Eva Funderburgh

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.

Before the last firing, I decided to track a whole group of critters as I made them.  I started with a bag of clay and ended up with Beast with a Ball, Flatout Beast, Mournful beast with horns, the papaya beast, and the two stilt beasts having a conversation.  This last week I finally got around to putting together most of the timelapse footage, and have four new videos for you.

Papaya Beast

Flatout Beast

Beast with a Ball

Mournful Beast with Horns

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.

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.

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.

Unloading an Anagama from Eva Funderburgh on Vimeo.

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)