The first of these shows to go up is “Through the Clouds”, a multi-piece installation featuring my largest beast yet. It’s in the front window of Gallery 110 in the Pioneer square area of Seattle. While the opening reception has already occurred, there’s going to be an additional reception during NCECA, on March 17th from 6 to 8pm. I’m also sharing the gallery with Becky Frehse, Jane Kelsey- Mapel, and Monika Dalkin. I’m very excited to be showing off this piece, which has been in progress since December. Also, this part of Pioneer Square is a positive warren of art galleries, many of which share the same building at Gallery 110. I’d recommended taking some extra time to explore the area, if you can!

Next up on my schedule of shows is Chimeras, a show I curated up at my old stomping ground, Twilight Artist Collective in West Seattle. This show is pretty exciting, since it’s given me a chance to collect some of my favorite sculptors in one place. It’s going to be featuring Rachel Van Wagoner, Sandra Farmer, Simone Clunie, and Cheryl Robinson. It will also be a chance to show off some of my best work from my most recent firing. The opening reception is this Thursday, March 8th, from 6 to 9pm. There’s also going to be an extra reception during NCECA, on March 30th from 6 to 9pm, so we can celebrate with all the out of town ceramics folks.

In addition to that, this week I have a second opening, this one for a show that isn’t related to NCECA at all. I’ve been invited by Ryan Henry Ward, better known simply as “Henry” due to his mural fame, to take part in his show “Who’s Hoo” at the Urban Lights Studio in the Greenwood neighborhood.  This show is pulling together a wide and non-conventional selection of the hippest part of the Seattle art world, all on the theme of owls! It’s hard to think of a better show set up than that. We’ll be living it up at Urban Light Studio, this Friday, March 9th, from 6 to 9pm

Switching from North Seattle to South Puget Sound, I’m also in a show in Tacoma. This year, the Washington Clay Arts Association’s annual show was juried by Josh DeWeese and Beth Cavener Stichter, of whom I’m a very big fan. This makes it even more of an honor that three of my sculptures were selected to be included in the show. The show is at The Art Stop on 940 Broadway and will have an opening reception on Thursday, March 15th from 5 to 8pm. It’s also going to have a NCECA reception on the evening of the 27th.

The final show that I’m going to be in during NCECA is a shorter affair and is only open the week of the conference, from Monday, March 26th through Saturday, March 31st. It’s called “12 Wood Fire Kilns of the Northwest”. I’m extremely excited about it, and while I realize I’ve been saying that about all my shows, it’s the truth. In this case, the show will feature wood kilns from around the Pacific Northwest, with each group of wood firers having their own little area to show of the style of work and results from the kiln. I’ll be there, helping to represent the two anagama-style kilns “Santatsugama” (Three Dragon Kiln) and “Ochawangama” (Teabowl Kiln). These two kilns basically siblings, being built and fired by mostly the same group of people. I’ve been firing with this group of compatriots since 2006, and it’s a wonderful group of friends and artists.  It will also be fun to compare and to contrast the work from the different kilns in the area. The show will be at 3509 Fremont ave N, Seattle WA, and will have an opening reception from 6 to 9pm on the 29th.

I’m also in a show in Redmond next weekend. It’s going to be at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse Community Center, at 16600 NE 80th st, Redmond, WA.  There’s be an opening reception Friday the 9th, 5 to 8pm, but the show will also be open Saturday, Sunday, and Monday from 10am to 6pm.

My work with chicken wire as a foam armature had led me to realize that chicken wire itself is a surprisingly nice sculpture material. It’s great for making rapid, expressive beasts. You can tweak it repeatedly without weakening it, changing your beast’s stance as much as you want. In addition to this, the end beast looks surprisingly good as straight chicken wire. The effect is ghostly and striking.

When this opportunity in Ballard showed up, I sprung for it. I’ve long been thinking about an installation of large running beasts, but had nowhere to display such a thing. I decided to create a version of this idea, choosing chicken wire over a more conventional material for its speed and unusual appearance. I gave myself two weeks to create as many running beasts as I could, and took another week fine tuning the final piece. In the end, I even made a time lapse video of the final beast.

In the end, I finished up 17 beasts, using around 240 square feet of chicken wire. Karol, the manager of the U-Frame-It was nice enough to donate black paper to go under the beasts, which allowed gave the chicken wire more contrast. We’re actually working together to help set up a pop up art show for this Saturday, the 10th. If you’re in the area, please come on by the storefront at  from 6 to 9pm for art, fun, and refreshments.

The only downside of the beasts is that they’re very hard to photograph. I’m planning on doing another photo shoot later, which will hopefully give me some more photos to post here.

