Handmade & Elegant for Spring: Weddings, Mother’s Day…You!
My show and sale includes gallery-quality pottery as well as “aesthetic” and “minorly flawed” seconds. Early birds claim the best finds! We are about an hour from Framingham, Northampton, and Worcester, MA as well as, Keene, NH and Brattleboro, VT. Click this link for full event details.
Saturday, May 4th, 10 – 5 and
Sunday, May 5th, 11 – 4, 2013
Thank you for supporting creativity, community, and local
by buying and giving handmade.
The 2013 Pottery Invitational Show & Sale at the Worcester Center for Crafts (where I teach adult classes) is April 5th – 7th, 2013. I’m so pleased to be a part of this great two and a half day exhibition and sale that was curated by fellow potters Hayne Bayless and Hannah Niswonger. The show comprises a fantastic group of twenty-one studio potters from New England who will be standing side-by-side with their work as well as demonstrating for the weekend (including me), making this an exceptional event! Visit the link to read all about events within the event, details, and times here.
Artists include Hayne Bayless, Dan Bellow, Molly Cantor, Autumn Cipala, Arthur Halvorsen, Robbie Heidinger, Jody Johnstone, Martina Lantin, Michael McCarthy, Hiroshi Nakayama, Hannah Niswonger, Kiara Matos, Tom O’Malley, Francine Ozereko, Rob Sieminski, Brian Taylor, Sam Taylor, Holly Walker, Tom White, Adero Willard, and myself. It’s a must attend event for my fellow New Englanders!
Every other year or so, I make a small series of wall forms, each more elaborate than the last. At almost 3″ deep, they’re too dimensional to be called a tile, and too soft-looking to be called a box; so “pillow” seems the most suitable term for this round, as they are plumper and poofier than ever before. I really like making these forms. I mean, I really like making these…A LOT. They are my opportunity to explore layered pattern over volume without having to balance function. (Though I make sure they hang easily, and their purpose is adding beauty, so they ‘function’ perfectly!)
I think of these pieces as being collage because I’m assembling disparate pattern as well as layering four different ceramic decoration techniques (slip-sponge, underglaze, slip-trail, and mishima). But I also think of them as little paintings because I’m applying color and texture to a surface; the deco and the canvas are just both ceramic. So, ‘ceramic collage pillow paintings’ ~ perfect for adding a lovely focal point to your home décor, solo or grouped. Or just call them ‘wall candy,’ that suits me and my influences just fine.
This is just the beginning of what’s new for 2013 from my studio, some of which are already available in my online shop. These rich layers have also made their way onto some of my yunomis and large plates, all also debuting exclusively in my Etsy shop in the New Year. More posts on form and deco newness coming up with a few teasing glimpses on my Facebook page in the album New Work 2013.
My studio doubles (quadruples really) as many things when needed: making space, glazing area, gallery, as well as photo room. One of the questions I am asked frequently by fellow makers is do I shoot my own images. I do, and have from the beginning.
My Dad helped me get started photographing my work way back in 1991 with film. (Remember when we called it that and used that stuff?!) Along with my Dad, John Glick (who I assisted/residencied with from 1996-97, and who also shoots his own work, even when large format, 4 x 5 was a tricky medium), helped me understand the settings on the camera, lighting, etc. And it’s really through the same two decades of practicing how to make pots that I’ve had the simultaneous practice of shooting them.
Artwork almost doesn’t exist without images. (These days, maybe nothing exists without images.) Most folks see someone’s work via image (web, books, magazines), many times more than in person, if they ever see it in person at all. The image of the work can be paramount over the work itself, so good, current pix are a necessity. Once I’m ‘in it’, I like the photography part of my studio practice. As the maker, I have a unique idea of how my work should be shot and looks best (from angle to lighting to placement). While I’m making pots, I imagine how they’d be framed in an image and ponder groupings. Someday I would love to have my work professionally ‘styled in situ’ (and am not saying a pro couldn’t do even my simple, standard shots better), but for now, doing it myself also allows me to shoot frequently, so my images for publicity and the web are always current and new.
