Dark Brown Clay

June 28, 2020 / mardysears / 4 Comments

While the Art Institute of Chicago has been closed due to Covid-19, I have been working from home. This is challenging for me as I work primarily with the collection of Prints and Drawings and I don’t have access to the collection at home. As with most people working from home, I have been to many zoom meetings and taken advantage of many webinars. I’ve also had a few box making projects and created several box making tutorials on YouTube. But this time has also given me many free hours to make art.

As seen in previous posts, I began making a Covid Journal very early in my Stay at Home period. It was an immediate way for me to respond to all that was happening around me and a great outlet for my thoughts and observations. During this time, the clay studio that I work in was closed as a non-essential business, so I wasn’t able to work in clay. This practice of digging in the mud and experimenting is something that feeds the rest of my creativity. I feel it keeps me connected to making, but I don’t usually think of this work as art. These are functional pieces and I often make what I want in my own kitchen. That being said, working in clay keeps my hands busy and my creative mind engaged, often leading to bigger projects.

I hadn’t worked in clay for many weeks, when Joanna Kramer offered online classes at Ware with contactless pick up of materials at her studio. I have often envied her use of a rich dark clay, Standard Clay #266, so I signed on and began hand building at home.

This woven tray was the first piece I made during her class and I continued working on my own afterwards. I love the way the white glaze breaks on the texture and shows the detail nicely.

I bought underglaze colors that can be applied to greenware, before bisque firing, and began making butterflies and moths. I was inspired by a wooden tool I bought in India years before. It looks like the body of a butterfly so I pressed it into the clay to form the center of the Monarch. It felt good to make something colorful, and purely beautiful. The first two trays are quite large.

The underside of the large Monarch with ‘caterpillar’ feet

The next two are brush or chopstick rests and I love the small size. I plan to make many more moth and butterfly varieties.

Sometimes you just have to make what you have to make and this sperm whale butter dish happened. I approach ceramics from the perspective of a printmaker and I love the sgraffito effect. It is similar to carving print blocks and I think the contrast between the dark clay and the white underglaze is beautiful. Although the Pot Shop in Evanston has re-opened, I hope to continue building some pieces from home using this beautiful clay!

Text is from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

COVID-19 Journal

May 24, 2020 / mardysears / Leave a comment

During my time at home in relative isolation, I created a bound journal from scraps that have been in my studio for up to fifteen years. This Ethiopian binding has quarter sawn wooden covers that were incorrectly made for my edition Gules, and pages of an old atlas that I’ve always thought would come in handy one day. This finally seemed the ideal paper for pages of a journal about a world pandemic.

Eventually, I will fill the book with bats and butterflies cut from maps of China to show the spread of this disease. I began cutting bats and realized pretty quickly that this has to be the last step or it will be very hard to draw on the pages. I want this book to take the form of a travel journal, stuffed with papers or tickets picked up along the way.

My first thoughts began with – where did this begin? A bat, a pangolin?

My next thoughts had to do with what people are doing. I feel there have been so many moments of beauty and thankfulness in the world. This is something I focused on to alleviate the shock and fear. I have been working on linked type, drawn with purely geometrical shapes. I love the negative spaces the letters and numbers create. Even when I was having an off day, I could spend my time drawing text. It felt like a meditation.

I have had some dark moments that couldn’t be denied. I try to keep the politics out of my journal and focus on numbers and facts. Iranians drinking methanol as a cure could not be ignored.

Many hopeful moments include the return of nature. Finding animals in places that are usually occupied by humans and the clearing of smog. These are things that give me great comfort and I hope can continue when the world begins to pick up speed again. I dearly hope that we have evolved in some way from this experience.

Although I am posting the pages in a linear fashion, I haven’t been creating them from beginning to end. I jump from place to place, reflecting on what is happening in a particular area. I date each page so I know when they were finished. There are many pages (and regions) that I have yet to fill.

Working in a random fashion I don’t often get a sense of the whole. It’s nice to see the images all together in this blog to get a feel for what I’m doing.

This is the page that I keep going back to. My home. Where I track the cases and deaths every so often, when I feel like I can face the numbers. The numbers are huge but the individual stories are heartbreaking. The redwing blackbirds are back and active, but this is the strangest spring. Watching and listening to the birds has become a daily pastime.

I’m happy that the last couple of pages are hopeful – blue skies over LA and Hawkbill Turtles migrating to the sea, on a beach that they have all to themselves. One way or another, nature always wins.

Let the Obsession with Earth and Water Continue

April 21, 2019April 21, 2019 / mardysears / 2 Comments

I continue to create ocean and sealife from earth, and I’m finally beginning to feel some satisfaction. The whale is my favorite by far, and on my third try I finally have a large stingray tray. I’ll have to sell it before I break the tail! It was a challenge to get all these pieces home on the el train. I had visions of lurching trains and stingray tail stabbings.