Pit firing is a very primative firing method. By primitive, I don’t mean unsophisticated, but rather ancient. Basically, as most cultures developed ceramics, some sort of pit firing was first way that folks figured out how fire their pots. It’s pretty low temperature, which means the finished pieces aren’t super sturdy and can’t be covered in glaze, like you can with higher temperature firings. However, it’s hot enough the pot isn’t going to dissolve back into mud if you put water in it, which is pretty darn useful for an emerging civilization. While most cultures figure out how to build kilns, and to heat their pottery to higher temperatures, some stuck with pit firing, developing the method to create incredibly beautiful work. The example that always comes to my mind is the pueblo potters of the southwest united states, including the beautiful black on black work by Maria Martinez.

There seems to be nearly infinite ways of setting up and doing a pit firing, so I’m going to stick to describing the pit firing I did with Hilary. We did the largest bit of preparation before hand. Each piece was wrapped in copped wire (specifically, a choreboy, those copper things made for scrubbing pans.), followed by steel wool, followed by salt water soaked burlap or straw. All of the salt, the copper, and the iron all fume at high temperature, leaving an assortment of colors on the clay. Once that initial prep was done, we placed each one in a labeled brown paper bag, ready for the fire pit. For my pieces, we had to experiment some, putting protective grills above the pieces, to avoid snapping of wings and beaks. I feel like figuring out how to protect my delicate beasts is going to be the biggest issue  for my exploration of pit firing. As we loaded the pit itself, we put down layers of sawdust, copper carbonate, horse manure,  paper, and wood. I actually made a timelapse of the whole loading process that sums up the set up pretty well.

The whole firing, once we lit it up, took maybe an hour. We had campfire sized flames for even far less than that.  The only time issue was the cooling of the pieces. We let everything cool for an hour or two, before my impatience got the better of me and I started digging out pieces. The results were great, but the rapid cooling just proved too much for pieces, leaving several with cracks. Apparently, the number one way to avoid this is to let the pieces cool in the ashes over night, which brings me back to the idea of my very own mini-firepit, in my very own backyard.  I have some plans as far as that, but that’s for another time.

Here is more info about the auction.  Should be a great night!

His website has a down-loadable portfolio, but flickr seems to be the way to follow him. I can’t wait to see what he makes next

As a total amazing bonus, it turns out he’s also the genius behind these! He’s made a series of tiny, perfect, papercraft models of analog synthesizers. I saw them on the tech blog unplgged.com a while back, and was blown away. It was only today as I was exploring his flickr stream that I realized that the beautiful scifi prints and the papercraft synths were made by the same person.

ABOUT THE SHOW:

Come glimpse the Forest King’s realm and the creatures and oddities under his stewardship. New works by Justin Hillgrove, Eva Funderburgh and Mike Capp.

Justin Hillgrove grew up in Snohomish, WA and has been enjoying artistic expression since he was old enough to color on the walls.  He studied Design and Illustration at Seattle Central and has since enjoyed many years of freelance illustration and design, working on everything from collectible card games to toys. He paints monsters, imps, robots and other oddities in satirical, sweet or uncomfortable situations he finds amusing, many of which are inspired by his children. Justin has showed at galleries and shows all over the country, with collectors all over the world.

Eva Funderburgh  is a Seattle artist, who makes strange and slightly whimsical ceramics monsters.  While technically a native Seattleite, she has spent most of her life so far in Kansas and Pennsylvania, but is glad to now be back in the land of rain and delicious salmon.  A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, she’s been working on art full time for the past few years, and has created a world of fat, elegant, and clumsy beasts.  Her sculptures are finished in a wood fired kiln, an anachronistic process more connected with the Japanese tea ceremony that with the present art world. The end results are beasts that share influences from comic books to Greek myth to Japanese anime, but yet are truly unique.

Mike Capp is an accomplished artist who finds inspiration for his artwork through his children’s creativity and pop imagery. His paintings don’t really mean anything dangerous, angsty or irksome. There’s no bubbling social commentary. His paintings which incorporate his young children’s’ drawings aren’t meant to provoke the unarticulated terrors of childhood. They’re just drawings of monsters, superheroes and robots.  Even though there’s plenty of angst behind his humor, more so there’s a playful, impish, boy’s mind, full of cartoons and KISS memorabilia. His technique is solid and clean, so he affords himself the privilege of choosing subject material that is loose and silly, while still keeping a close eye on small details of color and composition. He paints what feels good and what results are paintings that are funny and frivolous, in a good way. It’s not as important to understand what his paintings mean, as it is to understand that they are just what they appear to be.

One of my pieces, Cuckoos #3: Unexpected Twist, just finished being displayed in the 3rd Biennial Concordia Continental Ceramics Competition in St. Paul, MN.  I’d been stressing about the piece being shipped back, since it’s both large and delicate.  When I got a call on Monday from the organizer, I immediately started worrying, only to be utterly surprised.  The piece had been stolen.

While the gallery was open for local artists to pick up their work, someone had walked in and left with four piece that did not belong to them.  The university didn’t realize the problem until they were preparing to pack up the out-of-town pieces. A vase by Leopold Foulem, a wonderful teapot-ish sculpture by Gerald Ferrari, and a piece by Kevin Snipes were also taken.  (Gerald has a very insightful blog post about the theft.) The total listed value for the work was over $12,000, most of that was due to Foulem’s vase. All the same, a life of crime stealing ceramics sculptures is hardly a way to get rich quick. Heck, if there’s a way to get rich in ceramics, there’s lots of ceramics artists who’d love to know about it.

