I am happy!  What else is there to say? I am surrounded by a wonderful supportive group of family and friends.  The time I spent at the storytelling festival was great.  I really enjoyed the interaction I had with other local ceramic artists and all of the attendees of the festival.

Things are moving forward.  I recently received notification from Lark Books that the submission I made to them a year ago has been accepted for inclusion to their upcoming publication “500 Raku” this next Spring 2011.  I am searching out and preparing work for submission to different shows and exhibitions around the country.  I hope to get some broader exposure to the work I am doing.

I now have a space at B.Y.U. to work on my projects.  I am happy to be working up there and expanding my abilities.  I have been awed by the other students work and am really excited to learn from them and Von Allen.  Von has me looking up a list of other artists to gain more insight and perspective on my own processes.  One of these artists Lisa Clague gave a great quote from another artist William Daley when she was interviewed for Ceramics Monthly; it reads, (continue reading…)

I have a few pieces of green ware patiently waiting for me to get my kiln finished so I can start firing them and treating their surfaces with vitreous engobes.  I had an assignment from one of my teachers this past spring to work in a series and he wanted me to work in clay since that was my strength, which is funny to me because I was in an interpretive drawing class at the time.  After many hours of doodling in my sketchbook I started to notice a pattern to my madness and settled into doing Kiln Gods.  In my line of work no matter what preparations are made, there is still a lot left up to chance.  We prepare our work to the best of our ability, and try to control the firing process as much as possible, but in the end there are some things out of our control, in a way it is analogous to life and there comes a time in life when we have to say that we have done all that we can do and place the rest into the hands of a higher power.  For me that is what the Kiln Gods represent.  They have been used by potters the world round to watch over their firings and help them get through the process with the best possible results as then can.  The ones that I sculpted are not modeled after any specific cultures existing Kiln Gods, but are symbolic to me or my interpretation of what I think may be important to the culture that influenced them.  Part of me hesitates to share this work in progress, but I want to share something with you that I have been working on recently:

I went to the V&A Museum today.  They had art from all over the world and across many era’s.  I particularly enjoyed the Sculpture and Ceramics exhibits.  They had a huge section on the 6th floor dedicated to ceramic art and the history of ceramics from all over the world.  The ceramics was organized in a loose time-line and the work from different regions was place together according to the time-line so you could comparatively see where the different cultures were in their ceramic techniques at the same point in world history.  (continue reading…)