Bulb Installation in YVC Faculty Office Area

my installation at YVC

Over spring break I installed some of my work at YVC. This work is in the hall of the faculty office area in the art building. I also have some sculptures in the front office area and plan to put up another wall installation elsewhere in the office area when I have the time.

Chris Otten's photography in the office area in our building

The Yakima art faculty requested this permission from YVC's new interim president earlier this year. The main halls in the building have built in display cabinets and temporary display walls for student work, as well as a large permanent mural painting and the etched glass and cement of the front entryway, but the halls of the faculty area have always been very plain. We wanted an opportunity to have the visual arts faculty have our work up (and somewhat protected) as both a pedagogical tool, and just to make the space more interesting. 

 Our office hallway waiting for more work from Kayo

Chris and I installed work over break and Kayo plans to install hers in the summer, which may be when I put up my other work.  It's nice to be able to show the students what we do in our own work, since during class that's not our focus, nor do we usually have the time or setup to do so. However, I already know that I can use some of my pieces as reference for students who are asking about more complicated or just less routine techniques or surfaces.

these paper templates help me "quickly" apply the grid to the wall

I've done this format of installation before: 10 rows and 10 columns of bulbs in a grid. I already had the grid planning paper ready to go, so I used that, but later learned that the lowest part of the installation might be in the way for the carpet cleaner, so I have an email in to facilities asking whether they'd like me to adjust the installation to be higher and shorter (but longer).

My bulbs and other stuff on the wall at home

When I went to install the work I was surprised to discover that I didn't really have a lot of extra pieces. I grabbed several boxes of bulbs from storage in my house, but when I got to school, I realized that some of my resist or politics bulbs were perhaps a little too political to install at work. I ended up pulling work from the wall install at home to use at school.

close up of the bulbs at YVC

The wall installation at school now has abstract bulbs, chemo port bulbs, and some of the bulbs from the resist series that consisted simply of the text of the first ammendment and the constitution. When I got back home, I put up the too-political bulbs, as well as some that I don't like as much, but the home installation has had to be filled out with other hanging work that wasn't originally conceived of as part of this install.

new bulbs in the kiln before firing

With a bunch of ideas bouncing around my head, not a ton of uninterrupted time to spend in the studio during the quarter, and with knowledge that 100 of my best bulbs are at school now, I've been spending the bulk of my home studio time making news.

new spiky bulb with sesame seed texture

I've entirely lost track of how many bulbs I've made this year. I have about 8 on the shelf in my studio and a handful more in progress, but I've been loading work into a bisqe kiln at home for at least a month. I was originally thinking I had enough to fire, but when I loaded, I realized I had more space and some work drying in the studio, so I decided to wait for that. Once those pieces were dry, I had a few more nearly ready, so I wanted for those. I repeated this cycle an least 5 times, until I'd used all my kiln shelves. 

new bulb waiting to be fired

I fired the work yesterday and I know from the view from the top that there are at least 15 pieces in the kiln (because I can see them), but it will be a big surprise this evening or tomorrow when I unload at discover how many pieces I need to glaze and finish. In fact, yesterday I boxed up a bunch of functional work to put in storage where the bulbs had been because I know I'm going to need more shelf space for storing these pieces while I glaze them.

new bulb made from extruded cylinders

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.

Faces and Hands on Bulbs

my screaming face and some hands holding money and bills

I've found myself making a lot of faces and hands this summer in my bulb forms. Last week I made some bound hands, and a face with no eyes. This week I made several pieces with hands and one face with another in the works. 

the start of my screaming face

On the weekend I did some sketching because I wasn't feeling full of ideas at the end of last week. Among many others, I ended up with an image of a woman in a MAGA hat screaming angrily. In the photo, she was screaming at a protestor or someone who wasn't a fan of Trump. I can't remember, can't find the original image I was looking at, and only sketched the angry woman.

my sketchbook with a screaming lady surrounded by abstract bulb ideas

I decided to try to to capture that scream in the bulb. I've used the bulb form as a head before and was fairly happy with the results, though looking back at it now, it seems much less lively than the ones I've done this summer. 

my face from last year

When I started to sculpt the screaming face, I realized I had a sketch from the side and needed a frontal view. I did an image search for "woman screaming at protestor" and similar phrases to try to find the image I had been looking for and was actually pretty disgusted with what my search results showed me. The vast majority of the results were pictures of a bunch of nude women who had stripped to protest violence against women in Argentina. I don't mind this being among the search results, but it dominated the results for a variety of searches, none of which included references to nudity or gender based violence. I also found images of a woman who apparently was turned into a meme after protesting at the inauguration in 2017. I wasn't able to find the image I had seen the day before, even after searching a variety of different phrases.

the "colorblind" face from last week

Since I wanted an angry, hateful facial expression, and not a crowd shot of women's bodies, I changed my search terms to simply "screaming woman" and later "yelling woman." Perhaps predictably, the first results are images of women who are frustrated, scared or pretending to be screaming in a not-very-convincing way. When I changed my search to "screaming man," I found the angry facial expression I was looking for and had seen on the woman reproduced in my sketchbook. 

Apparently stock men scream in anger and stock women scream only in exasperation or fear. It reminds me of the difference between a female painter's depiction of female violence and a man's depiction of the same subject. (I've linked to Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes and Caravaggio's depiction of the same event. Look how physical the act is in the former and how distasteful and uninvolved the women seem to be in the latter.)

my screaming face, drying

Once I had the reference images, I found the mouth fairly easy to get right, but the eyes were tough. Part of the trouble is that they are scrunched up and in shadow in the photos, whereas the mouth is relatively large and well lit. I actually had to remove the eyes entirely three times before I got them looking how I wanted them. First they were too big, then the bottom lids were too large and the pupils were pointing in the wrong direction, then the top lid was angled in surprise rather than anger. I finally got them close to where I wanted them and let them dry for a while that way, but I made the mistake of cleaning them up a bit once they had dried some. I think the roughness of my penultimate draft is better than the final version. 

the rough draft of the scream after I revised the eyes three times

I know I want to make at least one more face, but I intend to cover the eyes in that one. Now, looking back at my photos in progress, I want to make another attempt at these angry eyes. I figure the practice will be good for me anyway, though I'm also aware of an impending deadline this month. (Aaah!) As of today, I have finished 24 of the abstract bulbs and 26 of the political bulbs. This week felt much much better than the previous two weeks. On Wednesday, I did no studio work and basically just read for the entire day. I felt especially good about the work on Thursday and Friday.