers, students, and my family. Drawing heavily from this research and autobiographical experiences, my work is often critical, sometimes humorous, but most importantly empowering.

Expectations, 2009

Hey Baby, 2009-2010

Pistil and Stamen, 2009-2010

It's not sexist, it just looks better, 2010

Here's a look at my beautifully designed showcards and business cards courtesy of my great friend and brilliant designer Andy Mangold

It's a Woman!

We're so thrilled! (can't you tell?)

We're in the final weeks of my undergraduate career. I can smell that diploma. I may be looking a little batty (I blame it on sleep deprivation), but it's actually been quite the thrilling ride in these last couple weeks, including the sale of one of my figures! It's like I can actually be this artist thing.

I know there's been a dearth of posts this semester, but don't stray too far. Shortly, I will have slides of my final body of work and all my professional development stuff.

Shape Shifters

Another part of my previously mentioned Cut and Paste studio was rethinking found ceramics.

It was a good exercise in creative thinking, but I can't say it is really inspiring me to run in new directions with it. As an object maker and object lover though, I do appreciate these little things for taking up space in intriguing ways.

This funny composition below is the result of a class kiln forming experiment, which involved a lot of kaolin, kiln wash, and glaze.

Lacing Up

My final for my Cut and Paste ceramics studio with David East came from an impulse to understand spiritual places like the Standing Stones of Machrie Moor in Scotland or the Plain of Jars in Laos. What makes a place spiritual?

I ended up concluding it is a combination of history, mystery, as well as the designation of whomever happens to be in the space. In the two mentioned places, there is also the recurrence of circles, which have an undeniable spiritual importance to people.

My impulse then led me to the idea of sanctuary and how we create places and barriers that provide the goals of sanctuary (often peace, rest, and isolation) for us. I've been experiencing a particularly difficult time this year, which has included having my places of peace invaded, making a safe sanctuary an idea of particular concern. Places are what we make them, and our ideas about them are applied.

The idea of sanctuary includes putting up certain barriers. That isolation can be good and bad, depending on the situation. This idea lends itself quite well to some of my infant explorations of self-mutilation or self-inflicted injury, as well as the figure and architecture/space. So here we have a figure, sewing herself into a tent of lace.

I got a well-deserved tough critique on this one. However, I'm definitely intrigued by the ideas within this peace, and I am teasing some of them out as potential bases for my thesis work this upcoming semester or even for my graduate thesis, which is looming in the near future.

omg SEX!

omg SEX! It's a dirty word, and that's part of the problem; silly taboos on widespread experiences.

These two figures are the most recent productions for my thesis. Here I am attempting to tackle the role of sexuality in gender construction. It has turned into a challenge to define sexuality and understand how it is constructed. Basically so far I've decided, sexuality is a created response to an object of attraction. Nature chooses the object of attraction; society teaches us our response. That response is an enormous part of how we navigate gender. It would make sense then that gender as we currently define it, being either a man or woman, is too narrow.

For me, sexuality is a very calculated projection, with both passive and aggressive qualities. Basically, sexuality is very much about power; who has power, who wants power what gives power, and how that power is acted out. Now it is also about concepts of desire, but if everyone wants to be desired, then there is power in who decides what(or who) is desirable.

These figures are particular demonstrations about my experience with sexuality and about women's sexuality in Western society. They also bring up issues about children's sexuality and how we educate them, which is another beast I have not yet begun to tackle.

These ideas are much more complicated than that, I know, and really I could go on about them for a while. However, I'm very clearly still working through them, so I won't. Dialogue is absolutely appreciated though.

Just a note- the female figure is half life-sized. The child is the same size, but of course that means a different scale.

I received a thought provoking critique from my thesis class, and I, of course, couldn't leave them alone afterwards, so each figure has been tweaked since the photos. I know most artists prefer critiques of finished work, but at this point in my career, green critiques seem much more helpful because I can change things or work out problems without having to rebuild the figure entirely. Now these ladies are tented for the winter break, ready to be fired upon our return for the spring semester.

On the technical side, I've had some problems with slumping, and I've decided I'm not entirely satisfied with the glaze I've been using. I'm going to be experimenting with bisquing high, glazing low, and some new glaze recipes with these figures.

New year, new adventures, hopefully better results and better luck.