-Styrofoam-

Styrofoam is a specific brand of expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam, that white crumbly stuff. It carves extremely nicely, and apparently most theme park decorations or large advertising objects are EPS coated with urethane and fiberglass.  Anyway, the professional way to do it is to use hot wire tools. I tried that, but found it far too fumey for anywhere inside. However, regular saws and rasps go through it like a breeze, if you don’t mind vacuuming ever 20 minutes.  Straight Pins or flower arranging pins are also very useful, for holding on parts before you’ve glued them. There’s a number of different ways of getting large blocks, but I stuck with scrap pieces while experimenting. I cut apart some old packing materials, gluing them into solid blocks.

-Glues-

I ended up seeing several recommendations for glues to use on Styrofoam, so I just decided to test everything I could find. Here’s my conclusions.

Wood glue/ Elmer’s: Seems to work ok, but the middle sections of your block will never dry. It’s usable, but not ideal.

Gorilla glue: This will dry well, but it’s so much harder than the Styrofoam that it will make carving difficult.

3M 77 spray adhesive: This specifically says not to use it on Styrofoam/ expanded polystyrene. This is because it has acetone in it, which could dissolve the foam. However, if you use as directed (Spray from 12″ away, and wait at least 30seconds before attaching the pieces), the acetone *appears* to evaporate away with out damaging the foam. A test piece created with this hasn’t shown any ill effects after a few weeks, but I wouldn’t use it on anything you want to be archival. That said, it attaches perfectly well, has some flexibility, and the seam carves just like the rest of the foam.

3M Styrofoam spray adhesive: I never had a chance to find this, but I suspect it’s similar to 3M77 but without the acetone. If I was going to be focusing more on Styrofoam in the future, I’d take them time to track it down.

-Coatings-

Styrofoam has its downsides, including the fact that it dissolves when exposed to anything with a solvent, such as epoxy or fiberglass. It also won’t be that durable until you can apply some type of coating to it. So, like with the glue, I went about testing different stuff.

Foamcoat: I feel pretty certain that this is something I’ve worked with before, just re-purposed. Heavy duty spackle? Some sort of instant plaster? Regardless, it’s extremely heavy, goes on goopy, and is a bit brittle after it sets. To get a durable coat on, you’d have to apply a lot, maybe 3/8″ coating over everything. I’m not that impressed. At least it’s sand-able. Might be useful when making theater backdrops or something.

Styropoxy 7045: There’s several different varieties of styropoxy. All are designed to go on Styrofoam/EPS, extending its life and making it safe from epoxy and solvents. I bought the 7045, which goes on extra thick and is designed to be sanded afterwords. They also have a Syropoxy 7015 and a 7060, which are thinner and are painted on. The numbers refer to working time. The 7045 handles a bit like a cross between those and bondo (Auto body filler). If I were buy more, I’d go with the 7015 or 7060. Better to get the thinner version, and then supplement it with bondo where needed.

Bondo (after the Styrofoam has been sealed): It’s my first time using Bondo and it appear to be very useful, if very nasty, stuff. It’s made for autobody repair. You apply it, then should sand it right away before it hardens all the way. You can sand it afterwords as well – though a power sander will help. It hardens rock hard and very durable.

Apoxie Sculpt (After the Styrofoam has been sealed): This stuff is like the love child of epoxy and sculpy. It’s a two part clay that will harden rock hard within 24 hours. I’m undecided as to where I stand on it. It’s useful, but I’m not fond of it. I hate sculpting in rubber gloves. It’s close enough to clay I want it to act exactly like clay, and I’m disappointed when it doesn’t. I had more luck carving fine details in after the fact with a dremel, though like everything I’ve been talking about, don’t sand or carve it without a respirator mask.

Acrylic Hard Molding Paste: I’d heard a suggestion online that acrylic molding paste might be a useful top coat, since it’s hard, sandable, and is basically marble dust secured in a polymer. I wasn’t that impressed with it. It clearly would take several coats, and it seem like it’s too flexible to add much in terms of structural integrity to the piece. It would be useful to add texture to go under paint, which is its intended purpose, but not as permanent hard coat for a foam creature. You might be able to put this straight on Styrofoam, but I didn’t try it.

-Other Materials-

Chicken Wire: Chicken wire is actually the reason I don’t see myself doing any more Styrofoam sculptures. I started experimenting with chicken wire to see if it could be used for an armature, only to discover the wire armatures had so much more life and movement than my trial foam pieces. Evidently, I need to sculpt in a material I can bend. I immediately started researching what I could do starting with a base of chicken wire.

Spray Insulation in a Can (Great Stuff/ Hilti): My first experiment was coating the chicken wire in spray foam. I first tried spraying it on the outside of a chicken wire. The foam was a bit hard to control and led to a messy coat about an inch or two thick. I then tried loosely covering the outside of the chicken wire in plastic, and spraying the foam along the inside. While that looked promising at first, the foam fascinatingly shrank back as it cured, sucking the plastic in with it. I ended up giving up on both methods regardless, because the end foam is too squishy, and I’ve heard some people online claiming it can shrink over time. In short, not archival quality.

