Monday Morning Out of the Kiln

Functional Fossils

The small figures on these espresso cups are made with a sprig/stamp I created last Summer at Penland.


The wonderful heart shape is an antique shoe buckle that belonged to my grandmother, and the snowflake is a plastic window decal we used on a sliding glass door in the '70s. I am currently a little obsessive about finding new patterns and textures for stamps. "Mom, where's the toothbrush holder?" I hear from the bathroom. I'm using the bottom of it to make another stamp. Combining the impressions of old objects and new images feels archaeological. I feel like I'm making fossils.

Porcelain tile 6x6

This will be centered over the kitchen sink....surrounded by 2 rows of the glass tile. I hope the color and calculated shrinkage work out. I wanted to imitate what you see in the other direction when you look out the window to the beautiful woods. It's firing now. Anticipation....

Surfaces

So it's always fun to add a bit of color to a previously carved tile or to hold a loaded brush very lightly against a stamped texture and watch the color flow into the form like a natural puddle. I hope everyone's having as much fun at work....but I do think I'm lucky that way.

so many stories

There are so many stories to tell, beginning with this one.
(Is what is written on the cup above.) Narrative qualities can be both liberating and confining. Form has a language all its own, though.

"In another Lifetime, you and I...."

"In another lifetime, you and I...."

Did you really say that?
I am a vessel.
Lifetimes flow through me.

Ladies and Amateurs

This is the box which houses the carving tools I sometimes use. They were my great-grandmother's, then my mom's, and now mine. I giggle every time I open it. That is: I both giggle and sigh to think of the barriers and assumptions women confronted when they just wanted to make things, or how impossible it was to transcend the rank of amateur if you happened to be a lady. I also think it's very wonderful that the ladies in my family went ahead and used these tools and others to keep making things anyway.

'Back into the studio after re-arranging, cleaning, re-assessing.
Beading things that have been around for awhile, moving work out to Downtown Books and Espresso, considering how being a mom has taken precedence over making things, feeling good about that....missing my friend Hedi who was always strong enough to make her work and be a parent to my three brothers. Family. Considering how different our family was, unique in our own way as each family is, a family of artists. I see them now in the objects they made, held, and touched. Thank you, Hedi.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,,,,"

"When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn".
I grew up in my mother's studio, playing with clay, paints, linoleum, and lots of other materials in the beautiful woods of rural Chatham County, Georgia. Mom was a commercial artist who had first learned from her grandmother how to draw and paint. Because my father was a lithographer and the medium intrigued me, I took myself to the University of Georgia to study with a wonderful Tamarind printmaker, Charlie Morgan. I ventured into clay there, too, which has been my primary medium since grad school. I share a studio in the Lowcountry of South Carolina with one of my favorite artists, my daughter.

Penland Again

We're headed to Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina tomorrow. We'll be assisting photographer David Ramsey as he takes pictures for the Annual Benefit Auction catalog. Our first chance to see and handle the wonderful work that will be auctioned in August. Penland is always inspiring to me, even when I'm not in a class. Creative people, compassionate people, makers, mountains, oh and good food..... Check it out at www.penland.org.

Tooth Fairy Revisited

I want more magic than they tell me exists, more sparkling enchanted moments, more mysterious circumstances of good fortune and wishes coming true. And I want this right now and happily ever after. Don't you?

I want peace. Don't you?

Here she is photographed by the wonderful David Ramsey! (Thank you, David!)
Four and twenty blackbirds. Can you imagine?

Reserve Your Eggs!!

Celebrating hope and rebirth, celebrating Easter.....
Following our annual tradition, I am making ostrich-size ceramic Easter eggs which can be any color or style and have special details such as names, birthdays, messages....

Order by March 5th, then come to an Easter Egg Showing in our gallery on March 20th to retrieve your egg and to see every one else's.....$45.00 each.

Call or email to reserve yours TODAY!!

February Open House

On February 8th, we invited local friends over to see hearts, birds, vases and other work. It's always nice to clean the studio and focus on the more gallery-like attributes of our quaint storefront. Now, the bags of clay are out again and I'm working toward an Easter Egg show in March. I'm sure I'll make a few dresses, too, while on the Egg roll....
Last Summer we had a very interesting visitor:

Living creatures appear and remind me that the objects I make can never compare to their beauty and vitality and importance.

That said, I am making eggs. The unmistakable reference to nature is a big part of their power, the metaphor of rebirth.
Their decoration and ornamentation is a celebration of fancy and Springtime, which after a long, cold winter will be WONDERful! The decoration also celebrates another aspect of my artistic heritage. My mother was the absolute Easter Egg Queen, sometimes spending more than an hour on one little boiled or hollowed-out chicken egg, painting, resisting, and forgetting all about time as she showed me in yet another way how to be.

Water Weights

I came to this image last Summer. Sending a weight or projecting my own gravity into a bottomless ocean.
The little shelter afloat. (Someone asked me, "Are they outhouses?" I answered, "No. The people who live in these don't even have outhouses." Like: what could be outside; the experience is in here. Or is it?

I like the way the OM sounds so much like "home".

The red tile is 4in x 4in. The salt-fired tile is 8.25 sq in. The charcoal drawing is 5 x 7.