Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Third time's necessary for things leaking out of my head

A few more new birds here! I forgot to share a couple of things, and the first one is time sensitive:
 
ONE 
 
I'm presenting as part of SDA’s online conference Community Ties January 22-29, 2022! Programming includes artist talks, presentations and panels as well as Meet the Maker demos, meetups, and an SDA open house. Visit SDA's website for details and to register. The conference recordings will be available to attendees until the end of March 2022. You can use WINTER21 for a 10% discount to register for the conference. If you're interested in joining SDA, you can use the same code WINTER21 for 10% of your membership. To learn more about SDA, check out their introduction video and member benefits.
 
My talk is with Steph Rue, about our Fulbright experiences in Korea
 
TWO
 

Double header: a new pot!

I got fired up a couple weeks ago and started a new pot to try and match a lid I made in Virginia last summer.
You can't see it here (but you can later) that I added folded spokes so that I'd have less trimming on the inside of the base.
Turning up the sides to start the foot.
Bottom
On the other side
Starting the body
I know, lopsided center but I just kept going
View from the outside




Okay, this is another day (you can see it was nighttime in the other shots under a desk lamp). I had to concentrate more to do the handles properly. Even though I knew that each arm was not the same length, I went ahead with lopsided handles. I mean, why not? Remember Arachne?
Hands on hips!
This goes to show how messy it gets as you decrease and feel simultaneously excited to be getting closer to the end but annoyed by how there's less space for all of the bits.
Was not happy about how flat the top was but was also not interested in going back to rip it out.
The weavers are still on the piece, which you can see like noodles, and this lid clearly...
...is too small for this pot!!
So, even though my hands were on fire and very unhappy (thank goodness that arthritis gel is now available over the counter), I started a new lid. Which I didn't document because I was so unhappy about having to do that the entire time.
Until I finished it! Because this is the right lid for this pot. I don't know what to do with the other lid, because truly the lid follows the pot. But it's such a nice little lid. Someday I'll sort it out.
The best part was when I coated with methylcellulose: I forgot that I could block this sucker and fix the flat top! Glory be! I was elated as I sculpted it wet. Truly, it looked exactly like I was working with clay.
Yeah, still lopsided in there, and the handles are not perfect.
But it all comes together and feels exactly perfect to me now!
I was tempted to dye but will leave it alone for now because it's better to do what a friend suggested: make a new one and dye THAT one. My hands are screaming.

Trying to be in the world

Though I felt safe in Korea running all over the place, I didn't when I returned home. But I've attempted to get out a little more this fall, a lot of that facilitated by people around me being willing to accompany. Here is the show at Praxis where teams of two spent a year making an outfit locally.
I went to see Charity's collaboration and was delighted to see her felted wool balls in another guise (I had seen them pre-pandemic as jewelry and enjoyed that iteration as well).
This was the info on their process. Jessica was kind enough to open up on a closed day because Mattie was visiting from Baltimore via Cincinnati. A friend of another friend, she was so kind to drive hours to meet me on a classically cold, grey, windy day to do grunt work in the studio and then see some art. It's amazing to have that kind of help appear, because then I could set up two big shelving units: one entirely for moulds, sugetas, and bal teul!
Then we swung by the museum. While I was sad that the Chinese rubbings exhibit was already down, seeing this Peng Wei piece made me think about a performance I did in the mid aughts where I was supposed to get 100 Steinway pianos but then about a week or so before the show, the showroom reneged. I got about 88 black music stands instead. The paper here was made from flax.
I don't often go into the Americas gallery but was happy to find this "Female Figurine, 1500–500 BC: Ceramic, pigment, Mesoamerica, Guerrero, Xalitla?, Xochipala style" that felt like a powerful talisman + real lady proportions!
Yuko joined me to see the new Pivot Center and an opening at Future Ink Graphics, a new printshop on the west side. This hallway holds the new show along with info on a dance company that shares the space.
I loved these floors. I know the polished concrete is the industrial look that every single place goes for but this is much warmer.
The Cleveland Museum of Art clearly invested a ton into their giant space here, for their community arts. It's huge and makes me wonder where they stored all these Parade the Circle stuff before they moved.
Every classroom has colorful murals and clearly have not been used because they are all immaculate.


This is just a fraction of past art over the years and I wonder how big their off-site storage was to hold it all before.
I'm sure they look more lively when animated but this is about how I feel during winter.
Meanwhile, this is the space that I have to worry about: the studio! I was outside yesterday in the less cold weather to measure so that I can talk to friends about designing murals, gardens, etc., which then have to go thru the city approval process. Don't even ask about indoor progress as my beater is still unfinished. Even if it puts me in the red, I have to hire someone to help me. I can't do this alone, as much as I'd love to. I want this space to be welcoming and tolerant, but not of things like cruelty, which Herb just wrote incisively about. I was texting a friend last night about how hard it is to be a kind person with manners, and how easy it seems to be to be a person who does not care. Or is it? How can it be easy if it feels so bad to be uncivil, unkind, and cruel? As much as I want to do it by myself, I have to be in conversation with other people to make this new place work.