When I work on my regular sized beasts, I tend to make them in batches. I’ll start with about 3 to 6 balls of clay, and work on them in parallel over the course of a few weeks. Often each step in the process of making a beast will only take an hour to half hour, but I’ll need to let the parts rest and dry for a day between each step. This makes sure that seems don’t reopen or wet legs don’t get attached to dryer bodies. I’ll often spend a morning or a day doing nothing but making legs or sanding backs.
I find it very amusing to watch the clues as to the progression of time: What I’m wearing, what color bandana I have, if I have a soda, and how messy my work area has gotten.
So the Pittsburgh show went very well. I’ve sorted through my photos of the trip, and now have the best of them up on flickr.
The gallery was great, and it was really fun to meet Jamie and Kat, who organized everything. I was also extremely honored to have my work featured on the postcards, as well as an advertisement in The City Paper, a local weekly. Below is a picture of the Society for Contemporary Craft. It’s located in the strip district, an old warehouse district of Pittsburgh. Now days, the area is mainly know for having the best ethnic groceries and food wholesalers for anything you could think of, all crammed into one 10 block stretch. Well, known for that, and for an awesome gallery or two. I highly recommend checking out the whole area if you’re ever in the ‘burgh.
The opening went quite well! It was a great time all around, and very well attended. It was also great to be able to see the work of Joshua Longo and Toby Fraley in person. I got to meet Toby, who’s a pretty cool guy, but Joshua was off touring with a band or something, and couldn’t make it. All in all, totally an awesome time, and thanks to everyone who showed up. The show will be up for a bit, or until they sell all the work. However, judging by the rate the pieces have been selling, that might not be that long.
The Society for Contemporary Craft also had me give a demonstration on creature making, the next day. It was a new experience for me, being the first time I’d ever done anything of the type. The strangest thing for me was trying to cram work that I would normally do over the course of a week or two into three hours, talking the whole time. It meant I had to work with the piece much softer than normal and I had to fight with it some, but it worked out in the end.
I’m back from my Pittsburgh trip, which went very well! I’m sorting through the photos from my show there, and will put together a post on it later this week. However, I wanted to get this info out in the mean time.
Friday is the first of August, which means our studio will be open for the Fremont First Friday Art Walk. From 6 to 9pm, feel free to stop by, drink some wine, eat some snacks, and peruse the art work. If I have time, I might even make a cake for people to eat. I’ll have a few pieces from my most recent batch of work there, along with work by everyone else in the studio.
We are at 218 Florentia St, Seattle WA - just on the south side of the Fremont bridge. Come take a look if you’re in the area!
The opening for the Society for contemporary crafts is tonight! I’ve stopped by the gallery a few times in the past couple days and everything looks really really awesome. I’m really looking forward to tonight!
Also, it’s looking like Saturday will be a lot of fun also. I’ll be doing a demonstration from noon to two, and I think Toby Fraley might also. Feel free to stop by. What with the strip district being its hoppin’ self, thing should be pretty awesome.
Before this last firing, I filmed all the steps in sculpting one set of beasts. I’ve been calling it “Trio”, but in some ways it’s also “Cuddle” #2. I liked the beasts I made for “cuddle” and wanted to see a larger arrangement of them. It was surprisingly hard to figure out how to make the three fit together. Anyway, here’s the timelapse video fully tracking them from beginning to end.
I really like arranging my beasts in groups. And this sort of lumpy, toothy form really appeals to me. For a bit, I’ve been meaning to make a pile of 10 or 20 guys. Maybe next firing I’ll have time.
I tend to take a fairly large number of photos. When I recently broke my year old camera, I’d taken 9000 photos with and it had been starting to wear out. To be fair, that’s including my art documentation, a trip to asia, and my habit of taking 10 photos of every shot I want to capture. Regardless of all that, it means I spend a fair amount of time sorting through photos. This weekend, I’ve been catching up on some of the random photos for the last few months, and uploading the best up to flickr. I still have a lot to go, but this is my favorite for the evening.
Coming up in late July, I’m going to be having a show at the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA. Joshua Longo, Toby Fraley, and myself will be the features artist in the SCC’s shop. A lot of my new work will be there, and I’ll be flying in from Seattle for the opening. I’m pretty excited about it. It’s a great place, and I’m really like both Joshua and Toby’s work. Here’s the details for the opening reception
Opening night reception!
July 25, 2008. 5:30 -8pm
Society for Contemporary Crafts
2100 Smallman st, Pittsburgh, PA
I’ve just about finished photographing all of my work from this last woodfiring. I have a couple pieces left that I’m still doing some mixed media work on, specifically a few beasts that will be walking on stilts and the big city beast. The stilt beasts will be done hopefully in another day or two, but it will be a bit longer for the big city beast. In addition to having some mixed media work to go, he’s also too big for my photo set up. It’s located in the shower stall of the spare bathroom of our studio, and maxes out on any piece bigger than six inches or so. I’ll have to take the city beast out to the other side of the Sound and get Steve Sauer to photograph him for me.
Anyway, here’s the point of this post. My new work!
Since the quality of the Youtube version of the unloading was so poor, I decided to uploaded to Vimeo, one of the many competitors that keep popping up. It had its share of frustrations as well in the upload process, but I’m much happier with the final video.
We went and unloaded Santatsugama yesterday, and it looks like everyone got some wonderful results. We had to make an early start after a late 4th of July party, but it was completely worth it. I’m very happy with my work from this firing. There was lots of carbon trapping, resulting in ghostly looking grey blues in addition to the beautiful gloss orange red that we’ve been getting recently. However, the black flashes that we’d been seeing recently were much less prominent. We think this was due to difference in atmospheric conditions in the kiln during the cooling, but that’s another post.
As I said, I think it was a good firing. One very sad thing though is that Erin’s cabbage jars self-destructed. Some clays just don’t do well in this kiln, and will shatter unprovoked as they cool. Each cabbage jar would come out, look beautiful, and then “ping” itself into a pile of leaves. Hopefully we’ll see some surviving ones in the future. Here’s a sneak peek as to some of what I got out. I’ll be doing formal documentation photograph over the course of the next week. I also have a fair amount of cleaning up and mixed media work still to go, especially with the big guy.
Also, like the loading, I took stop motion video of the unloading. It followed the whole unloading (3 hours instead of 2 days), and compacts down into 5 minutes. It’s pretty fun to see. (Fun fact. I broke my gorilla pod during the filming of the video. It just plain wore out from overuse after 3 months. I’m hard on tech. When I broke my old camera after a year, I’d taken 9,000 photos with it). Anyway, enjoy the video. If you go to the youtube page for it, there should be higher quality version. (It takes about a day for the high quality option to show up)
The next chance to see Eva's work will be Friday, August 1st, at the Fremont First Friday Artwalk. Stop by the studio at 218 Florentia Street between 6 and 9pm for food and sculpture!
