y.oh.y.

I can’t believe the semester is basically over. All I have left to do is finish up some final glaze tests, put together my semester’s progress powerpoint, glaze some things, and write this blog. 

My mugs are starting to look wayyy better. They’re still rough, but much better than they were before. It’s really amazing how much of a difference it makes in my throwing when I get to sleep as opposed to when I don’t get to sleep much. I threw these one day when I hadn’t gotten to sleep much because I worked that morning. The next day I got to sleep more, and when I came in, I was like what are these?! They were all extremely squat and thick and just tiny. So I put ‘em back on the wheel and worked on them a little bit longer. So yeah, sleep is a good thing to have when you are learning to throw!

Rebeka and I redid our glaze tests, and they came out almost exactly the same as they did before. We got a bit more crackling out of some of the blue ones, but the ones on the cylindrical test pieces still didn’t crackle at all. So this week before we do our last cone 10 firing in Big Eddy we are going to try one last time…

We are taking apart Big Eddy so that we can make room for new kilns. Which is exciting, but it’ll be sad to see him go. So we are having a little ceremony where we are going to make paper sculptures and burn them.

Here is mine: I used photocopied pages of a Dada book to make a kitty.

Thursday we did clean-up of the studio, and Rebeka and I thoroughly documented the test kiln, which we will also be taking down in order to get the car kiln.

So RIP to Little Test Kiln and Big Eddy. :( I’m sure their bricks will become part of new things in the future. Who knows what we’ll decide to build next ? 

I’m really glad that we are doing a powerpoint presentation for our final so that I can actually step back and take a look at the progress I’ve made over the semester. I always enjoy those kinds of presentations/finals much more.

I cannot BELIEVE wet work cutoff is TOMORROW. Ahhhh! :( :( :(

I am really stressing about the end of this semester. My throwing skills have DEFINITELY improved. I successfully trimmed a bowl and a plate yesterday. Or at least more successfully than before. So that is exciting. I made a 2nd mug as my thrown and altered piece, and it looks a little better than the first one.

We unloaded our kiln that we spent all semester building.

Dan cleaning out the ashes.

Top shelf

Miri, Dan, Chris

Next shelf

The shelf closer to the flames…lots o’ ash.

Next shelf

I only like 1 of my plates that came out—the one with the nice coloring. The other two have wayyy too many ash marks all over them. The things that I didn’t glaze turned out the best.

This semester has been so incredibly busy. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about throwing and about the nature of glazes through the glaze tests that we did. Luckily I’m getting a little better at throwing. And hopefully over the summer I will keep improving. I can’t wait for that. I’m really happy to have the opportunity to help with the wood kiln as well. 

The Open House went pretty well. I was a little disappointed with the number of students that didn’t show up but had their work up in the show. And how so much of the actual work was left up to just a few people. We really need to find a way to get more people involved next year. I don’t know what it will take, but the open house was sooo much bigger last year than it was this year. 

On another note, I REALLY enjoyed Jordan Tate’s lecture on Thursday. He was so knowledgeable, interesting, and engaging. I really love that he uses media that are very relevant to the times to critique our culture and our way of accessing and interpreting information. All wrapped up in a lovely philosophical package. 

Artist lectures galore! Thursday I went to the Ann Hamilton lecture. It was fantastic, just like I knew it would be. I was already pretty familiar with her work and had watched her Art21, but it was really great to see her and hear what she had to say. She is such an eloquent speaker. I find her ways of thinking really meditative and beautiful. She really knows how to simplify something really complex that can really create a mood. There were a lot of audio problems during the lecture, and they ended up cutting her off at the end because the museum was closing. Shame on The Speed Museum for that….

Today was Lisa Walcott’s lecture, which I found really resonated with me, and probably with a lot of other people. Which is an extremely good thing…you want people to be able to understand your art on some level when you are creating installations. A lot of people really don’t “get” installation art, so when you can find those beautiful moments that people can really feel, it’s like magic.

Basically she enjoys collecting gestures, and as Adrienne pointed out, most of them involve a visual perception of how air flows through things (like a paper bag on the wall inhaling and exhaling, bubbles being blown up out of the floor, etc.) 

