Rachel Dorn Ceramic Sculpture

throwing the pitcher plant form

pitcher plant forms drying off the wheel

pitcher plant in progress with spoke

pitcher plants in progress

bisque fired pitchers

I made the closed and open forms, first. I didn't take many pictures because I was generally using both hands for these forms. I threw closed bulb shapes for all ten of the forms, then sliced half of them open and incised lines in the other half.

an open bulb in progress

Then I built up the split base using coils added to a simple thrown form, I split the form and coiled the two knobby parts closed at the top. After these knobby parts and the base set up for a few days, I added the closed and open forms on top.

The base of the sculpture is fairly simple in form. the focal point is naturally the large top section, but I seem to be incapable of not decorating a surface.  I ended up using three types of decoration: gear sprigs, impressed stamps with a swirl pattern, and round plain sections meant to hold on some bicycle parts.

bike gears in the sink with the cleaning products and tools

The difference between being sent parts by SRAM and getting parts locally, is that the locally recycled parts came off the greasy working elements of the bikes and went directly into the box. When I got the box home, I had to weed out some energy bar wrappers and receipts, and then start cleaning the parts.

fishing clamp

I've been spoiled so far; other people have cleaned the parts for me. My mother-in-law got me a couple of crazy old fishing pole clamps for Christmas last year, but she cleaned them thoroughly before she gave them to me. They fairly shine. A few months ago my husband took apart a bike and a shredder and cleaned everything before we put them into storage in my studio.

parts coming out of the dishwasher

they look clean, but...

To get the parts clean I just needed to remove the grease and oil. I started by laying out the parts in the tub, spraying on Simple Green and going after them with a brush. This method had the dual disadvantages of being very slow and making the tub very dirty. It was also uncomfortable to lean over the side of the tub to scrub. I eventually loaded up about half the parts in the dishwasher, and ran a pots and pans cycle. When I opened the machine, the pieces looked clean, but they were still smudging my fingers with grease when I handled them.
Besides leaving a trail of grease in my wake at every future show and during the entire building process, I have concerns that the grease residue would prevent the epoxy from securing the bike parts to the clay, so I cleaned some more. I moved the cleaner parts into the sink and went after them with dish soap and Simple Green. After literally hours of scrubbing, my fingers were wrinkly from the water but I had a basket full of clean bike parts ready to join forces with my clay.

half a basket of clean parts, ready to go

sketches utilizing bike parts

bike part (seen in the sketch above: bottom right)

books and inspiration images

old sketches

new sketches based on old

I was going to write about my plans for sabbatical this week, but then I was bouncing around the internet and happened to discover this lovely cartoon homage (the artist's website is Zen Pencils but I found the cartoon on Slate) based on a Bill Watterson graduation speech at Kenyon College (I totally visited Kenyon in high school because Bill Watterson went there--but then we crashed the car and I ended up at a small college in Iowa instead of Ohio.)

Finding the Zen Pencils cartoon is serendipitous; I've actually been thinking about Bill Watterson lately. Earlier this summer I read two books that, in my mind, at least, are natural partners with Watterson's book, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. Steve Martin's Born Standing Up and Art Speigelman's MetaMaus both reminded me of Watterson's book.


All three books offer fascinating views of artists doing their thing, their way, against the protests, concerns or confusion of critics and friends. And all three artists succeeded in doing their thing brilliantly because they ignored the outside voices and followed the direction of their own inner artist's voice.
I am only artificially familiar with Steve Martin's stand-up comedy, since my experience of his work has always been via Saturday Night Live reruns and movies. I'm also less familiar with the performing arts medium of comedy than I am with the visual arts medium of comics.  I chose to download Born Standing Up more or less at random. However, I found much more direct connection to the world of a working artist in this book than in Martin's An Object of Beauty, which is actually a novel set in and about the art world.

I was expecting a silly, funny book of jokes, I guess, but Born Standing Up surprised me by focusing seriously (and not-so-seriously) on the development of the author's own artistic voice as a comedian. In the autobiographical book, which begins before Martin commences his professional comedy work and continues until he steps away from stand-up, Martin illustrates the process of conceiving of, developing and sustaining an artist vision. He shows and discusses the fear, hard work, confusion, mistakes, successes and frustrations that are part of the process. I was continually making connections between my own experience as an artist and that of the author, though our media and content choices are vastly divergent. It's a funny book and I recommend it in general, but I highly recommend it for my artist friends and students who might see a connection to their own lives and expression.

