Epoxy Time

I have a show in Seattle next month, Mechanical Botanicals at CORE Gallery. I had originally planned for this show to feature sabbatical work from last fall, but I was also hoping I might finish some new work this summer. The short work time of the summer months doesn't leave me quite enough time to build, glaze, and put together the complex mixed media work, so I have tried to get it glazed and fired during the academic year.

A clean table surface makes it much easier to clean and organize the parts.

During January I finally got a chance to start putting together the bike parts and the ceramic parts. It had been months since I was planning the pieces, so I had to remember which pieces went with which gear or bike part. I also had to clean the metal parts because several had clay finger smudges on them from when I was building.

Ceramic pieces laid out to measure attachments with bike parts.

None of the pieces are completely finished yet, since all have several levels of attachments. I put one level together and let the epoxy set before it is strong and stable enough to attach the next level.

  

Two levels of one sculpture taped or braced against the windowsill for stability.

A big change I made this summer was on my attachments for my bike wheel piece. I build the bulbs to be slotted in place, so I had to unscrew the spokes and feed them into the holes of the bulbs. I added a bit of epoxy so that they wouldn't slide around.

Bike wheel with spokes passing through the bulbs.