My Birthday is Coming Up
Who wants to get this for me?
Life in Miniature
My life in the studio has take a miniature turn ever since we got our new Orion Welder (thanks Arthur).
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| Orion Pulse Arc Welder |
The Orion Welder is a pulse arc welder, which is basically a tiny tig welder that works in pulses. So, to weld a long seam, you have to do a series of spot welds. It is amazing for tack welding something together that you will then solder. Here is an example of some steel sheet that I welded together using this. The weld spots measure 1mm in diameter.
Also, yesterday I made this itty bitty carabiner. I'm thinking about using them as clasps for some necklaces that I've been working on.
Maybe one day I can get a job as a set fabricator for Laika, then I can work in miniature all the time.
Neglected
It's true, I've neglected this blog all summer while I was in Seattle. I was busy going on motorcycle rides, boat rides, building cardboard cars, checking out tide pools, having drinks while watching the sunset, and other Northwest activities. So, I thought I'd post some photos that I took this summer. You can see more of the photos I've taken this summer on my Flickr.
Value System - Detail
For my Metals seminar class we were to give a presentation on three artists who are working in similar ideas as our own and talk about the choices that they made to render those ideas. I began by defining what I value in jewelry which is: line, asymmetry, simplicity, detail, texture, color, experimentation, craftsmanship, unconventional beauty and evidence of the handmade. Over the next several weeks I will write about the studio metalsmiths and jewelers that I used as examples for my value system.Helen Carnac – Detail
Helen Carnac’s work corresponds with many of my values in her formal considerations, her inspiration from the world around her, and her thoughts on time and making.
Carnac is a member of a group called “Walking, Talking, Making”, and photos that she has taken when on walks inspire much of her work. Her work focuses on mark making on enameled steel bowls. Line is a key element in her pieces, so the photos that she takes are often about line and texture.
As part of the slow movement, Carnac recently curated a touring exhibition called Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution, which is “looking at how things are made, where they are made and by whom.” This idea of the slow movement shows in her work. There is a sense of stillness that you get when looking at these bowls – the quite of the white enamel, the conservative use of marks and the evidence of time in the rust stains. Carnac says of her bowls that she “[allows] the steel substrate to oxidise naturally, creating new relationships with the enamel; a crossing point between control and chance.” This is an aspect of her work that I value – allowing that tension between control and chance to exist is a fine balance, and often giving up control is the hard part.
Good Ideas and Geeky Metals
There is this great video by Steve Johnson and RSA Animate about where good ideas come from. This RSA Animation is similar to his TED Talk, but shorter and with lovely dry erase animation that really illustrates the points for all us right brain thinkers.In this video, Johnson talks about how good ideas come from a collision of hunches – when your ideas meet someone else's, and you, "allow those hunches to come together and turn into something bigger than the sum of their parts." In his longer TED talk he says, "More often than not, [great ideas] are cobbled together from whatever parts happen to be near by. We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stich them together into new forms and create something new." Colleges are a great for this, because there is a group of people thinking through similar problems which creates a "collision of hunches." But what do you do when you are out of college and working alone in your own studio?
One solution to that problem was Geeky Metals. Geeky Metals is a crit group for metalsmiths in Seattle, WA. Started by Dixie Darling and Stephanie Tomczak in 2008, when they thought it would be great to be able to have critiques like they did in college. For the first year it was just the two of them, Trudee Hill, Sarah Loertscher and myself. The meetings were infrequent and sometimes no one would show up to them at all. But Dixie was persistent and the driving force behind it, and now there are at least 40 Seattle metalsmiths that are involved to some extent or another. We meet for regular crits and informal social events. These have been, great opportunities to bounce ideas off each other, get inspired, or as Johnson puts it, "engines of creativity."
Existing in a post-modernist mindset, we believe that we need to be constantly coming up with new and original ideas that we came to entirely on our own, but is this a falsehood? Are there new original ideas that stand on their own, or do good ideas, as Johnson suggest, come from crowds or networks and develop over time?
Contemporary Ceramics
Last Wednesday I attended a lecture by Marek Cecula on contemporary ceramics. It was a whirlwind survey of current ceramic work. He showed about 200 images in an hour and a half. Included were a few of his own pieces, like his Random Series cups, where the cups are slip cast porcelain and are all of the same shape, but each one is different in that there is a random 3 digit number printed on each.It would seem that his lecture was a review of the exhibition Object Factory, that he curated in 2009 for the Museum of Art and Design, which their website states is, "A groundbreaking exhibition documenting contemporary innovation in industrial ceramic production and the renaissance of ceramics in art and design today." The majority of the work that he showed was either re-purposed and altered ceramic pieces or slip cast porcelain. He seemed like a cheerleader for post-modernism (or is it post-post-modernism?). He was so excited by the variety of work being made right now, and by the intersection of old and new technology. He kept saying that, "You could do anything you want." It was very inspiring, and made me want to get back into doing ceramics.
Some of my favorite pieces were:
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Robert Dawson Willow Pattern with Uncertainty |
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| Khashayar Naimanan |
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| Emiko Oki Trophy Tableware |
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| Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow +/- Hot Plate |
And these hot plates that have heat conductive patterns printed on them, and can be plugged into a 12v battery.
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