AB polyurethane foam: AB foam is pretty cool stuff, and actually the present focus of my experiments. You mix to parts together for 30second, and then it rapidly expands between 10 and 18 times its original volume, setting carvably hard within five minutes. I’ve been experiment with coating chicken wire forms in plastic, and then pouring the foam into the form. It expands, pushing out the plastic, creating a carveable coating around the chicken wire form. I’m still experimenting with various plastics, but I think this is a promising line of experimentation. You can apply bondo or fiberglass directly to polyurethane foam, unlike Styrofoam/polystyrene..

-The next step!-

I have an chicken wire armature ready to turn into my first full size foam beastie, one about 4 foot tall. I’m planing on building a structural system of metal rods and PVC pipe inside the armature. I’ll coat it with AB foam using my plastic wrapping method. After that, I’ll sand it smooth and coat it all with a thin coating of bondo to give it more structural integrity. I think I might finish it with autobody paints. I feel pretty good about this plan, though I do have more finishing methods still lined up to test. There’s a chance this all might have to wait a bit, since I’ve heard talk of another woodfiring, but I can’t wait to turn this research into a finished piece!

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– www.evafunderburgh.com –

So with that in mind, I’ve been giving away fliers, to the artists who shaped my time at Guldagergaard, to fellow studio mates, and good friends. I’ve been selling them as well, through my studio, the Island Gallery on Bainbridge, and through Etsy.

It’s been so cool, watching them go on to new lives. It’s amazing to me to see something made by my hands disperse and bring happiness all over. On a whim, I made a google map of all the place they’ve gone. It’s made my day, and it will just continue to be exciting as it keeps filling in with new locations!

View Swarm, 2010 in a larger map

Mette, the wonderful director here at GG, has arranged it so I could install “Swarm” temporarily in a local elementary school. We met with a school official Monday morning, who asked when I could start installing it.  Despite the fact that the pieces were all still in the kiln at the time and the framework was barely started, I decided to be optimistic and said I could start on Wednesday.   This was setting myself up for a lot of work in a short period of time, but then again, that’s what I’m here in Denmark to do!

As soon as I got back from the school, it was time to get the kiln unloaded and get myself to work.  While I was fairly happy with how my work came out, but it  turned out the soda firing held some surprises. The main one was the way that Jody’s work reacted to the firing. Her work is made of thrown porcelain which has been cut apart, manipulated, and reassembled. While it’s visually all about movement, we weren’t expecting the fact that the pieces themselves moved a huge amount during the firing! Every nearly single piece warped, fell or tilted. The mystery of the overly long and difficult firing was solved when we discovered that two to three pieces of hers had fallen into the firebox, blocking off most of the path of the flame into the kiln. In the end though, she seemed ok with some of her results, and started to get excited about some of the new creations that formed as a result of the firing.

On my part, I didn’t loose a single piece, which is a very luck situation. Overall, while I’m still not sure soda firing is really for me I’m still quite happy with the results of this firing. It seemed to have work especially well with Swarm. Anyway, as soon as my pieces were out of the kiln, I got to work on the installation framework.  It was my plan to make a wooden frame containing a metal grid.  Each flier would be hung from parallel strands of fishing line, which would run up to a stick that’s a bit longer that the mesh work of the grid.  That way, hanging each flier from the grid would be as simple as slotting the stick through the grid and letting it catch, like a button on a coat. While this worked as well as I hoped it would, the frame and hangers took no less that five trips to the hardware store along with many many hours of very hard work. I also totally owe my friend Rachel Van Wagoner who spent several hours helping me string fliers on fishing line.

However, in the end, everything came together for Swarm.  I’m extremely happy with how it’s worked out. It’s taken weeks of hard work and hours spent walking up and down a ladder, but I think it’s all worth it.  This idea of thing hanging together in space is one that I keep coming back to, much like my city beasts.  In fact, my parents recently reminded me of a ninth or tenth grade math project, where I tried to build a three dimensional diagram of the golden spiral using ping pong balls and fishing line inside a plexiglas cube.  The end result was giant, clunky, and awful looking, but evidently planted some thoughts about space and sculpture that have stayed with me to this day.  It’s wonderful to finally have created something that properly explores those ideas. Here’s a brief video tour I made of it. The video accidentally got shortened by flickr, but I’ll be making a longer one with proper lighting soon.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading back to the school for an opening reception, complete with snacks, tours by some of the older students, and music sung by the students in the grand tradition of Danish fantasy ballads! It also apparently will include a speech, by me, to the students. I better go figure out what I’m going to say and see if I can finally manage to pronounce Guldagergaard in such a way that it doesn’t cause all Danes in the vicinity to burst into laughter.