Creating in Quarantine Exhibition

This is the first piece I made when my kitchen became my quarantine clay studio. It is a sculpture made by using a coil and pinch technique. Since I can’t glaze or fire, I gave the surface extra attention. All of the pieces I have made during quarantine have been decorated with slips or finished by burnishing. For this sculpture, I left the texture from the pinching movement of my hands and accentuated it with white porcelain slip.

Creating in Quarantine will be a virtual exhibition through Paint Creek Center for the Arts.
It is available to be viewed here starting Friday May 8th.

House

House (above) was informed by watching the documentary Rachel Whiteread, House (below).
I became interested in revealing inner structures. I made a plaster mold of a clay cube, soldered a steel 3D grid, and used the mold to coat the steel in a layer of beeswax. The structure inside the wax cube becomes visible through the thin skin of beeswax.

Process photos of creating this piece and the Documentary: Rachel Whiteread, House (1993) video are available below.

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The original clay cube positive

Mold Making

Mold making and some plaster disaster

Oops! Plaster disaster.

The finished mold

The steel grid inside the mold

The steel grid inside the mold

The mold prepared and ready to be filled with wax

The mold after the wax pour, ready to be opened

Sake Set

I made this video tutorial on how to make a coil built sake set for Paint Creek Center for the Arts.
See more videos by PCCA’s faculty on their Facebook!

Vanishing

In the 2019 book, Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, she references Simone Weil and the desire to vanish: 

“The word “decreation” is Weil’s term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated that it makes you leave yourself behind. “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy,” she writes. “For in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying ‘I.’ ” She dreams of vanishing, but this fantasy reinscribes the dazzling force and vision of her intellectual presence. It’s a “profoundly tricky spiritual fact,” Carson writes, describing Weil’s quandary. “I cannot go towards God in love without bringing myself along.” Being a writer compounds the dilemma: to articulate the desire to vanish is to reiterate the self.“

In relation to this paradoxical articulation of the desire to vanish, I have created multiple hand-built and wheel-thrown sculptures. They are decorated in cheesecloth, which is covered in black underglaze. During the kiln firing the cheesecloth burns out, or vanishes, while the record of this action in underglaze is left on the surface.