Central Washington Artists' Exhibition Award Winner at Larson Galllery

 

my face bulbs at CWAE this weekend

This weekend was the opening of the Central Washington Artists' Exhibition at Larson Gallery in Yakima. I have two pieces in the show this year, my Chartreucat sculpture and a small wall-installation of face bulbs.

the CWAE program

This is the 64th annual Central Washington Artists' Exhibition and I believe this is the first year in the new Larson Gallery on the new west side campus of Yakima Valley College, behind Taco Bell. The show runs through December 11. The gallery is open Tuesday-Friday 10-5 and Saturdays 12-5.

my installation at CWAE this weekend (I really like the neighboring work by Yu-Hen Dade)

The new gallery is much larger and nicer than the already pretty decent gallery across the street. The new space has multiple rooms, including a totally separate sales gallery with small art and gifts for sale. The new gallery also boasts better parking.

Chartreucat, also at CWAE (picture taken at home)

This was the first year in a bit that I remembered to enter this show. I can't remember if they had a show last year, but it's been a busy couple of years for me. This Chartreucat sculpture was one of several abstract sculptures I started last spring and finished this summer(with one not quite finished yet). I felt pretty good about finding the time to make these pieces.

my award certificate

My wall installation was also built last summer and mostly finished in Spring 2021. This installation won an award, the Jeffery Schaap & Gilbert Young Award, which was great news, and even better when I realized it was a monetary award.

detail with sold stickers Saturday afternoon

The installation features 15 unique face bulbs with a range of features, colors and expressions. When I arrived at the gallery this weekend, a couple was in the process of purchasing a pair of the bulbs. The woman indicated that she liked the masked pieces. Someone asked about the bulbs with plants coming out of their mouths, thinking they were like a scene from Trolls 2 (which I haven't seen).

weeds as speech

I explained that when I made these, I was thinking of the weeds coming out of mouth as a metaphor for hateful language, the way it spreads quickly and chokes out the beautiful flowers or healthy vegetables that might otherwise grow in that space.

invasive choking weeds/speech

Most of the bulbs were specifically created as a reference to the hateful political climate of the past several years. The masks were clearly created post-pandemic, but the screaming faces started showing up before the pandemic in the lead up to the last election.

masked face

 

I believe more of these may have sold since I left the show on Saturday. I was asked to provide some written explanation yesterday for Larson Gallery to use on their social media. It's not up yet, but these may be featured later on Larson Gallery's Facebook or Instagram. 

detail of installation

I'm happy to get these seen. It is sometimes challenging to keep up with teaching, union work, and my own work. Especially when my own work includes making, applying, showing, advertising, and keeping up an online presence here, on my website, and (kind of) on social media. 

my face bulbs and other (abstract) bulbs in my home studio this September

I showed these pieces this summer at my home studio for the Yakima Artists Studio Tour in September, but this was the first year for this show and I think all of us are still kind of gearing back up from pandemic to semi-post-pandemic mode for attending shows and going out in public. It is strange how long it has taken to start to move back to operating how we did before the pandemic.

award page of the CWAE program

After I published this, Larson Gallery added a video tour of the CWAE show:

Face bulbs from Summer 2020/Spring 2021

face bulb, I particularly like the texture that happened on the tongue

At the end of spring I finally glazed and fired a batch of face bulbs that I had made last summer. These face bulbs are (in my mind) related to both my scream/face mugs and the protest/resist bulbs I was working on in 2018. 

installed face bulb group in my studio

 

The academic year, which last year meant moving my studio classes online for the first time, and my AFT faculty union work, meant that I didn't have a ton of time in my studio in summer 2020 because I spent so much time on union stuff.

masked face bulb

I was able to finish these in Spring 2021, in part becacuse I was teaching classes that had moved online in fall/winter and because my teaching schedule is irregular, leaving me with an overload in fall and winter and a slightly lighter load in spring.

here the weeds coming out of the mouth are meant to be a metaphor for toxic or hateful speech

I wasn't able to get good pictures of these in May, though, because I couldn't figure out how to set them up in my photo booth. They are designed to hang on the wall, so I needed to wait until I had a wall available.

the temporary wall of bulbs in my studio for the tour

If that part of the house weren't being remodeled, I probably would have hung these up in the laundry room/hallway where I've had a wall set up for bulbs like this ever since my home was the the Larson Gallery's Tour of Artist Homes and Studios in 2013. 

hand on face bulb (sold)

This wall was unavailable for most of the summer as my husband was remodeling and repainting first the laundry room, then the hallway, and now he's moved on to the stairway. 

