In the Process of Re-situating

As some of you who have been in to Riverrun and/or know me personally may know I completed my apprenticeship with Joan at the end of August and immediately (quite literally, actually...as in the next morning) packed up and moved to the Minneapolis/St. Paul region of the Midwest. Why the Twin Cities? Well, my initial reasons included the fantastic art scene and resources, the great mix of people and cultures, and the close-ish proximity to home for occasional visits. However, at the end of July, one reason in particular jumped to the top of the list. After applying to the Edina Art Center in Edina, MN, as a teaching assistant, I was actually offered a regular teaching position for their fall Clay Sculpture class; the regular instructor had an unavoidable time conflict come up and my qualifications and previous teaching experience just happened to fit the position requirements (obviously there was a lot of excited hopping around after that phone call). The following week I drove to Edina, met with the head of the Ceramics Department at the Center, and finalized the details of the position. (There will also be opportunities for me to propose additional classes for the winter session, but that won't come until later this fall.)

Living and working in the Twin Cities area has been a very interesting transition - driving around the cities still makes me a bit nervous, though it's more so the speed and traffic congestion than unfamiliarity of the roads - but I'm very happy here.

And summer keeps flying by...

Once again, the evils of dial-up internet have thwarted my recent attempts to post, but it seems as though the server is cooperating tonight so I can finally update!

Quite a bit has happened since my last post - the Manito Art League juried show has come and gone (and was beautiful....every year the art entered is so different from previous years!) as well as the first two weeks of my last classes as an instructor at Riverrun (which is strange to think about....I've gotten very attached to my students and will miss them greatly when I move). Most highly-anticipated of all, however, was the 2009 Northwoods Summer Art Tour, which took place this past weekend.

If you aren't familiar with the tour, the bare-bones description is that a large number of private studio artists and galleries around north-central Wisconsin participate in what might be called a three-day-open-house where they host guest artists, display new work, and offer demonstrations (some even invite the public to create small projects). At Riverrun, we hosted Betty Christian, a local jewelry artist, and Audrey Hood Hampton, a watercolorist, who created and sold their work in our upstairs gallery for the entire duration of the tour. In the downstairs studio, we worked on demonstrations of hand-building and carving in clay (which resulted in the first collaborative piece Joan and I have ever done together) and Joan also demonstrated various needle felting techniques. (I have various pictures from the tour posted below.)

On the last day of the tour I managed to take an hour during one of the quieter portions of the afternoon to go visit two other pottery studios in the area: Pigeon Road Pottery, owned by the fabulously-talented Amy Higgason , and Bear Paw Pottery, owned by also very-talented John and Vicky Langer. At Pigeon Road, Amy and her guest artist, Katelyn Koester (whom I've known since high school), had a small station set up for visitors to create small sculpted clay heads which will be fired and mounted in a round thrown frame for display at future tours (Amy did tiles with guests several years ago and had them mounted and displayed for this tour). I had time enough to make a small Minotaur-inspired addition before having to zip over to John and Vicky's, where they were just finishing unloading a raku firing. I had done an evening of raku with the Langers two years ago and they graciously invited me to come back to their house that evening after the tour was finished and everything settled at Riverrun to do another firing (again, images are posted below). Obviously and overall, the tour was a great experience...strange to believe it's over now!
Joan's and my collaberative piece...a Master/Apprentice canoe filled with sentimental and symbolic objects and carved with travel/future-related images.

.Joan said, "Hey, Kristen, why don't you carve a little something into the side of the canoe?"
...that "little something" ended up taking five hours to complete and representing three world cultures

.We all started getting pretty goofy towards the end of the last day...I happened to capture one of Joan's better faces :)

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John Langer moving my scorching-hot raku plate from the kiln into a paper-lined garbage can

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My piece along with some from John and Vicky (love the red!!)

For more information on the Northwoods Art Tours (there's also one in the fall) or the studios I mentioned in the blog, please follow these addresses:

http://www.northwoodsarttour.com
http://www.riverrunarts.com
http://pigeonroadpottery.blogspot.com
http://northwoodsarttour.com/bear paw.htm

Also, I have some very exciting news regarding this fall, but I'll keep that for my next posting. :)

Dreary days in June are no fun

Fortunately, I've been countering the lack-luster weather by using particularly bright colors on one of my new bodies of work (they make not look like it now since colored slip is usually pretty dull before it's fired, but trust me). Since late fall I've been experimenting with the yin-yang effect of using vivid electric glazes contrasted with smoke firing (did I mention this in my last post? I don't remember and it isn't worth it for me to check thanks to the wondrous world of 52 Kbps); recently, I've begun connecting that with my older interest in foreign decorative motifs and *voila* now have several new bodies of work I'm creating simultaneously.

The body I referenced earlier in particular has been demanding most of my time purely because of the ridiculous (so I've been told) amounts of time I spend decorating each piece. The pieces are simple hand-build forms with patterns inspired by Aboriginal artwork, which means lots and lots and LOTS of dots. The idea came from a book of postcards Joan gave me at the beginning of my apprenticeship and which has been stewing in the back of my imagination ever since; I didn't know quite what to do with them until my recent visit to an exhibit of Dale Chihuly's work inspired by Navaho Trade Blankets where something just *clicked* in my brain (*make a motion to indicate a light going on*). Obviously, the images posted with this blog are a sample of the creating-frenzy that followed.

One of the first pieces I created - the pattern is based on watering holes connected by small streams (a lot of the work I used as reference is depicted as if from a bird's-eye view)

A close-up of the detail on the bowl...the hardest part was "dotting" onto a concave surface without the slip running

This piece is based on a story of how one kingfisher visiting another led people to water; I was in awe at the thought of language as pure imagery with this one*

If you can't tell from the images, all of the pieces are completely rounded; I did this intentionally as putting feet on them just felt like it interrupted something with the form...couldn't put my finger on what. Instead, I'm designed wooden stands for the pieces to be displayed on - should be interesting at the very least. These pieces are also shown in their pre-fired state as I forgot that camera batteries need charging and therefore didn't have pictures of when they came out of the kiln. All I have yet to do in the finishing process is smoking the white areas of the pieces and then coating the exterior surfaces with beeswax to seal them...looking forward to the finished products. :)

*Please note: I was very careful to check copyright laws pertaining to Aboriginal artwork and am abiding by all said laws when it comes to the selection of inspirational pieces and decoration of my work

Finally "Getting Out There"

After years of promising myself to do so, I'm finally taking the initiative to create a blog intended to revolve entirely around my work in ceramics. Please forgive my first few posts as I'm still getting used to the whole concept of "blogging" and am currently living with a less-than-stellar internet connection (gotta love living in northern Wisconsin...I do, actually, but only when it's warm out); things should balance out as I familiarize myself with the site and a schedule of regular updates.

A good way to get started is probably a little background information on myself and my work.

I graduated in May of 2009 from Luther College in Decorah, IA, with a B.A. in Studio Art and a minor in International Studies. The following September I became the resident apprentice and beginning-level throwing/handbuilding instructor at Riverrun Center for the Arts in McNaughton, WI. My apprenticeship will continue through the end of August 2009, after which time I plan on moving to the Twin Cities to continue working in ceramics and preparing for graduate school.

My current body of work is an exploration of the contrast between smoke-fired and glazed surfaces; I've been experimenting with low-temperature glazes (usually no higher than cone 04) and white clay bodies for the last few months and am finally getting some results I feel I can really run with. I will be firing a load of bisqueware tomorrow, after which I will be able to post images of REALLY recent work.