I also really liked that she included a theme of impending doom. Anxieties of the doom that is to come. Or may not come. Either way we are impatient for it. It gets the best of all of us when we lie awake in bed at night (as I am doing right now when I should be sleeping since I have to work at 5:30 AM. Fuuuuuuuu) So I especially enjoyed her piece Not So Fast, where the doorknob was just spinning and spinning, and the screws look like they could fall out at any time. I feel like we can all relate to that. And that’s nice. Who would have thought we could all relate to a turning doorknob? :) I’m very interested in this idea of taking things that we all know and putting them into the context of art. I could go on and on, I took extensive notes on her lecture, but I should stop myself.

We fired the kiln for the first time this weekend! Yay!!!!! We had a lovely little ceremony for the lighting process. Unfortunately I didn’t get to be there for the loading, because I was in Bloomington during the day for an art history event. But the kick-off ceremony was nice. Emily brought this awesome candle:

It sang the Happy Birthday song (which was written here in Louisville by the way) and spun around (reeeaaaallllyyyy slowly.) 

Here’s Dan feeding the fire:

Tiffany and Oslo lookin’ like goddamn rockstars out there:

And Cory splittin’ some wood:

We’re unloading either tomorrow or Wednesday. I’m really excited to see what comes out of the virgin firing! 

Throw throw throw! That’s what it says on every day in my planner for this week and next up to wet work cutoff. Too bad the amount of halfway decent stuff I get out of hours worth of throwing is probably less than a quarter of what I actually throw. Ha.

Mark Cole’s workshop and lecture were sooo good. These are pictures of him doing his 2 day workshop here in the ceramics studio. He showed us how he puts together vessels to fit specific needs. This is him creating “pizza buddy”, which holds a piece of pizza, ranch, and a soda. He definitely added a lot of humor to his work, which I’m sure makes working way more enjoyable. 

I also really enjoyed his sgraffito demo. I want to do some sgraffito stuff since Rebeka and I made the black slip and the train kiln is now done!!! Woot woot!

Mark Cole’s Justin Bieber signature cup. 

So now I am working on my thrown and altered pieces and trying to re-make stuff for the end of the semester since wet work cutoff is less than 2 weeks away!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I wanted to make some cups and bend them so that I could cut the handle out of the actual cup and then put another thrown slab piece in where the hole is. This is what it looked like after I threw it and smooshed it.

And this is what it looks like right now. it still needs to be  cleaned up a lot and I’m not really very happy with the form itself. I want it to be a little taller and maybe more elegant. Not really sure… but anyway this was just a test run to see if I could get it to work.

I have a lot of throwing to do in the next few weeks, but I’m feeling a lot better about it now than I did before. I have a lot more confidence in it. And that makes a big difference. I just have trouble making things look clean. I’m going to have to find some tutorials and probably some new tools.

I’m really looking forward to continuing to throw this summer and take papermaking with Donna. 

Also, Miri and I have planned a SpaceLab show for next semester that we are working on together. It’s really nice working with her, because I feel like we have the same (but different) ways of thinking and things that we obsess over, and they all fit together really well. 

So we planned one. And now we are working on planning another one to try to do 2 next semester. The one we planned already won’t take a whole lot of time to put together, minus getting everything set up and figuring out exactly how to set up the gallery. 

So I’m looking forward to more show ideas this summer! Yeah!

Our glaze tests did not come out AT ALL like I expected. We were even extra careful this time with making sure we got it on really thick. I don’t really know what happened, but a lot of them didn’t really crackle. But some of them still look pretty neat on the black slip. We are going to do more tests to try and figure out what happened with some of them, and test some of the others even further. Here’s a photo of the ones we tested on the black slip:

I am really excited that the kiln is done! Brian and Ian finished the welding yesterday, and we came in and made kiln posts and kiln washed the shelves. I cut some fiber to put on the “door”, which Brian and Ian creatively used part of an old grill for:

The door looks even better now! I wish I would have remembered my iPad so I could have taken better pictures, so all I got were pictures on my crappy cell phone. Anyway I hope we can figure out our wood situation this week so we can fire it after spring break! 

I am going to be working on throwing stuff for the wood kiln during my whole spring break. I can’t WAIT to have a week where I can just throw and work on my art history paper. 