I don't remember if this was actually based on 45, but the expression seems familiar 

During the Yakima Artist's Studio Tour over Labor day, I set up my temporary walls in the studio and in the yard. These temporary walls were made for a show I did at Yakima Makers' Space (now the Collab Coffee space) in 2017. 

temporary wall installed on the fence in the yard

Hanging these temporary walls on the slightly open drawers of my work table in my studio and over the fence in the yard worked really well. And I was finally able to get some photos of these hanging like they are supposed to.

too much shine :-( but this one is modeled on a colleague's face

I probably need to work on getting some photos of the work hung up and with better lighting. The dark and glossy pieces in particular didn't photograph as well as they might have because I just used the room lighting.

again, weeds from the mouth

The light colored bulbs look better, but they could do with some intentional lighting and maybe the use of a tripod.

bulbs on the wall (detail)

I could theoretically take care of this now, since I have yet to put one of my walls away, but over the last two weeks I've been sucked into the melee that is the start of the quarter and convocation. 

back on campus, I've really only had one student who has trouble keeping the mask covering the nose

I've been really busy. This quarter I am converting my 100% in-person throwing class to a hybrid class with 2 hours of the week entirely online. I've also been converting the handbuilding class I've taught online this past year into a hybrid class, which is more work than you realize. 

I kind of want to fill the mouth with something

It seems like the conversion to online should be the hard part and the conversion back to campus should be easy, but it requires reconfiguring basically the whole class, including adjusting projects so as to take advantage of the shared space and tools, but also basically every online page and assignment has to be adjusted to remove references to the challenges of working at home, bringing work in to be fired, and how to contact the instructor.

using this form for heads makes such a funny pointy shaped head

Both classes have the added challenge this quarter of needing to adjust to accomodate the new 3' social distancing guidelines we need to observe in the studio. Keeping the student's work spaces and wheels 3' apart isn't particularly difficult (nor is it new), but keeping myself 3' away at all time while showing them tools and techniques and checking what they are working on is tough.

more bulbs on the wall together

The start of the quarter also encompasses a lot of faculty union work. We've had meetings and discussions with our membership, administration, and quite a few different work groups on special topics. 

the matte texture photographed failry well

One of our goals this year/quarter is to spread some of the work around to more people so that the workload that falls on my shoulders is reduced. But it even takes work to shift that load. People are stepping up admirably, but there's a lot of information share in my notes and my brain that they need to be successful, so these past few weeks have had a lot of focus on getting folks to where they can take over.

This one hangs a little to the side, like he's yelling at his neighbor

And, of course, everyone has those same start-of-quarter work loads. The union work is incredibly valuable, but all of us do it on top of our full-time jobs, which just makes busy times busier.

in the studio,

This post feels like it will be the last post of my work for Summer 2021. This is a bittersweet time of year, knowing I have to set this work aside for a while. I haven't even finished putting away work from the labor day tour and finding the time to do so is a bit of a challenge.

again, trying to express the nastiness of current political speech

I also know that I had quite a few more posts planned of student work from my online design and handbuilding classes of the past year. Those posts take a bit more effort as I need to check names and permission to share student work as I write them. Posts about my work only require that I take the pictures sometime and then write whatever I'm thinking about. As time allows, I do plan to add those student posts this year.

I don't have 30 face bulbs, so the rest of the wall was abstract and politics bulbs

The sadness of not getting to do my own work during the school year is tempered greatly this year by the fact that I will get to see my potters and hand-builders and their work in person. Both classes started this past week. Though being back on campus was more exhausting than I anticipated, I think the first week back (especially after 18 months) was always going to be especially exhausting. Going into next week, I am really excited to see what they are able to produce.

Face Bulbs Redux

I like this one where I expanded the mouth in exchange for removing the eyes entirely

Besides throwing plates and citrus squeezers and face mugs, I've also spent a bit of time this summer making face bulbs. I had started these in 2018, and enjoyed making them. I'd say their quality varies significantly based on how much time I am able to devote to each one, and, unfortunately, I'm fairly sure I've left a few half-finished in plastic on my work table for the past two weeks.

I tried to vary the age, gender, and race of the subjects I referenced in making these bulbs. I think I captured the older jowls on this man, but apparently I forgot about teeth.

I spent three days at the end of last week "at" a Zoom workshop, which one would think would be less time consuming than a live workshop, but somehow is just as exhausting. I think there's a lot of value in the in-between times of a live workshop, where you can have important casual conversations about the content during lunch or during breaks. I think these in-between talks are refreshing, while a series of Zoom workshops just leaves me drained. 

This one I did early in the summer. The hand is large and heavy, but I think the message is clear.

I was hoping to get the rest of the bulbs finished last week, but I was worthless after the meetings. I did manage to fire a bisque kiln, and today I have imposed a union ban on myself (so no working on union tasks) so I can get some glazing done. Good thing too, because the stress of writing this blog post is unusually high. Blogger has changed its format over the past few months and today I can't get it to allow me to type plain text--it turns every new line into linked text--and it keeps arbitrarily rearranging my justification.

Speaking of anger and hate speech, this one is based on picture of Trump, who appeared to be mid-curse.