So, the top image is one I composed and shot for a potential new postcard to illustrate my favorite forms, varied styles, and color pairings. The image below is of me in my studio taken by my hubby for a needed ‘studio shot’ request by NCECA. (The table behind me is where I shot the grouping.) The other images below from my studio are my darling hubby acting as a stand-in for me with our new, shelter-adopted doxie, Hannah, while I try to frame up my shot, and Hannah (the reason I seem to be blogging less) posing with my CM cover when it first arrived. All glimpses from a week-in-the-life of my studio, which isn’t always a pottery-making studio.
I’m delighted to have two pieces included in this outstanding compendium of contemporary ceramics culled from the last ten years of Lark Book’s 500 Series. The curators for The Best of 500 Ceramics were asked to select a specific number of works from all the previous 500 Series books and write a very limited amount of text about a half dozen of them. Lark then selected from among that offering of images and comments. It was a fun surprise to read Linda Ganstrom’s great observations below when my complimentary copy of the book arrived, and a great honor to have two pieces chosen for this volume. Thank you, Curators!
About the book: “This definitive collection features a decade’s worth of memorable ceramic pieces selected from the prestigious and bestselling 500 series. Juried by a roster of acclaimed artists, including such talents as Cynthia Consentino, Beth Cavener Stichter, Richard Notkin, and Sergei Isupov, each piece captures the power of ceramics at the start of a new century. Ceramicists and art enthusiasts alike will treasure the wealth of knowledge offered in this lavishly illustrated keepsake volume as the experts describe what makes a particular vase, teapot, sculpture, or bowl stand out. “
A pictorial collection of what I’ve been working on so far in 2012: revisiting the past, expanding the familiar, and exploring the new. Most of the pieces featured here are available for purchase in my online Shop or Gallery. Click the image to follow the link and read more about each. You can also see where more of my work will be out, about, and online in shows coming up on my Schedule page here.
Flower vessel (Corset series), Lilac pattern
I’m so thrilled to share that this large (18″ h) piece of mine, which was juried into the 19th San Angelo National Ceramic Competition by Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio (who also awarded it a Merit Award), has been purchased by the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts in TX for their permanent collection! Very much a delightful, triple honor. This is the third museum to purchase my work for its collection. The other two are the New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taipei, Taiwan and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Fort Wayne, IN.
This last month has been about allowing (maybe giving) myself time to play. YAY! It’s a rare thing for me because of deadlines and requests; my inherently deliberate pace (‘fast’ and ‘detailed’ are mutually exclusive it seems); and currently, perennials are calling to me like Sirens to abandon my studio and toil away my afternoons with them. I chose to play by re-visiting forms from the past, so it has been Retro Month for me here in the studio. Perhaps I felt a bit guilty for sidelining other responsibilities, or I’m just a masochist, but I apparently chose to re-visit some of the most complicated forms I’ve ever made. Go figure.
The first things I made were six Corset vessels (above). This is a form that is the most distinctive in my reperatoire I think, but is actually not a form I make often. In fact, I haven’t made the size pictured (+/- 9″ h) since 2005 when I was still firing cone 10 soda. For some reason when I moved to mid-range electric-firing in ’06, I scaled them up to 15-18″ and made only a couple every so often. So, it was fun to work on a smaller scale with patterns and polka dots I’ve developed in the last years. Indeed, a big part of the point of Retro Month was to bring my new palette (color and pattern) and accumulated experience to familiar, loved forms.
Next, I made Double-walled Baskets (only three; the one pictured above is my fave). I made these the latter part of graduate school at Ohio University over 10 years ago. I LOVE this form—pouffy walls, upholstered-looking surface, voluminous shape, elegant yet jovial attitude—but it is truly a technical nightmare, basically everything that clay doesn’t like or want to do, particularly in porcelain. While this image was the most “liked” pic I’ve ever posted on Facebook, and part of my style has always been to partially ignore the personality of clay, these lovelies may not be coming to an online shop of mine near you soon. They may have mostly served as a wistful reminder of why I stopped making them last time. We’ll see, but I’m not holding my breath as much as they appear to be.
Lastly, I made sets of Screen vases, which haven’t happened for a handful of years for no particular reason, not since my stripy/dotty phase began anyway. I love how these zig zag together in pairs and trios, pattern flowing from one to the other. These were supposed to be the less laborious end to my month…which made my hubby laugh (with love, of course).