I figured in order to incorporate my wanting to weave the clay with the assignment of thrown and altered pieces, I can throw slabs on the wheel and cut and weave them. I’m going to try to work really hard to get better at throwing through the rest of the semester. Especially now that the kiln is done and we will probably have more in-class time to work.

I’ve been reading up on Mark Cole since he is going to be our visiting artist this week. I’m pretty excited about it. I really appreciate the way he approaches vessel making. I really like how he compares the embellishments on his work to the embellishments of a story, or an interaction with people. His statement feels gentle and intuitive—which is sort of how vessel making should feel. Right?

The critique of the SpaceLab show last week was really helpful. I was asked what I was planning on doing next, and unfortunately I don’t know exactly how to answer that question. I definitely want to keep going with this idea of human constructs and things that we do psychologically to help give us a grasp on whatever reality is. Things that people give meaning to that wouldn’t have meaning unless we said that it did. It takes a common ability to all believe the same thing to make it true in our minds. 

So then I saw an article on NPR that was asking if the universe is real, or only exists because we all believe it. It’s the same argument as “if a tree falls in the woods…”, which I find really interesting. 

The people in the class had some really good ideas of what I could do with these ideas. I just have to figure out what I want to do. The best part was that Brian gave me a list of books to look into to research and meditate on, and since I took my $100 of pennies to coinstar and got an Amazon.com gift card with it so it wouldn’t take any money out, it looks like I’ll be buying myself some books!!!

Brian told me, rightfully, that I needed to take pictures and document what I am doing. I didn’t have my camera because I was letting someone borrow it, but I got it back and took some shots:

So our next assignment now through the rest of the semester is to make thrown and altered objects. I’m really excited about this. I have a few ideas of what I want to do. I found a mug that was slip cast in a magazine, where it looks like if it were to be thrown, the handle would be a part you bulge out on the side and cut through and add a slab, so it all is essentially one piece (minus the slab to cover the hole). I’m not sure how this will work, but I guess I’ll find out!

I didn’t really work on the kiln much this week because I was working on getting my show ready (it happened on Thursday).  But here are a few pictures from Tuesday of everyone trying to figure out how we were going to make the openings big enough to get the firewood inside.

Brian showing us how someone he knew would throw wood into the kiln.

Anyway, setting up for the show took a good chunk of time. I got my boxes of pennies, and unrolled all of the 100 dollars of them.

This is what 25 dollar boxes of pennies look like. They’re pretty heavy.

This is what 25 dollars of pennies looks like unrolled:

Even after I emptied all 4 boxes, 10,000 pennies didn’t seem like as much as I thought. But it was still a lot of pennies to turn over so they were all tails up. Good thing Rebeka stayed in there and helped me set it up while I set up the video. I couldn’t have done it without her!! 

All in all, I think the opening went pretty well. It was scheduled at a perfect time—right after a BFA Critique and also at the time people were supposed to be dropping off 200-level review portfolios, so lots of people were in the building who normally may not have been at that time!

It was really interesting to see certain things that just happened naturally. Happy accidents. I projected the video of the mirror breaking onto the mirror, and the reflection shined on the pennies, which I thought worked out for the best. Also, the spotlight that pointed down at the pennies made concentric circles on the shiny pennies, which added another nice element of movement.

It’s amazing how different it looks without the video and the lighting. I went in today to pick up my portfolios and walked back there when just normal lights were on. It’s just interesting how small details can change things so much.

I was really pleased with how many people weren’t afraid to walk under the ladder to go in, and then a lot of people were hanging out IN the gallery instead of outside of it. I guess there was nothing in it that they were afraid of breaking, which is good, because that also goes with the theme of not being afraid. ;)

I didn’t take any photos during the show, but I think some other people may have. Also, we are critiquing it during class on Tuesday so I’ll probably try to take some photos then when I get it all set up again. Then I’ll try to post some pictures on here of what it looks like!

This week I hope the weather will be ok to get the kiln built. It’s a bummer that last week was so nice and I couldn’t even help with it because  I was setting up for the show! We better have good weather again soon! 

Off to different things. I’m really hoping to get some clay weaving done this week! I’m ready for it since we haven’t gotten a new wheel throwing assignment yet (hopefully Tuesday we will).  

codaking:

shapeways:

3D Printed Black Glazed Ceramics at Shapeways

Making your designs possible in the widest range of the high quality 3D printed materials is one of our main focuses at Shapeways and today we are super excited to offer Black Glazed Ceramics to our range of material options for the next two months.

