Graduation, Summer Trips, and Studio Time

My husband got me a new desk chair for my birthday and it finally got here. It is so so so nice that it make me want to sit at my desk and type. So, I guess that's a good reason to blog after not having much interest in doing so for quite a while. My old chair has migrated to the studio where it joins a silly amount of seating options for different heights of focused work.

three "stacks" finished (left to right) last fall, this summer, last summer 

seating options in my studio (not visible here: a cushion on the ground)

This summer has already been pretty busy, and not just in the studio. My daughter graduated high school in June, so family and friends came to visit. 

proud parents of a new high school graduate

Since my brother's kids hadn't been to Yakima before, they decided to add a trip to Portland and Crater Lake in Oregon, and the Redwoods and California coast so my daughter and I tagged along with my folks for a week long trip. 

with my favorite red-headed nephew at Glacier Lake

my favorite brown haired nephew as a River Otter

The scenic highlight of which was probably the tidepooling in Northern California. We went looking for nudibranchs, which we didn't see, but we did see starfish, crabs, snails, sponges, anemones, and things I can't name. 

sea star heart

tide pooling near Crescent City

my favorite bit of the tidepool

Then we came back to Yakima for a week of getting stuff glazed and finished for the Yakima Art Festival in late June. I was most interested in creating some bells with jingly bits based on what I saw at NCECA in March.

at Yakima Art Festival

new bells this summer

Then my daughter and I took another trip to New York, where we spent 6 hours each at the Met and the American Museum of Natural History (and Hayden Planetarium), watched three Broadway shows, and also visited the Guggenheim, MOMA, the Museum of Art and Design, and the Museum of Broadway. We were in NYC for Alison's graduation present: Hamilton on Broaway, but our other shows were just as impressive! Six was great, Hamilton was amazing, and Hadestown knocked our socks off. It was a great (packed, exhausting, hot, fun, educational) week.

before Six on Broadway

After Hamilton on Broadway

We also got 30,000 steps one day (walking from our hotel through Central park to and from the Met. We had some really good food and got to experience Times Square during the World Cup (and Taylor Swift's wedding) and Hell's Kitchen in 101 degree heat. 

Our favorite thing about the Guggenheim

a very large cat near Rockefeller center

pretty sure this guy was in Harry Potter

we took the most picures at the American Natural History Museum

including these Mayan Bricks with drawings on them

and this bronze model of...one of my scuptures, I guess?

The Hall of Biodiversity was our favorite room at the AMNH

Loved (but didn't take many pictures of) the "Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley" at the Museum of Art and Design

Last week we were back to Yakima, happy to be in only 86 degree weather, and ready to make some work. I dove into some studio building projects, while my daughter balanced her time between college preparations and helping me in the studio (mostly seiving glazes and cleaning, which are both much appreciated.

First underglaze layer done before Yakima Art Festival

second underglaze layer done before the NYC trip

Glazing done after NYC, but waiting on more work to fire the kiln

I usually come into the summer super excited to work on something in the studio. This year I have already been working on tall stacks. These are coil-built pieces that have been consistint of two or three sections stacked on top of each other. I want them to be taller than me, but I have kiln size limitations which mean that I can't fit anything taller than about 25" or wider than about 20" in my home kiln. What that means is that I have to figure out how to make them strong enough to stack and hold their wet weight while building, fire safely without cracks, and stack securly after firing. 

underglazing stacks, waiting on the last firing for the top section, then paper

I had some challenges last summer with stacks cracking, so during the academic year, I tested out some new approaches to strengthen the bottom edge and some new clay bodies. I cracked two of my tests, but the other two seem to be ok so far.

this clay cracked pretty badly in the firing

Currently, I am building two stacks. I have the base basically done on one, and have started the middle section.  To this, I've added the structural challenge of some side openings designed to hold some large bulbs. I've been working from a sketch, making adjustments as I turn a drawing into three-dimensions. I am hoping the additional challenge of adding these elements to the form won't result in cracks during firing.

one of the two stacks I'm working on now

sketched plans for the bulbs on this form

The second stack I am working on now has the added challenge of a twist. I feel very comfortable building twisting, turing, cantilevered coil forms in one go, but they are trickier to make work when the forms are segmented. In the past, I've used epoxy and wooden internal supports to keep the pieces together, but I want to get to the point where the pieces can hold themselves up without other media. I am starting small, with the plan to work my way up to more complex forms.

a bit of AMNH inspiration (after the fact) for some spiral sculptures

I have been working on these two forms for about 9 days and anticipate they may not be done building until at least late next week. I am excited about them and enjoying both what I am learning and the progress I am making. It's nice to spend some studio time just trying stuff without a tight deadline.

Cleaning Bike Parts

Remember earlier this year when I realized I could get an assistant to all the boring work of recycling clay and cleaning the studio? And then remember how I got a studio assistant and it was great? I still have an assistant and it's still pretty great. She's been working throughout the summer, and though I haven't talked about her here, she has allowed me to focus on my work instead of devoting 3-4 hours a week to cleaning and recycling clay.