The bulbs, like the face mugs, are trying to capture the general feeling of the past 4 years, and this year in particular (also Zoom and uncontrollable text formatting, I guess). Before COVID, I had been planning to make these screaming faces, but I also had been thinking of having the mouths spewing flames and snakes, as metaphors for the ubiquity of hate speech and general anger in the country today. I also planned to have mouths covered and bound, a bit like I had done in 2018.

It seemed ridiculous to make faces in 2020 and not include one with a mask, though now I wish I made one with the mask worn under the nose.

Once COVID started, it seemed like simply screaming captures one part of what we are all feeling, while specific imagery related to frustrations around speech, racism, and the politicization of mask wearing also fits in. I had planned to make some faces with enlarged coronavirus shapes coming out of the mouths, but I simply ran out of time. 

I made a press-mold from some bindweed we ripped out of the yard, but without the twining vines, its hard to recognize, maybe color will help.

I did attempt some pieces with weeds growing out of the mouths, but I'm not happy with how they turned out. I'm not sure the plants are recognizably weeds and I didn't make them appear to grow in any convincing way. Additionally, there's some issues with fragility in the vines. Ultimately I think I'd be better off making the weeds from another medium, like Sculpey, but I can play with glazing in these beta tests.

Here I added the vines, but I didn't attach them particularly well so they're going to break.

I haven't been working with these faces long, once you factor in the breaks. In general, I think the forms and expressions are improving, even if individual bulbs are duds. I keep saying it, but I'd like to spend more time on them. Without a show coming up as a deadline, and with a number of other responsibilities encroaching, I'm not even sure that I'll get these glazed before school starts. 

I'm generally happy with my progress on squinty eyes and most of my later noses. proportions are funny on these, since the bulbs themselves aren't head shaped. 

My time was so interrupted towards the end of July, that I left two of these out to dry without even remembering to put the hanging hole in the back. Luckily I was able to carve it in, but I was kicking myself when I first picked them up to load the kiln.

This one is the screaming mouth with no eyes. I was really annoyed when I flipped it over on the way into the kiln, but I guess I'm glad I checked before loading.

More Throwing: Lemon Squeezers, Plates, Scream Mugs, and Kid Lessons

Dry plates waiting to be fired

At the end of June, I told myself that I could have all of July to myself before I started thinking about prepping classes for the fall. It didn't work out quite as planned, and I spent more time working on work related stuff, but I did keep my promise not to prep classes until August. Tomorrow, then, I start class prep.

Citrus squeezer parts thrown, before carving

In July, I managed to throw regularly and spend some studio time sculpting, too. It wasn't as productive a summer as some, based on what I made in the studio, but I was glad to get the time despite the chaos of this particular summer. I threw mostly plates, mugs, and lemon squeezers, with a few odds and ends we needed for the house.

Citrus squeezers (both carved and coiled ridges)

I managed to throw enough that I ran out of throwing clay. I tried throwing with some sculpture clay I had hanging around. I know I want to glaze all the work at cone 6, and my only other option was some recycled scrap clay that is about half low fire clay. I tested this recycled clay at cone 6 and it didn't work well.

Bottom of a trimmed plate in sculpture clay: holes are from grog, the hairs are from a clump of nylon fiber

The sculpture clay is heavily grogged (grog is ground up fired clay) and has nylon fibers (for building and drying strength) in it, both of which are nice for sculpture, but pretty gross for throwing. The clay looks especially rough when trimmed. Throwing was actually fine, but the texture is certainly noticeable. I'm a bit concerned about how this clay will fire, but I didn't really have brain space for sculpture that week.

More citrus squeezers in sculpture clay

I've since ordered some replacement throwing clay, so if I can squeeze in some studio time in August, I can make some more mugs. If the plates don't work in the sculpture clay body, I can also remake them.

Screaming face mug in progress

I spent some more time on a few screaming face mugs. I have four in progress and about three in the kiln I loaded today. I've discovered the certain features tend to come easier to me. Specifically, I have been having trouble with thin lips. I have been working from photographs and the flat image leaves some information out for the transition to three dimensions. 

Poorly rendered Trump on the right

I've been trying to capture Trump's face in one of the mugs and one of the bulbs, but I keep struggling with something about the face, either the lips or they eyes. The anonymous faces might simply be easier because I don't mean them to look like anyone I can recognize.

Kids' throwing lesson

I also took one exhausting day and gave a clay lesson to my daughter and the neighbor girls (ages 8-12). The lesson went fairly well. We all wore masks and kept the door open and the fan on in the studio. I had all of us throw on bats so we could take turns. (I also had saved out some small pieces of throwing clay so the kids didn't have to use rough sculpture clay which would hurt their hands). 

Kids' throwing lesson

I showed the girls how to center, then let each one try. I ended up helping them with that step, but they mostly didn't need my help for throwing or for trimming (other than getting the clay centered for trimming). All three girls managed to throw and trim a small bowl and I managed to get some help from all three in cleaning the shockingly messy studio afterwards, but it wasn't until this evening that the studio was fully cleaned and recovered after the experience!