Black Glazed Ceramics joins White Ceramics as our second food-safe material it suitable for cups, plates, bowls, sake sets, almost anything.  

The process used to create Black Glazed Ceramics is the same as White Ceramics with the same design rules, level of detail, wall thickness requirements and size restrictions.

We have printed a few models from the Shapeways community so you can see how the finish looks over a variety of surface geometries.

As with White Ceramics the Black Glazed Ceramic glaze likes flat planes, curves and radiuses rather than hard edges and corners and knife blades. 

The max build size is 30x22x17cm (11.8x8.6x6.7 inches). Minimum wall thickness and details remains the same at 3mm and 2mm, respectively. Note, glazing process can add up to 1.5mm of thickness to your item so some finer details may be lost or softened. This is especially true for the nooks and crevices, as well as the bottom portion of cups.

This material will be off by default and mark-up set to zero so if you would like to make it available in your shop you will need to manually update your products.

For trial period will run until Friday the 28th of April and pricing will be calculated at $0.18 per cm² of surface area.

After the trial period we will review the popularity, pricing and design rules.

Ooo, technology marches on! Exciting!

The kiln is looking gooooooood! The arch was a little too tall so we had to put some slip in between the bricks. It shouldn’t be long before it is completely done…I think I’ve said that in every blog now, but this week the weather BETTER be good enough to work on it every day. 

I went in today to help out for a bit with the kiln after work. Brian was already working on it, so I didn’t do too much, but I’m still glad I got to help a little.

The glaze tests are done! I’m pretty pleased with how some of the ones Rebeka and I worked on turned out. Especially the one in the front of the pic that looks like the pattern of a giraffe—I want to put that on everything! We also have test tiles that we made to test the glazes on black slip—so this week, that will be done. I can’t wait to see what that looks like too!!

Today I’ve been playing around with my camera and my computer and trying to figure out how to make the videos work…since I got a new hard drive a few months ago, I haven’t been able to get videos to work. But I think I figured it out today! 

Which is good, since my SpaceLab show is this week. I’m going to shoot the video and get it edited now that I have that squared away. Whew.

I’ve decided to have the SpaceLab opening on Thursday since we have the Contemporary Art Historian candidates coming in Monday-Wednesday. I know there is a BFA Critique on Thursday, so I guess I’ll have it at 5:30 when the BFA Crit is over. 

Which also means I need to make some flyers.

This week, plates are due. Plates are a little easier to throw, but for some reason I keep getting them really thin on the outside right by the rim. But I’m really enjoying throwing them. Hopefully this means throwing will get easier overall….fingers crossed!

The wheel up on cinder blocks. 

Some of my mugs.

This was the first sort of structure I tried to make to weave with clay before I really found the tutorial. The clay I kept trying to weave through was way too short. So tomorrow I’m going to try again with the gum arabic in the clay, and also with thinner pieces. We’ll see how that goes!

So thanks to the suggestion of a tumblr friend, and Brian giving me the specific names of different gum arabics, I think I have found some useful research for helping me weave with clay. I found a lot of stuff about CMC gum (the powder mixed with water) being added to clay to make it more plastic. The things I found were talking about using it for throwing, but the way the person was talking about the difference before and after lets me know that it should do the trick. Also, the little tutorial I found (the post below) gave me a few helpful pointers.

My SpaceLab show is going to be next week, either on Wednesday or Thursday…I have to pick a day for the opening. I am going to decide on it tomorrow when I look at my work schedule for that week. I got the mirror I am going to break for the video part, so I need to make sure to film that soon so I have time to edit! The 100 dollars in pennies are sitting in my car right now in $25 boxes, It doesn’t look like very many when they are so tightly organized! It makes me a little nervous. I’m going to have to get in there this week when there isn’t anything going on and try to set them up. The only problem will be once I take them out of their rolls, what am I going to do with them until the opening since other things are going to be going on in the SpaceLab until then? Hm.

Also I must make the flyer for the show.

