Starry Night

Porcelain tiles....derived, borrowed, appropriated from my favorite art deco picture frame. 3 1/2 inches high or in diameter; fun to "edition" for upcoming sales!

"I'd like to teach the world to sing...."

This little bird is a three-note whistle.

I made it in Brian Ransom's class at the Penland School of Crafts, and last week I took it with two other instruments to the Savannah Arts Academy where the Ceramics teacher turned one of her pots into a flute with my help.
An award-winning science student in the class is making a sculpture based on a sound wave....and after my little demo, he may try to make the sculpture sing, so to speak.
Artists sing so to speak.
And when we share our knowledge, beautiful songs emerge.

Blooming in Savannah

I am in the process of moving my studio to Savannah. Reading and re-reading Feng Shui guidebooks in pursuit of perfect harmony, I am moving little bits at a time from the studio in South Carolina.


The first clay I brought with me was Helios. Just one bag of it. And in pursuit of perfect harmony....I prayerfully make a sphere and push my thumb into the center....pinching a pot. Years ago I started pinching the edges paper thin, returning any pieces that pinched off to the face of the pot as folded flowers. Blooming bowls. Hoping for transparent edges. Loving porcelain. Thinner and thinner with the water and feather-light pressure of my fingers. Little molecules of clay standing up, supporting each other in porcelain gymnastics....It seems fitting that in homecoming I also return to this favorite form.
I want to celebrate and honor blooming. And clay, breathing, earth and water. Air and fire.
See? I return home with the romanticism of the young girl I was when I left. But with clay.

Four Tiles Waterfalling

Water is Heaven to me.

When we speak of "dust to dust" I think we omit an important truth.

That we evaporate.

Some days I feel it already. Don't you?

(Each tile is 4 1/2 x 7 3/4 inches. porcelain, stamped and sprigged and carved.)

Water and Color

I had a wonderful time preparing this drawing for the recent Lowcountry Juried Art Exhibition. The method I'd worked out in grad school helps me feel at home within the boundaries of the picture plane. I enter the place as if it is a room or a clearing out of doors, then I ask myself what and who else are there.

I began with the placement of a piece of fence in the center. I cut masking tape to its dimensions and decided to place a fishing "water weight" or an anchor of sorts way underneath it, as if the fence were sending down its roots to feel for home.

The fence is derived from an old photograph of my grandmother as a child. She stands in front of a long picket fence which separates two places I imagine were familiar to her: the world in front where she smiles toward someone she loves, and the world behind the fence which may have held the safety of her home.

In this drawing, there are two rocks in the water. This is in case the anchor gets washed away and has to hold on to something. The sky is full of the arcs of ascending spirits in flight and the wave and protection of overhanging limbs.

Maybe it's about feeling grounded in a sea of change and mystery. The activity itself, layering color and shape with water and pencil, this is grounding and pleasant.

Tiny tiles

Small wearable tiles are a new obsession. I'm making little drawings and embellishing some of my stamps with a tiny dot here and there and color. My favorites so far are the black and white drawings. So like little lithographs....

EGGS made to order

I hope to make 100 this year for 100 happy people. Each egg is $35. They are slightly oversized or sometimes ostrich-sized. I love painting a child's name on an egg, especially with a birthdate or special message. I am carrying on a tradition; my mother and I spent hours every Easter with intricate embellishments....

Egg-Centric 2011

Creating handmade personalize-able wheel-thrown colorful EGGS again this season. More pictures to come! Order by March 18th to have in your hand by April 15th! They'll make tax day so much more colorful!
It is a pleasure making these for people's children especially! And painting eggs is a family tradition. Mom taught me. Every year!

New Year's Eve

The plaster form I made two summers ago has been sitting in various places in my studio waiting for something to happen. It's a dress/figure, about 20 inches tall, the result of playing and playing in wet plaster. I made it during Tom Spleth's mold-making class at Penland. I even finished casting the mold for it here after the weight of bringing most of it home destroyed my muffler. Last year, I threw out the mold, finally realizing I didn't have the facility/space/knowledge for casting slip. I kept the form, intending to someday throw thin slabs of porcelain against it, cut them before they shrank too much, then wire them back together once fired. Like a dress-maker or restorer.

When New Year's plans were made for my daughter to have two friends over, I realized I probably wouldn't be participating in some of their activities, so the studio loomed accessible for the last hours of 2010. The thought of beginning "production" of the vessels I plan to make in 2011 was somewhat attractive, though the plaster lady silently stood her ground, going nowhere.

It's like those motivational time-management writers and speakers who tell you to imagine you only have a month or a week to live. You cull your list. You do those things you'd always wanted.

It was a wonderful night. I rolled very thin slabs of porcelain and dressed her, then I textured the dress with stamps, stopping a few minutes before midnight for sparklers and sparkling grape juice with the girls. Thirty minutes into the new year, it was back to the studio. My joy was only completed, of course, by having my daughter close by, greeting the new year with her, and knowing she and her sweet friends were having (nearly) as much fun as I was.

Though underslept, I was up with excitement the next morning first to make waffles, then to find places for the seams and holes for sewing the piece together. The twelve fragile sections are in the bottom of the kiln now after two days of finishing. If this experiment doesn't pan out, I may have to learn slip-casting or make some clay molds. Either way, the plaster figure has been touched and not forgotten in 2010, and I had a blast of a New Year's Eve. Tomorrow being the first official "work" day of the new year, I begin production work reinvigorated once more by the versatility and expressive potential of my wonderful medium.