Overall, my response has mostly been confusion.  I am a bit worried about my piece, as to whether or not its safe.  My biggest fear if that some scofflaws just grabbed it on a whim, and it’s been trashed somewhere.  That would break my heart.  The university has said that they’ll deal with the insurance, so at least I’m not worrying about that.  They could have handled the show taken down better, but no sense in being angry about that – they didn’t want this to happen either. I guess it’s a bit flattering that someone likes the piece so much, but really, it would have been better to for them to just buy it.  It’s been so weird seeing pictures of it on the local news, and having my relatives emailing each other about it. Add to all that, it’s not a small piece! It’s large enough it needs to be carried in both arms, and the surface is delicate enough that it could be scratched by snaps or zippers. While I guess do feel strangely honored to be on a list that includes everyone from Miro and Van Gogh to the other 3 artists from this show, I would really rather people just didn’t do stuff like this. It’s so disrespectful to the artists, the work, and the institution that it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around it.

Not cool, random thief, not cool.

Ever since I saw some translucent porcelain lamps made by Terry Inokuma, I’ve wanted to make a glowing creature.  The ultra white porcelain (Southern Ice) I use for teeth in my sculptures also has the property of being amazingly translucent, something I don’t normally pay attention to in a clay.   However, a couple years ago I decided to see what I could do with it.  The first creature I made to explore the idea of glowing creatures was Glowbelly, a little round fat beast, whose belly reminds me of a pale frog.  I used a mix of southern ice and my typical clay to make its belly, making it both paler and theoretically translucent.  However, we’ve never been able to find out for sure.  As soon as got the beast out of the kiln, it became clear that there were some aspects of electronic beasts that I’d neglected to take into consideration.  Namely, the ability to put wires into the beast, the ability to block excess light and direct the LEDS, and the all important on and off switch. While I had a loose idea of just sliding all the electronics in through the mouth, it became clear that much more planning would be required for glowing creatures.

The next step on our experimentation was the Industrial City Beast.  By planning ahead, we were able to set up easy access to power switches and wiring.  The wiring of the beast was very simple, just a battery, a few LEDs and a resistor or two.  (We started playing with the more complex wiring and microcontrollers later).  However, we discovered how important the quality of the light was.  The beast was to have glowing red eyes, but with the LED just in there, it was as empathetic as a laser pointer.  We experimented with a number of materials as diffusers, to give the beast a warmer glow.  In the end, we discovered shapelock plastic.  This semitranslucent plastic can be heated in boiling water and will become malleable, but hardens on cooling.  The stuff is great! It’s designed for rapid prototyping, and it can be reused indefinitely and machine tooled as well as hand formed. It solved two problems at once by both securing and diffusing the red LEDs in the neck of the beast.  The white LEDs for the city were reflected internally by covering all internal surfaces with tinfoil, which helped make the light less directional.

However, the present pinnacle of our collaboration together is the Glowback. We finished it up last year, but got distracted before writing about the process of making it. However, the process is still fascinating, and the result is one of our favorite pieces.

Like many of my woodfire pieces, the beast is a mix of different clays.  I used a mix of porcelain and stoneware for its body, southern ice porcelain for its teeth, and a mix of southern ice porcelain and B-mix porcelainious stoneware for the pods on the back.  This was so the body with have some grit and texture, the teeth would be white, and the pods would be pale and translucent from the southern ice, but still have some color and crystallization due to the B-mix. Since the beast isn’t very large, about 6″ long, the difference in shrink rates between the clays didn’t cause too many problems.  (Porcelain shrinks about 14% from start to finish, while stoneware will only shrink 10%.  If there’s long connected seams, the difference in shrink rate can cause the piece to crack.)

Each bulb on the back of the beast contains a super bright LED mounted in a styrofoam plug, which in turn is secured within the beast.  Two of the bulbs were removable, which while seeming adequate during construction, turned the wiring process into a laparoscopic surgery.  However after much swearing and and many minor burns from hot glue, all the LEDs were in place.

There’s 11 LEDs in all, and they’re controlled by an arduino microcontroller. (I can’t recommend arduino enough if you’re thinking about getting into this sort of thing.) We programed them to fade in and out in a vaguely hypnotizing pattern.  Since the arduino only has enough pins to control 6 things independently, the five largest bulbs pulse independently on random timers, while the six small bulbs pulse all at once. Figuring out the correct rate of fade involved some very interesting math. Here’s some videos of the different patterns we tried. My husband Ben’s blog post goes into greater depth about the programing and wiring.

Eventually, once all LEDs were in place, the arduino (we used a smaller arduino clone called a boarduino), was wrestled into place inside of the beast.  This ended up being the most difficult part of the process – I’d underestimated the amount of working room needed, and the amount of room the wires would take up.  In fact, lack of internal space, and the access to it was in generally the most challenging aspect of the sculpture.  Even the thickness of the wires factored into the difficulty – they keep popping off the dome that covers the power switch!

However, the end result is pretty awesome.  We had a huge amount of fun constructing it, and I believe it’s lived up to our expectations.  Since it’s a fairly experimental beast, it isn’t for sale. Here’s a final documentary video showing off the final completed beast.

Here’s the gallery of all the new work.  Most of the pieces are presently on display at the Island Gallery on Bainbridge Island, and they’re also for sale in their online store!

Also, it’s time again my studio’s annual holiday sale.  We’ll have an opening party this Friday, December 11th from 6 to 9pm.  On Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 4pm, we’ll be around the studio if you want to come in and browse through all the work for sale from myself and my studiomates! The address of the studio is 218 Florentia st, and here’s the facebook invite for more info!  Also, during the opening, I’ll be having a silent action of “Relaxation”, with all proceeds going to charity!