Rebeka and I got part one of our test tiles done. The glaze recipe we were testing also had a recipe for a black slip in it that is supposed to look really nice under the crackle glaze, so we made another go-round of test tiles last week so we could bisque the slip. This week we are going to put the test glazes over the slip and get those going. I’m really excited to see what it is going to look like!

I’ve been trying to throw standing up. I really like it. It gives me a better flow of energy while I’m throwing. And I think it’s really beefin’ up my arm muscles. Whew.

We have 10 mugs due on Tuesday. I have them all thrown, but no handles yet. Tomorrow evening I am going to have to work really hard. I probably threw about 20 today, but I ended up making the bottoms too thin on a whole lot of ‘em, and when I tried to cut them off, cut through the bottom. Or I would knock them with one of the tools and destroy them. :( When will I learn?! Haha.

I also have my outline for my art history paper due this week and have to work in the early morning Monday through Wednesday, so I am really feeling the stress! Who needs sleep anyway?

Rebeka and I working on our glaze tests late one night. Photo by Joy Wilson.

This is a good starting point. A little thicker/cruder than what I am wanting to do, and I’m hoping once I get the hang of it I can work on creating different forms.

The kiln is really coming along! This is the work that was done last Tuesday. We had to deconstruct/reconstruct the raku kiln to give ourselves more room around the new kiln. We had to add a little more length to the kiln to make it work out the way we want it. So now I think we have a lot of it worked out. Brian had to cut quite a bit of brick for us. Something has to be welded in order to make the archway we are wanting. I’m not totally sure what it will look like, it’s hard to picture it without seeing it. But I’ll post pictures of that when it happens too.

Thursday we went to UK for the John Balistreri workshop. We got there a little late, so we only got to be there for the last hour or so of the workshop and he let us ask questions afterwards. He talked a bit about his research with 3D printing. It’s really interesting that people that work with ceramics are so opposed to it. I feel like it should be more freeing to them to have another way to express themselves with the material they are comfortable with. Even if people don’t like change, we all have to deal with it. Change happens so much faster now than it used to. Technology is crazy. He also talked about how he is working with doctors who are researching bone cells. It’s interesting how intertwined science and art are, and always have been. I would really love to learn more about 3D printing if I ever get the chance to be around one.

The art building at UK is amazing. It’s an old warehouse with wooden floors and it is HUGE. I was really impressed by it, and all of the professors seemed really awesome. They also had quite a few kilns, which is also really exciting. 

We had dinner at Hunter’s house (one of the professors). His wife turned their garage into a studio and it is awesome! Her work is so nice. And her studio was so clean. It was really cool. It gave me some ideas for what kinds of things I would like in my own studio. I really liked her kick wheel (it was a specific kind but I can’t remember what Brian said it was called unfortunately). Also, all of her electronic wheels were up on cinder blocks so that she could throw standing up. I am going to try that soon. I found the trip to be very inspiring and I’m really glad I went. It’s always really nice to know what artists like John Balistreri are working on, and also the artists/professors at other schools. It really gives you a better feel for what the life of a working artist is like.

Also I’ve been trying to research weaving with clay. I found the artist Rina Peleg in the 500 Ceramic Sculptures book, and I really like the pieces of hers in there. I’ve been Google-ing it and trying to figure out how it is done, but have so far only really found stuff about crafts for kids with polymer clay. I think what i will experiment with is making what would be considered the warp (the part that goes vertical, the part that you weave the horizontal (weft) part through), and bisque that so it is strong. Then, weave the horizontal (weft) part through and fire it again. We’ll see how it goes! Here’s a link to her website if you are interested. The pieces that are in 500 Ceramic Sculptures aren’t on her site, but if you Google her it’s the first one that comes up on images.

http://www.rinapeleg.com/Bio.aspx

Well I went in and threw a few more today. I went through a lot of clay again and messed up trimming another one. Hopefully in the next few days I’ll get the rest of ‘em trimmed up and ready to go.
I’m really excited for the glaze tests. Rebeka and I are experimenting with a crawling glaze. I can’t wait to see how it looks.
I’m also really excited for the workshop at UK on Thursday! It will be really interesting to see how John Balistreri works. I would also really love to learn more about his research on 3D printing!

ceramicsnow:

Cindy Billingsley: Transformation, 2011, 25” x 8” x 12”, raku clay, hand built solid, hollowed for firing, low fired, cold finish acrylic and wax