I have a whole selection of shows coming up this holiday season. Hopefully, it should be fun for one and all.  Here’s a quick run down of the line up. Further details will come for all of these as the dates get closer.

Eva Funderburgh at Snow Monkey’s House of Monsters!

1205 East Pike street, Suite 1A, Seattle WA

November 12th through December 3rd, opening reception November 12th

Snow Monkey’s is a new gallery that just opened in the Capital Hill neighborhood of Seattle.  It’s an awesome little place, focusing on strange great art,  handmade stuff, with a smattering of amusing things from Japan.  I’ll be showing off a selection of fun work, focusing on saggar fired stuff I made over this summer.

The Island Gallery’s Holiday Good Times

100 Madison Avenue, Bainbridge Island WA

December 4th through 31st, Opening reception December 4th

The Island Gallery is a long time favorite of mine.  They’re located across Puget Sound on Bainbridge Island, and focus on the finest woodfired ceramics, wearable textile art, and beautiful hand made furniture.  This December they’ll be displaying off a selection of my newest woodfired work – so new they’re still in progress right now! I’ll be sharing the stage with their annual fashion show.

Florentia Clayworks 4th annual Holiday Sale!

218 Florentia st, Seattle WA

December 11th, 12th and 13th.  Opening reception/ party on the 11th.

Florentia Clayworks is my shared studio space, where a total of 8 clay artists toil away making cool things.  We’ll be showing off (and selling) of those cool things over that weekend, along with consuming mulled cider, hot cocoa, and delicious wine.  Come by for a peak into the world of clay! I’ll also be holding a silent auction of one or two of my favorite pieces, and donating 50% to charity.

This weekend, I have a two person show opening at the Northwinds Art Center and Gallery, in Port Townsend, WA.  It’s a neat little gallery, in a neat little town.  Port Townsend is the city that thought it was going to be Seattle, back in the 1880s, before railroads. Once it became clear that Seattle was to be the major port for the area, all development stopped in Port Townsend. In the late 1980s, everyone realized that there was a very cool perfectly preserved Victorian seaside resort two hours from Seattle, and it’s been hopping ever since.
The show will be with Don Tiller, and will be up for the whole month of August.  There’s going to be a a variety of events going on during the month, with an art walk reception on the 1st of August, a Saturday, and a coffee talk on friday the 7th.  I won’t be able to be there for the art walk reception, but the coffee talk should be fun.  Don Tiller and I will both take some time to talk about our work and the process of creating it at 7pm at the gallery.

I just swung by the gallery dropping off work, and everything is looking great.  My work is a selection of some of the best larger pieces from the past year or so, along with some new, saggar fired work.  Saggar firing is a technique that is very reminiscent of the pit firings often seen in southwest native American pottery.  It’s a technique that I’d long been curious about, and have finally been exploring.  It serves as a good counterpoint for woodfiring, since it very similar in unpredictable nature.  I’ll do a post about the whole process pretty soon, assuming I can stay out of the studio long enough to write it up!

I’m also trying something new this show.  I’m making a flickr set of all the work, and making everything available for purchase online.  Each piece will have its purchase information and the contact information of gallery manager listed in the description.  If you see something you’re interested, just send the gallery an email, and they’ll take if from there!

I’ve been back from Japan for a week or two now, working on sorting through the 1200 photos I took over there, and starting to get back to work in the studio.  Now that the the whole crazy japan trip has finally sunk in, and I’m no longer jet lagged, I figured I should try and compile my thoughts on Design Festa into a blog post.

Design Festa was great, but really, unlike anything I could ever imagine.  I think for the most part, nothing in my experiences could have given me an idea of what I’d gotten myself into.  (Think one part art fair, one part Japanese school festival, one part burning man.)  It really boiled down into 16 hours of interacting and talking with people, across a culture and language barrier, about art.  And when it comes down to it, that’s pretty cool.

Design Festa is made up of a maze of tiny little art cubicals.  There’s about 1500 booths, many with different artists each day, so it’s practically impossible to see everything.  It’s loosely divided by type, ranging from 2-D art to clothing to a darkened zone for lit sculptures and installations.  Artists get a chunk of floor – either one or two tatami mat’s worth  – and do anything that they might want with it.  I get the feeling the more people get their both to show off their work then to make a profit from the show.  Installation, performance art, and just hanging out were quite common. In fact, the booth walls (which you had to rent) were designed for you to attack with ink, acrylic, and almost anything you wanted.

There were also several stage areas where you could sign up for a time slot.  There was a constant stream of really cool and different performances going on at all time, from 20 pieces bands to very happy girls playing taiko.  There were a surprising number of different ninja gymnastics dance groups.  (They did backflips to music while holding swords, in ninja garb)

While I’d seen photos of all the individual parts of the show online, there was nothing out there that could give me a feeling of what it would be like to actually have a booth there. In the end, while there were a number of things I might have changed, I would go back again in a second. It was just so cool to be able to interact and talk with artists and art fans from all over the world.  (I speak a little Japanese, and folks generally spoke English).  I got to talk about using a traditional Japanese kiln in America, about ceramics, and about Seattle. I got to watch the crowds streaming by, in everything from pink frilly dresses to Godzilla suits, to a troop of knights in armor (Europeain, not samurai). In short, it was an amazing chance to spend a weekend dedicated to art, in all of it’s strange, strange forms.

I recommend spending some time exploring the design festa flickr pool – there was so much more stuff out there than I could photograph.

I’ve been running around for the past few weeks, trying to get everything together for Design Festa vol. 29, one of Asia’s biggest art events.  Design Festa is a twice yearly free for all of art, with 15,000 booths of art, 70,000 visitors, live music, and all sorts of art related things.  Tomorrow, we leave to fly across the world and to set up our little booth in Tokyo Big Sight, the largest (and possibly strangest looking) expo site in Japan.

The fair will open at 11am on Saturday the 16th and should be a crazy non-stop art experience.  We’ll be in booth D-001, the very first booth in the main Atrium.  We’ll be pretty easy to spot.  I’m bringing 15 critters, 1000 postcards, and 200 business cards (assuming the business cards get here in time).  Should be an awesome weekend.

I’m not sure what the wireless internet set up will be like in the convention center.  I’m going to be taking photos non-stop and will be trying to upload them as I go.  I should also be posting to twitter when I can, so feel free to follow me.  In addition to our time in Tokyo, we’ll also be spending a while in Kyushu and Shikoku.  We’ll also be stopping by the studio of Mike Martino, an American working as a traditional potter in Karatsu, Japan. All in all, this should be an incredible trip!

I’ll be having a couple of pieces in a pretty exciting show in Sewickly, PA. The show is called “The Day after Tomorrow”, and consists of the work of five artists – . I’m really excited about it, but won’t be able to make it back to PA for the opening, which will be today, Friday, March 6th.  I’d put off posting it until I could find links for the other artist in the show. I think it was worth it, it looks like there’s going to be some really cool stuff!

Here’s the the other artists:

Michael Angelotti – Really incredible beautiful organic crystalline glaze forms.  Picture the most awesome geode ever, crossed with what you encountered last time you cleaned out the fridge.

Jae Yong Kim – I just linked to her profile at the Pittsburgh Society for Contemporary Craft.  Her piece there is an incredable wall installation of giant platinum snails.

Vince Palacios – a beautiful investigation of simple forms, with pieces that could be either teapots or machined parts for large machines.  They’re covered completley in intricate detailed decals and underglaze.

Gregory Byard is also in the show, but I couldn’t find a website for him.

Anyway, if you’re in the are, check it out! It promises to be an excellent show!