I make the connection between Born Standing Up and the Zen Pencils / Watterson quote cartoon because I see both as addressing the fundamental question of how and why we might choose to live a life of art, or expression, or whatever, rather than follow the easier route of a more proscribed life and work that is acceptable and expected beforehand.

MetaMaus is subtitled A Look Inside A Modern Classic, Maus, so obviously one would expect some familiarity with the original. I'm not sure how old I was when I first read Maus, but I was old enough to have a general familiarity with the holocaust. Either because of my age or the age of the book when I read it (the first volume was published in 1986, the second in 1991) I wasn't particularly tuned in to the fact that a comic book featuring mice might have been a controversial medium in which to tell "A Survivor's Story." I do, however, remember being amazed at how the story was told. I remember being impressed with both the use of the comic's text and imagery as a medium, but also with the multi-layered storytelling.

Reading MetaMaus all these years later I was interested to learn how controversial some of his choices were. In MetaMaus, Spiegelman explains his visual and conceptual choices he made in building Maus clearly as artistic decisions that were central to the format, flow and content of the work. I'm not sure if these choices were entirely conscious at the time, but its clear that the Speigelman of MetaMaus has taken time to consider and reflect on his art and his intent.

MetaMaus, like Born Standing Up, is a book about being an artist, making hard choices, sticking to your idea even when its hard, even when years have gone by, even when the world has changed and even when other people don't "get it." Spiegelman's is a more subdued (though still beautiful and visually intriguing) book than Martin's, but the message for an artist reader is the same, the struggle and the necessity of doing things differently than the expectation is what makes art worthwhile.

All the time I was reading these two books, I kept thinking about the first book I remember reading that really talked to me about what it meant to be a professional artist. The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book is full of reprints of wonderful Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, but what I really enjoyed reading and rereading was the commentary by the author. Watterson, in the book, discusses his visual choices, inspiration and intent in creating the comic strips. He also discusses some of the changing specifications of cartoons in newspapers and syndication (back before we had any conceptions of cartoons on the internet) and goes into his decision to cease writing the Calvin and Hobbes weekly comic strip.

I must have read this book (and reread it) when I was 15 or 16, roughly the same time I was realizing that I could conceivably "do art" for a living. I remember the discovery that I could be an artist, roughly around sophomore year, as revelatory--since I was surrounded by teachers and had started to assume that I had to be a teacher (yeah, yeah, I know I still ended up as a teacher, but I split time as an artist, too). Watterson's commentary helped me get an early insider's view of what it might mean to be an artist and what it might mean to stick to one's own vision when being pushed, very hard, to change or compromise the way in which that art was made.

I don't mean to get too sentimental here, but The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book is a beautiful book and it was meaningful to me. The others are simply well done, interesting books about being true to one's self and expressing something new and different. I recommend all you artists (and everyone else) go read one or more of these books. Also, if you haven't read Maus yet, get on that.

I recently subscribed to Ceramic Arts Daily e-mails. I have gotten Ceramics Monthly for years and I occasionally buy Pottery Making Illustrated (though with no Borders or Barnes & Noble in town it's harder to buy on a whim than it used to be). I was looking online for something else when I signed up for their e-mail. I figured it would just fill my in-box with more junk that I'd have to delete, but I tried it anyway.

Contrary to my expectations, the latest of these e-mails was relevant to discussions I'd been having with my intermediate and advanced clay students and will probably provide me with a useful new teaching tool. This quarter I have some motivated students in the higher levels of ceramics and I think it is going to be important (and perhaps tricky) to keep these students challenged. At the last two NCECA (ceramics) conventions I was particularly taken with thrown and altered works like those by Deborah Schwartzkopf who demonstrated at NCECA 2011 in Florida.

works by Deborah Schwartzkopf at NCECA 2011

my not-very-useful images from the NCECA demonstration

I attempted to show, explains and demonstrate some of her techniques for altering her thrown work, but  I'm not sure my short demonstrations captured the energy and smooth curves of her work. Part of the problem is that I had difficulty getting students to understand why they would want to emulate her techniques. Beginning clay students are so focused on making things round and functional that they tend not to look farther than techniques for making things round, fixing things that aren't round and attaching handles.

more work by Deborah Schwartzkopf

I admit, I find these altered forms most interesting because of the techniques. I don't own much work like this and I don't spend my limited throwing time at home making it. But I think it is interesting to work with wheel throwing techniques and end up with smooth curvy asymmetrical forms that swell and bend. My own sculptural work often uses smooth, curvy asymmetrical forms that swell and bend, though I reach these curves and swells through different techniques and the end results are not meant to be functional.

