I’m finally getting settled in at my post-CCA studio.  At the end of the spring, at the advice of Nathan Lynch, I met with Lisa Cooley to talk about my being the first artist in residence on her property on the southern rural edge of Petaluma.  We discovered over lunch that we had some pretty compatible ideas about art and life.  Then I drove to her property to visit the studio.

Tucked back into the hills near Olompali State Park, her home is a wonderland of nature.  When I first came to the studio, I startled the two spotted fawns that were sleeping next to the back door.  On my walks, I have seen eagles, hawks, coyote, deer, and the elusive tail of a fox, not to mention field mice and rats and song birds and a hundred thousand lizards.

Having such a quiet rural place to visit just a quick drive from my urban home has led me to think more about the context of the animal — human and otherwise.  To see a rat in the city means to call and inspector and exterminator.  To see one in the country is to put out a trap, maybe, and let it go.  I carefully shoo any and all moths and flies from my house, while I feel totally comfortable working around the frogs on the internet router in my studio.

If you know how much I love duality, you will see that this is probably going somewhere.  More on that in the coming months, I am sure.

Meanwhile, I have covered the tables with new canvas and tested the kiln to make sure it goes to ^6.  I’ve got a sketch book full of ideas, and feet that are longing to carry me over the trails and through the trees and into conversations with turkey vultures and wandering cows.

I am deeply grateful to Nathan for making this connection for me and to Lissa for offering up this studio to me.  It’s going to be an amazing summer.  Stay tuned on my instagram for photos as the work progresses!

 

 

In Air Guitar, Dave Hickey wrote an essay about truth and beauty and Liberace in which he asks the reader to decide if they prefer “the genuine rhinestone or the imitation pearl.” He writes, “Most prominently, Liberace was, without doubt and in his every facet, a genuine rhinestone, a heart without malice, whose only flaw was a penchant for imitation pearls—a certifiable neon icon, a light unto his people, with an inexplicable proclivity for phony sunsets. Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is residue of someone else’s privilege – and Liberace cultivated them both in equal parts and often to disastrous effects.”

My life in the San Francisco Bay Area has been blessed with showers of genuine rhinestones – the subcultures and undergrounds where the rules of abundance and affluence are rewritten. Lush fake furs worn with pride and rhinestones carefully glued on for glitz as if to show the wealth of our own created fantasy world. I have found more joy with genuine rhinestones than diamonds could ever provide.

The work I make is a tribute to those stories, of the traps and pitfalls, of the peace and beauty, and, of course, of the cost. So many of these stories go untold because their nuances get lost in trying to pin them down with words. As Jon Berger wrote in his book Why Look at Animals?, our language is born from the symbolic animal. In studying this idea and Derrida’s ideas about the abyss created between man and animal by language, I have found that many of these non-verbal truths lie still trapped in that abyss.

The animal forms I use are chosen carefully. The fables the sculptures tell come first from the study of the behavior and history of the animal itself. The giraffe becomes a story about how we have to adapt to our adaptations. The giraffe has a complex circulatory system dedicated just to its bending its head down to drink water. In the same way, those of us who adapt to these underworlds have to readapt our adaptations to fit into daily life. By starting with the animal, I use the animal as a indexical symbol, pointing directly back to the validity of the animal, rather than as a cipher that strips the animal of its meaning. Moving back and forth between the animal and the human, my sculptural animals tell the viewer the nuanced stories that might otherwise hide behind the weight of language.

Humans are drawn to gaze at the symbolic animal. Using this attraction with glitz and glitter, I try to include a wide range of viewers. However, while keeping my art accessible, I remain committed to a critically engaged conversation. In this way, my art creates a gateway for the casual viewer into the often-exclusionary conversations being had in the art world.

Moving forward from the work shown here, I am currently creating a body of work at a residency in Northern Marin. While I am still basking in the ideas of the spectacle, I’m also looking at the lines we draw between domestic and wild, useful and pest. The same animal in a different context has a completely different meaning – tells a completely different story. While exploring the visual of that, I’m reading and thinking about the way that we humans become defined in our lives – both as how we define ourselves and how we define others. Is this choice between the genuine rhinestone and the imitation pearl just a casual illusion or a necessary evil truth?

Title: Pit Fired Forms (Set of Three)
Sizes: 5″ x 3″, 5 “x 4″, 5″ x 3.5”

 

These forms were fired in an open pit fire on Ocean Beach with Tom Decker and the Fort Mason Ceramics Guild.

 

 

The fire pits were created by metal artists in San Francisco to preserve the tradition of fires on Ocean Beach.  Because this firing was done in a raised pit instead of a sunken pit, the firing goes much faster and has greater thermal shock.

 

The pieces are set on a cushion of saw dust and copper and iron for coloring.  Then everything is covered with wood and set aflame.  As the fire burns down, the pit fired pieces emerge from the fire.

It is an exciting and communal way to finish thrown ware.