Eva Funderburgh

For months, Florentia Clayworks (our studio), has been discussing repainting our building.  We’d shuffled paint chips, negotiated with the land lady, and talked with neighbors.  We’d talked about where to get paint, who would pay for the painting, and yet, had never made progress.   However, all that changed about two weeks ago, due to a chance meeting of studio mate Randy, our land lady, and the local muralist Ryan Henry Ward.  With in two days the walls of our drab and tagged studio blossomed into beautiful blues and purples.  Now more or less complete, our studio is covered with awesome monsters with hollow heads, and giant birds.  Neighbors who had overlooked us for months began to wander by and ask about us.

To celebrate our new look, we’ll be participating in the Fremont First Friday this week. I’ll be there from 6 to 9pm with snacks and drinks! If you’re in the area, I recommend swinging by and checking out the new look.  I won’t have any new work yet, but you’ll be allowed a sneak peak at what’s lined up for the next firing, if you want. I’ll see if I can get Ryan, the muralist, to join me for the art walk, but he might already be off working on a new building.

Getting started on the mural

This is just to remind folks that the Washington Potter’s Association art show at the Tacoma Art Stop will be having an opening tomorrow night.  It’s looking like it will be a fun show, with 20 some different clay artists.  Two of my pieces were selected to be part of the show – Stilt Beast and Flora Beast #2 – Grazer.  If you’re in the area, I recommend stopping by!

The opening will be from 5 to 8pm on this Thursday, Sept 18th.  The website appears to be down, but  here’s a link to their place on google maps.  If you happen to be going through the area at another time, the show will be up until October 17th, Tuesday -Fridays 9:30am – 5:30pm, Saturdays 9:30am – 4:30pm.

I’ve been starting to prepare for a wood firing next month.  It will be my only chance to fire pieces in time for the holiday season, so I’ve been working pretty hard to get ready for it.  However, I’m quite happy with what I’ve been putting together.  Here’s a shot of the one pieces in progress.  In this shot, I still need to finish the horns, teeth and all of that, but still, I really like its movement.  I’ve since finished it up, including the fruit.  I used a different clay for the fruit, one that will turn black or purple, or maybe just brown.  I can’t wait to see how it comes out.

In this last week, I decided to shuffle all of my work between my galleries.  I just took most of the stuff from gallery A and gave it to gallery B and so forth.   This just keep everything fresh for everyone.  Part of the fun of this (besides trekking all over Seattle with a suitcase full of critters), is that most of the work I have for sale in my studio has been refreshed too! The new list of pieces for sale is up on flicker.  Stop, browse, and have yourself some fun!

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.

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.

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

please RSVP at 412.261.7003 x17

I sorted through all of my photos from this last firing, and they’re now up on flickr. (There’s fewer than normal since I was having so much fun taking timelapse movies.)  Enjoy!

So while I was at the firing, I had a bunch of fun, once again, with the video features of my canon sd850.  The first bits to be processed and uploaded are some time lapse videos of loading the kiln.  The process of loading a kiln ends up being pretty slow and complex.  I’m writing up an explanation of all the factors that go into that slowness, but decided to put them in a separate post.  For now, you can enjoy the process of loading a kiln at x30 speed and set to fun music.  It’s pretty fascinating, really.

Loading a kiln, from the inside:  This video is shot from one of the stoke holes, and follows the loading of the shelf after the middle firebox.  Since it’s so close to the middle firebox, where we’ll be putting in sidestoking wood, we’re being careful not to put anything small on the back side of the shelf that might get knocked over.  It’s about 3 hours boiled down to 5 minutes.

Loading a Kiln, from the outside:  This video is of loading the next set of two shelves, but shot from outside of the kiln entrance.  It really shows a different aspect of the process.  For every person in the kiln there’s another few outside, prepping the pots, organizing, discussing, shooting the breeze, and just hanging around. It covers about 2 hours in 4 minutes.

I’ve just discovered you can watch these in higher quality, but only on the Youtube website.  So follow them back to their youtube pages for a less grainy version.

As part of the website redesign, I decided to start up a blog. It’s something I’d been talking about for a bit. I’ve been spending so much time putting together explanations of the ceramics process for friends and family that I thought it might be fun to share them with anyone who might be interested. The primary goal of the blog will be to explain ceramics, from the my processes to the culture in general. However, I expect it to meander a fair bit along the way. So regardless of its final form, I hope you enjoy these musings on clay, life, and whatever happens to be distracting me at the moment.