Zombie is officially done. By council of friends his official name is Dr. Billy Zombie Bones, but the piece doesn’t actually have a title. Since everything was pretty much done with the project last Monday, the only real work done this week was creating the base and photographing Zombie.

The base was kind of tricky. My original plan was to create a coil that mimicked a spine and epoxy that to the skull. However, skulls are heavy, coat hangers are hard to bend, epoxy is weak, and apparently I am too, so that plan fell through. However I came up with a stand made from a coat hanger, brick, and a bit of wire that the skull can be taken in and out of, but is also pretty supportive and well balanced.

Next step after getting him all balanced was taking pictures. Pretty straightforward, but I wanted some outside in the spaces where the bits were found, so I balanced him on the stump of a tree that had to be cut down last year and snapped away.

I wish I had some profound end to the semester. My great moment of being proud of my art. But I think with everything going on I think I’m doing good enough just taking the time to be creative. I’m hopeful that I’ll get to glaze my mugs and be proud of them. I want to finish putting together my mysterious locking box and finally have it do it’s thing. Maybe I’ll keep invading the ceramics studio as a visiting student with no business doing art and just being creative. But yeah. I guess this is it.

And for my cleaning project for the last day of class I took the time to brush out my big boy, Popeye. He enjoyed mandatory clean up day.

So there was a disaster with Zombie (he’s become personified). After several attempts at attaching his bone antler (literally for almost two hours) and finally thinking it was on, Zombie took a fall off the kitchen counter and broke. I didn’t realize that his center of balance had drastically changed.

The antler came off, one of the epoxy connections of the antler broke, a bone snapped, and the now epoxied jaw detached. Yee haw.

After a lot of backtracking I was finally able to make progress on Zombie and (finally!) get his super cool bone antler attached and then attach his eyes. It isn’t much, but the dry time on the epoxy makes it a slow process.

Everything is on track to be done by Wednesday. I’m planning to photograph Zombie outside both on and off his base.

So the last 3 weeks not much has happened ceramics-wise but a lot has changed when it comes to figuring out the dynamics of how things are going to work. A lot of my panic about how I’m going to finish my half done work and how the rest of the class is going to play out has subsided, so in general I’m feeling a lot better about things academically.

Since I thrive off of having some sort of creative outlet, when we were given the option of either a glaze tutorial or a project for the remainder of the semester, I instantly went with the latter. I went on my walk to find supplies to repurpose and rethink the next day and was surprisingly faced with a lot of bones.

Like. A lot more bones than I expected to find. And I knew instantly I wanted to do something with them, I just didn’t know what.

The next day I started cleaning them and thinking about the other things I had found and started just holding them and playing with the objects until I landed on an idea I liked, which will be exploring the weird dynamic that exists between nature and suburbia where I live.

I’ve done a little bit of work on my project so far, but with life things (losing job, finding job, working with Alley Cat Advocates, had a termite swarm in my room, vibing playing Animal Crossing, etc.) it really has only been a little bit

So yeah, things are coming together as best they can in this wild time of coronavirus and isolation. I’m hopeful for the rest of this rollercoaster of a semester.

This week was pretty much just a frenzy to finish what I could before the shut down. This meant moving my drying mugs to the bisque shelf and taking the time to glaze my locking box. There’s really not much more to say than that. No complications. I brushed clear glaze over the box as planned and avoided anywhere that might interfere with how it would close or how the pins would rotate.

I came back on Saturday hoping I’d be able to assemble my box and glaze my mugs after finding out we wouldn’t be let in again. The kilns were cool but they weren’t unloaded. I glazed one stray test cylinder I missed earlier in the week.

After that I mopped the glaze room floor, stacked some sponges and left.

I’m feeling a lot of things right now about not being able to finish my work. I know it’s no one’s fault, but I’d be lying if I said I weren’t sad about not getting to finish anything at all especially after finally feeling excited about being close to really feeling like I made something last week. I can’t even imagine what this feels like for everyone else.

So the mugs. The mugs the mugs the mugs. After all the practicing and planning and hoping they would come together, they are DONE!

But before I show a picture of them done I want to talk about the actual process.

Monday, I threw like I have never thrown before. I knocked out 4 consistent cylinders in a row for the first time. I finally felt like I was actually capable of making this mug set come to fruition.