This is how I work: all the tools, all the trimmings, all the bike parts and all the sprigs shoved together on the table behind the piece I'm building.

My assistant has, as originally expected, recycled clay for me. Somehow this job never seems to diminish. How do I have so many stashes of dry or sorta dry clay? I think she might get it all done by September. Anyway, she has also vacuumed, cleaned underglaze brushes and tools and adjusted my storage shelves so I have actual room to work.

Ooh, look, a shelf for bisque-ware!

More recently, she's started helping clean my bike parts. In the first year of my bike project, SRAM sent me a box of 100 bike parts. Each part was individually packaged, clean and separated from all the other pieces. Interestingly there were four of every part and quite a range of colors.

Look at all the clean, colorful and duplicated bike parts from SRAM.

Last year, during my sabbatical, most of my bike parts came from Revolution Cycles. I very much appreciate their generosity, but free parts do come with a cost. I had to clean the greasy, dirty bike parts myself before I could use them. I also had to take some clusters of pieces apart to get to the piece I wanted to use.

Yuck!

This year I asked my assistant if she would be willing to clean the gears. It wasn't exactly what she had signed on for, but I'm paying her and the work isn't so much difficult as it is boring, dirty and annoying. She cleaned a whole stack of gears very thoroughly using paper towel, an old toothbrush and some Simple Green.

Clean, shiny gears. They seems to look cleaner when someone else does the work.

Later I introduced her to my friend, the brush grinder in the garage. The wire brush spins while someone holds the gear against the bristles. It is important to wear gloves because the sharp gear can kick back a little and cut into the hands. My assistant bravely used the brush grinder last week on a day when the temperature was close to 100 degrees F. We haven't installed a garage air conditioner, so it was a bit toasty in there.

Safety first: always wear work gloves when holding sharp objects up against fast spinning machines.

Of course the grinder in the garage isn't great for winter weather either. Last December I was cleaning chains using the grinder. I wrapped the chains around a gear so that the teeth held the chain in place against the brush. I could hold the gear and the back end of the chain a safe way aways from the sharp, painful bristles. It worked well except that the garage was frigid. With the grinder blowing more cold air at me, I lost feeling in my fingertips even though I was wearing gloves. Alas, suffering for art.

Studio Assistant Week One

Earlier this year I started thinking about hiring a studio assistant to help me in my home studio. As so often happens with this blog, writing about a problem or an issue helped me realize something important about that issue. This particular writing made me realize that I have actually reached the professional level and now is the time to hire an assistant.

The studio gets fairly messy during the academic year and I usually spend about a week cleaning it before I can get to work in the summer.

Of course the blog is also public, so as soon as I realized I was ready to hire an assistant, I had a volunteer . I wrote about the idea on a Saturday and had a student suggest herself for the job as soon as I walked into the school studio on a Monday.

my wooden shelves today--after putting them back together and putting work back on them

Last week was finals week, as well as the week before June Art Fest so I had a lot to do and little time to do it in. My new studio assistant came over on Friday morning and got right to work. Its funny, I wanted to hire someone to help do the cleaning so I could do other things. Somehow I didn't realize how very helpful this would be. Not only did she clean and help me pack for Art Fest for 3 hours, but by working hard herself, she kept me mostly on task. if I had set out to clean for 6 hours, I would have gotten bored and taken breaks and gotten distracted looking at shiny objects in the studio or making tough decisions about which stack of bubble wrap to use for packing. Instead, I felt like I had to stay busy because she was staying busy. I think I got more than 6 hours of work out of the two of us in just 3 hours.

tedious jobs like packing lawn sticks are perfect for me to assign to an assistant

I was also able to give her the more tedious tasks. I figured she was compensated for boredom--and since she hadn't done all of these things many many times before, she would get as bored as I would doing them. I had her clear my wooden shelves and take them apart so I could take them for my booth this weekend. Then I had her pack up the stray lawn sticks (scroll to bottom of linked page for image) so I could take them and so they'd be off the work surfaces. Finally she collected tools from around the studio and worked on recycling some random clay I had left over from who-knows-when. As I type it out, it doesn't sound like three hours worth of work, but it sure was.

my new shelf of sorted (and sorta clean) bike parts

Meanwhile I continued the long process of sorting bike parts. Most of the shelf in my lean-to storage area is now devoted to boxes of gears, chains, ball bearings, pedals and other parts. This project took me days of work. I completed it when the studio assistant was here.

bike and mechanical parts (and some hardware) in my lean-to storage area

The upshot of my assistant's first day was that I got my show stuff packed up and also got some work done for school that afternoon. I haven't gotten much work done in the studio since then, because I had family visiting and a couple of jobs for work (still--why am I not being paid for this?), but my new studio assistant will be here tomorrow, meaning I should be ready to start building for real next week.

Mike Hiler in our shared booth at June Art Fest

June Art Fest went ok. The weather was nice and people came, but I didn't sell much. I did get some good ideas for new work based on some discussions with folks who visited the booth.