From NCECA 2011, my notes say this is by Glenda Taylor, though all the work I can find from her online suggests this is not her work (looks a bit like Schwartzkopf's work, really)

interior of the mystery Glenda Taylor/Deborah Schwartzkopf piece

I believe my current intermediate and advanced students can appreciate the forms and the combinations of techniques and might consider integrating some of the techniques in their own work. The latest Ceramic Arts Daily e-mail included a link to a video clip from "Creating Curves with Clay with Martha Grover." The clip is short, under 15 minutes out of a 3 hour video, but I found it to contain some highly useful information. I'm going to try to order the whole video for class.
The general information in the clip is not new to me, but the artist demonstrates all the steps slowly and clearly and she carefully explains what she is doing and why. The most useful tip for me was that she used a paintbrush to smooth the slip on the interior seam of her attachments. She also shows and explains how and why she bends the rim and edges of the bottom edge. I think the video clip (and eventually the video) might help my intermediate and advanced clay students see both why one might use these techniques and how subtle changes in technique can result in smooth, elegant hand-built and thrown forms.

This weekend my daughter and I drove to Ellensburg and Thorp to go on Gallery One's "Art About" tour of artist's studios. I was surprised by how much patience my daughter had. It probably helped that we started the day with a visit to the Home Depot Kid's Workshop and bought her some stickers with which to decorate her newly crafted box and some hairy squinkies with which to fill said box. The stickers entertained her for the entire drive north. On the way back we took the Canyon Road and she and I discussed boats and bikes and cloud shadows on mountains until she fell asleep.


Because she was patient, and because several houses on the tour ended up being more fun for her than for me, we visited more houses than I thought we might get to. After Gallery One, we started at Dick and Jane's spot. I've driven past it before but never went in. We spent about an hour there and most of that time was in the garden. My daughter liked looking for reflectors and marbles and other surprises. I liked looking at the flowers. My favorite part of the built garden was the twisty kiln/tower structure. I overheard someone saying this is what the Secret Garden must have been like. I would have preferred the book if that were the case.







We went into the house and one of the volunteer/hosts gave Alison a flashlight to shine directly at the late Dick Elliot's reflector art. Jane Orleman (his widow) turned out the light so we could see better. I was surprised what a difference it made to hold the light right at eye level rather than looking at it at my daughter's level. When the light is coming from the viewer, the reflectors are very bright. When the light is coming from below, the reflectors just look like they have a spotlight on them, but no more. Jane was very nice to my daughter and brought her through the rest of the house, but the kid wanted to get back outside to the garden. The volunteer/host out there helped her feed the fish in the heart shaped pond with the hubcap floating in it, then she and I played hide and seek until my stomach growling started to scare the neighbors.





After lunch we took a circuitous route (I misunderstood the map) to Stephen Robison's and Kathleen Guss' home. I was mostly interesting in seeing their kiln and their studio. I hadn't though much about the likelihood that the kids would be there. My daughter and their youngest son proceeded to bury her new hairy squinky in the gravel, play in the water and the sandbox and explore the irrigation canal at the back of the yard. The canal was very small and mostly dry. I discovered this after looking over at my daughter and realizing her stance meant she was going in. She did, but just to dig "witch dirt" for their magical rock and sand brew.


I talked to the adults briefly and finally dragged the kid away (she was not happy to go) so that we could get to Renee Adams' and Justin Gibben's house in Thorp. I adore Renee's work and only really really like Justin's. Ironically we own his work and not hers, but only because it was an inexpensive print rather than an original. The work in her small studio I hadn't already seen was better than everything I had seen, meaning I loved it! My girl was more interested in playing with their dog in the front yard so I was only able to have a short conversation with Justin.

We ended our tour at Bob Fisher and Carol Hassen's house. It was the only place we'd both been before. It is a lovely house, though the wind was a problem since I was wearing a short light skirt. I was forced to play Marilyn Monroe on the way in. My daughter hugged my legs on the way out to ensure propriety. We visited a short time, but little girl's energy was flagging and I've seen their work frequently.

All in all, I thought it was well worth the price of admission. I guess I'm glad that my daughter had so much fun, though it would have been nice to see more without being (literally) tugged away. Its funny that we went to 4 homes and a gallery, spent about 6 hours and I didn't feel like I saw much.

Walking in the garden did give me lots of flower forms to look at and think about for the summer. The countdown is on. I have 3 days of finals, a week before grades are due and next Saturday is June Art Fest (yes, I know the link is old). Then I get to work on my own work!