Wednesday I took the amended class time to throw the final cylinder and trim the ones from Monday that were ready.

This brings us to Friday. The marathon day. 9.5 hours of trimming, handle pulling, attaching, tracing, and applying slip to the five mugs.

While I feel like the cylinders may not be quintuplets, they are at least sisters. However, the handles feel more like they share one common ancestor. They’re all similar in shape, style, and attachment, but I think I could have used more practice, instruction, and research in making the thickness consistent. However, all things considered, I’m still proud of the shape of my mugs.

After getting a handle on things, the designs were next (vaguely important note: things were happening in a wild order. Some mugs got handles after others got designs. I just let the wetness of the clay tell me when to do things really).

I drew the designs at home in photoshop representing the five gaits of a Saddlebred to put one on each mug. To get them on the mug I tacked my printouts on with a bit of clay, traced over them with a little rubber tool (that I honestly do not know the name of), then used a nail art brush to trace over that with colored slip. Each mug had 3 so it took a very long time.

Thankfully in all of this craziness, Brooklin was hanging out working on setting up her thesis work and firing the kiln and keeping me sane. She gave me a crash course in Big Bailey to give me a break from the teeny tiny mug work. Blessed be Bronk.

Back to mugs. After 9.5 hours, they were finally done. I’m a little paranoid about the drying process cracking them apart, so they are currently slowly drying on my shelf loosely wrapped in plastic. After bisqing they’ll have a clear glaze on the outside and a white glazed interior. But for now, I love them very much and I am pretty proud of the work I put into them.

In other things this week, I have so many thoughts and takeaways from Kate Johnston today. Even though I was only able to sit in on her workshop during regular class time today, I left thinking so many things.

In more practical takeawats, I realized how much the clay can really take. Like I’ve never seen someone take a tank of gas and basically a massive blowtorch to clay before. Seeing how someone works with large forms and actually builds one is giving me greater confidence moving into the 30″ stack project which almost seems small in comparison to what was made today.

I also found the discussions regarding gender, class, and economics in the art world to be very interesting. Even though I don’t think of myself as an artist, I can imagine that the gender issues within the art world have many parallels to those I faced when studying business based on what was discussed during the workshop; I can’t count the number of times a man was given credit for crunching numbers on group projects that I did statistical analysis for.

The economics and class discussion really started my brain rolling; I would I loved to have hopped in on the conversation, but had so many thoughts (and even now I still have so many things to process). Finding the balance between accessibility and sustainability, basic economic elements of supply and demand (among more complicated matters), the producer and consumer dynamic which differs from many typical goods, taking into account the aesthetics and politics of art, and even thinking about what constitutes being art complicates the matter. I’m thinking of taking some time over spring break to put my econ degree to use and write a short research paper for fun on art economy.

Overall, this week has been rad, I’m going to to let myself be a little proud of myself this week.

I finally feel like I’ve made significant progress on my mug project this week. Really specifically today. I’ve been having some medical issues that have been putting a damper on my mood, motivation, and actual physical ability to do certain things relating to the project. Last week I finally got some things sorted out and was able to get my first mug actually completely made with a handle and all of that fun stuff.

This mug is acting as the template for the rest of the set (but also as the guinea pig/crash dummy. I’m not counting on it coming out perfect and being one of the actual final set). It’s also my first attempt at pulling and attaching a handle, which was surprisingly easy and hard. Something I struggled with was keeping the pull even and not getting thin patches that would then tear off. It took about 5 tries to get one I liked, but it was worth the work.

Something else that has taken plenty of tries is getting consistent cylinders. I have been throwing and throwing and throwing for 2 hecking weeks with no consistency. And then today I was able to finally throw four cylinders that finally felt like a set, leaving just one more to make.

The last element to get sorted out for the mugs are the stencils of the horses for the outsides. I’m making these at home in photoshop. How they’ll be applied to the mugs is still to be determined.

I’ve finally made actual progress and have a bit of catching up to do, but I think things will come together in the end.

So, ceramics has low key been the last thing on my mind this past week even though I have managed to keep up with my work. I’ve been spending time practicing the shape and scale of the cylinders I intend to use for my mug project. Admittedly, some have been better than others. And some have just been absolute train wrecks.

