New Directions

I've been embarrassingly absent from this blog for far too long. Now that my first year of teaching is winding down, I thought a post was long overdue. You know how they say your first year of teaching is insanely time consuming and difficult, so much so that the first two years are what weed out the faint of heart? Yea, that's true. Excuses aside, though, I have managed to make some work, which, along with my infinitely patient fiance, helped keep me sane. Much of the art making was sketchbooking and experimenting, which led to the start of a new and exciting direction in my work.

I started to play with fabric dipped in slip, and as I worked I found myself thinking a lot about the people who died. There were more deaths and struggles in my world this year than I think have ever happened to me, and it was apparently weighing on my mind when I didn't even realize it. Fabric has numerous associations- comfort, swaddling, concealing, shrouding, just to name a few. And porcelain, well I used that because it is precious, delicate, fine, pure. When you dip fabric in slip then fire it, the fabric burns away leaving a shell of slip around where it was. And then I realized -BOOM- Memory. This is all about memory. The resulting pieces are memory preserved. So I don't think it was an accident that I was attracted to this method of working.

Here you can see some of my failed experiments. I tried both stoneware and porcelain slips, and it took a while to figure out the right temperatures. As of right now, the best method I have found is use ^6 porcelain, fire it to ^6, with a very slow preheat (the slower the better), and once my pieces got heavier and more complex- give them lots of support.

And I tried some glazing. I'm clearly still working on it. I got a few gems though.

Here's the fun stuff:

 

Then I had this crazy idea to drape the fabric over a human form. (Note for my unacquainted readers: that's not actually crazy because I always end up making art using human forms) So with the help of my fearless fiance, we plaster casted me, and eventually I had a couple forms to play with. Until I broke them. All of them. Only one was repairable. But such is the life of an experiment, I suppose. I did eventually figure out how to get the fabric off the mold without damaging either the mold or the fabric. The bottom pictures are images of the set up I rigged so I could do these experiments.

It's been fun to experiment. There's no pressure, it's very playful, and my students are very curious and almost as excited as I am to see how things turn out. It's also exciting to have this new direction come to my work. It's refreshing, encouraging, and invigorating. I'm glad to have the summer now to log some deep studio hours.