New Work: Listen

 

If I tell you my story, will you listen?

Part of my story lies beneath my skin, beneath my clothes.

Listen if you will.

Who Was Upstairs?

 

"Who was upstairs?" is the title of this cup. 

Like many of us who use ceramic clay these days, I utilize surface of my functional ware as canvas for graphic expression. The main room of a Polish castle I visited in a vivid 1981 dream is a space whose mystery lingers with me still. Large game heads hung with fresh dangling sinews on the wall across from the entry. The space was vast, and our hostess was kind. I didn't sense that this unusual installation was in any way extraordinary in these regions, and I accepted their presence without fear.

Stairs were on this wall behind the heads (See cup.) We didn't go upstairs in my dream; we went left into a room with a coffered ceiling where small prized possessions of the dead levitated just below each coffer.

I believe my Polish biology, my DNA, released these spaces to my visual mind.

Someday I would like to visit Wawel Castle in Krakow. I want to know who's upstairs.

Cups and Bird Bowls

Bird Bowl

I made flocks of bird bowls for sale at the Jepson Center and spent a lovely day in the lobby of this amazing building - designed by Moshe Safdie -hawking my wares.....(pun intended, except that my birds are vegetarian).


And here's one of the finished cups.....with a little underglaze decoration.

Cup

Yunomi

 Yunomi. You know me. A recent obsession. Seeing the shelves near the Penland wood kiln last week, it appears I'm not the only one obsessed. Photos of finished cups to follow.....

Flight

Flight. Monotype. 2012.

Dreams of flying returned after a wonderful Yoga class last Saturday. Sometimes the prints I make when demonstrating for a class become images I like better than the ones I plan and labor over. Serendipity is lovely. Dreamlike. Up-lifting.

Now Showing

I confess: The most complicated piece in this exhibit made it onto the wall only hours before the Opening. And only because of the generous assistance of the kind and very capable folks at SPACE.  48 small angel dresses each on its own special nail....beaded, hung....

Having the work of the past few months (and years) out of the studio and on display - is a great relief and a real inspiration. Long before this show made it up, I realized that some of the big ideas I'd had when we scheduled it would have to wait until "next time". And now, at least in my studio, it is next time. Now is the moment. I am delighted!

This weekend I cleaned out flat files, sorted a beautiful collection of rice and cotton papers, and began to play with transparent water-based printing inks. I also uncovered a large porcelain sculpture and carved and incised. With no show scheduled or planned anytime soon, I relish the short breaks in my teaching schedule as quiet and reflective free time. I do have a few small commissions and orders to fill, several things planned for consignment, but I also have new materials and ideas to pursue that don't have destinations.

Teaching has begun to feed my soul in unexpected ways. The questions students have inspire my own curiosity to push further into explorations of media, materials, ideas. The classroom is a community of artists, and I enjoy being one of them. I want to give them all the information I can find and then some. And in giving, I receive. I am a student at heart, and I grow.

Our exhibit is a 2-person show, curated by SPACE's Debra Zumstein, and my work hangs alongside the lovely photographs of Sam Norgard's dress installations that she makes of natural materials. They are exquisite. I am honored to be paired with her. It is uncanny and beautiful the way each pairing fits together in harmonious color and texture and shape, like perfect dance partners. What a wonderful way to meet another artist!

We are giving a Gallery Talk next month. I look forward to getting to know Sam. I look forward to teaching Printmaking and Ceramics and Drawing. I look forward to quiet moments in my studio. Now.

http://savannahnow.com/accent/2012-09-23/art-soul-scad-armstrong-professors-team-exhibit-inspired-dresses#.UF8cQbKPWSo

Dress for a Rolling Stone

Anything Can Be a Mold for Handbuilding in Clay. All I had to do with these shoe forms was to tear wings from their sides....and turn them into angel dresses. Thanks, Toms'.

 Using newspaper for forming can become especially amusing. Look who's wearing one of my dresses. I hope it still fits once it's fired....Stay tuned.

Preparation. Crows.

There I was in the grocery store parking lot with a bunch of beautiful crows and my camera.
I may have many more birds to follow and pictures to take before I find what I'm looking for.

Several years ago I made a wall-hanging dress called "A Dainty Dish" with 24 sprig-molded black crows on the skirt. It was based on the mysterious feeling I get when I think of blackbirds flying out of a pie for the amusement of some nobles in "Sing a Song of Sixpence". I remember so well calling crows with my brother until they seemed to respond to us, "Caw." I hear Edgar Allen Poe, too. In the grocery store parking lot, this bird stared straight into the camera, and I think the stare implied: "Go home. This isn't about you."

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.

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....