However, I’ve had some successes. Last week I managed to throw 3 similarly shaped vessels that are about the shape I want.

Of these three, I like the leftmost’s shape the most, but the refinement of the middle one.

Today I was able to throw something a bit larger that meets the scale I want for the mugs

I actually managed to throw three of these that were pretty similar. I’m planning to get at least a few finished with handles (which will be a first for me) by the end of the week.

So far the biggest struggle with these mugs has been consistency and figuring out how to throw mostly by sight when I can’t feel exactly what’s going on. Things like learning to spot possible bubbles, seeing when it’s centered, and knowing when I might rip through the clay when pulling has been a challenging thing to practice. I’m really glad I’ve been able to hold onto some of the muscle memory from last year.

Speaking of memory, I just realized I forgot my sketchbook in the studio. Good thing I took pics of all that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It’s been a bit of a waiting game with my locking box. Waiting for things to dry, waiting for things to get fired, waiting for things to come out of the kiln. But, it finally feels like all the difficult parts are done! Unfortunately, I don’t have photos to show of how it looks now that it’s been baked once, but it came out of the bisque kiln relatively unscathed. Except for one or two small blips in the colored slip and a few broken pins, all of the pieces have come out wonderfully.

While all of this waiting was going on, I took the opportunity to practice more throwing on the wheel to help me decide for sure that it was something I wanted to do for the next project.

After confirming that I wanted to throw, planning what to make was next. I opted for the mugs since I might have a slight mug obsession. I had considered other projects (namely the mixed media one) so I wanted to somehow tie in the element of memory that was a part of that project. Had I chosen that project, I would have done some equine related since horses have been a integral part of my life (I’ve been riding since I was 7, my mom rode, my uncle breeds horses, my grandpa was a trainer; you get the idea. I am horse person).

And that is how we landed on making a set of five mugs, each showing a different gait of the Saddlebred breed which, conveniently, has the same number as gaits as I do mugs. Inspiration will be taken Eadweard Muybridge’s equine locomotion photos to show different moments of each gait as the mug is rotated. I’m very excited to get started on these mugs and hope to make something both aesthetic and functional.

This week I spent my in-class work time focusing on making the bits and pieces for the lock part of my box. This has included making the visible knobs for the outside of the box (another chance to practice sgraffito), the partial circles that will lock the box, and the pin/column/coil things to connect them.

Because the pieces are so small and delicate and who knows what exactly will happen in the kiln, I’ve made 3 sets of 12 pins in different lengths. They are all almost dry and ready for to be bisqued. I plan to have everything on the shelf Wednesday since there are still bits that aren’t bone dry as of tonight.

Since I have a little time to kill, I did some throwing this week. I had forgotten how much I enjoy using the wheel. It somehow takes focus but not the kind of focus that wears you out. I’m considering one of the throwing projects for the one we get to pick out for ourselves.

I’m excited about what I’ve made so far and I’m looking forward to moving towards the finishing touches on my box, like clear glaze on the outside and something mystical on the inside!

I have officially started on my locking box and have officially made a lot of progress on it! The construction has gone super smoothly for the box and the lid, most likely because of all the preplanning and continually taking measurements while the clay is still wet.

I feel like I’m revisiting a lot of techniques I have admired, but didn’t get to thoroughly explore before. I haven’t made a dimensional slab piece since my first warm up vessel in Ceramice 1. I also haven’t used colored slip since my face jug (except for clayground), which was my first big ceramics project. This project is heavily using both.

I finished all of the actual building of the box on Wednesday. The box was was smooth, it was wonderful, it felt so good to hold. I loved it.

And then on Thursday I tried to add colored slip and do the sgraffito. Then I suddenly hated it. Looking back I realized I made a few mistakes, but there were also some things out of my control. I needed to have more patience with waiting for the slip to dry a bit more. I also think I would have benefitted from practicing sgraffito on a scrap piece before the actual box. Out of my control was the fact that my new medicine makes my hands go tingly and numb. But, basically, I was freaking out because I felt like I had ruined the box.

So after patching up the weird side and saying “good night, moon,” I went home and came up with a plan. I created a really basic stencil for each side to negate many of the issues I was having.

And it worked! I’m very happy with where my box is at and the direction it is going. In the coming week I plan to complete making the odd bits and pieces to make the locking mechanisms.