Ceramic Sculptures

An ostrich burying its head in the sand is an idiom and a metaphor used to describe the act of willfully ignoring obvious danger, problems, or unpleasant truths. Based on a false legend, it signifies avoiding reality rather than facing it. It is also referred to as the "ostrich effect" in psychology. Here you see a naked little angel burying its head like an ostrich, under a larger version of its wing. But why? Is it seeking or hiding? What could an all-knowing supernatural being seek? Perhaps it would not want to see everything it can see. Should we consider it indifferent or willfully ignorant? Perhaps it can only find the repose of being by taking refuge in limiting witness? Does that mean false ignorance or willful indifference are essential for being? And aren’t these our own challenges, of lacking impartiality? Of being prevented access to the whole of being while being an indivisible component of it? Of willful ignorance or indifference toward other beings to pretend separation into owning a better way of being? Cursing fate while participating in its creation?
Porcelain, epoxy, acrylic paint. 12 x 12 x 4 inches

We see things in clouds, so, by making one I expected an idea to present itself. But…. I just made a cloud. Then what?
Well, I gave it rain to stand on and gave it a tilt, and that introduced a sense of time and motion. It seemed the cloud could pass over the pedestal and the idea of being a sculpture.
Then I thought to make a little “Thurberesque” character act as a separate agent driving away the cloud. As such, the cloud becomes both a cloud in motion in its own time and an undesirable occupant of space claimed by our little protagonist. I find this an apt analogy of how one might wish to deal with depression. The title is an afterthought, recalling the children’s chant asking for the rain to leave.
Porcelain, Glaze, Acrylic paint, Wire, 14 x 11.5 x 7 inches

I imagined this as an as-yet-undiscovered mystery waiting in the woods with little hope of ever being seen. Imagine wandering and coming across it just when you consider yourself lost. I have staged this garish representation to make the reality of what is unseen seem seen. Can you see the iris/pupil bulging under the eyelid?
Conjured without a model, the head's style and color reference Greek bronzes recovered from the sea. This is a confabulation of Greek Satyr, Roman Faun, Christian Demon, and the Underwood Deviled Ham of childhood memory. It is an overdetermined symbol. Heaped and layered by cultural history, it is, “the navel of a dream.”
This character type has given form and narrative to humankind’s wrangling relationship to nature. It has characterized the breadth and contradiction of that struggle. He manifests the untamed, dangerous, lustful, playful, and duplicitous, but also the pastoral, peaceful, gentle, and benevolent.
The web of culture and history is in a sense shared, but imperfectly. It is a web of connections, sticky, somewhat structured, but multivalent, non-linear, imperfectly shared, easily damaged, and possibly misleading.
Ceramic, paint, and plastic foliage. 14 x 13 x 7 inches

Sometimes I see scraps and leftovers in the studio that catch me just when my mind is ready to create. A technique I call "wet on dry” makes this very do-able. In art, a "confection" can refer to a piece of art that is elaborately and artfully put together, like a sweet confection, or to the process of creating a work of art from multiple elements. In a wet-on-dry sculpture, I concoct a gloop as a mortar which can join clays of disparate dryness. This is creatively freeing. The consistency is like cake/candy frosting which can itself be applied and textured. This all tends toward a sculptural confection.
12 x 12 x 7 inches

I used a tree as a tool to express itself. This started as a 25 pound bag of clay that I skewered with a pvc pipe. I pressed and rolled this around the base of a large tree with deep gnarly bark. Then slammed it off the pipe onto one end to initiate a stumpy look, followed by detailing using pieces of tree bark.
12 x 9 x 9 inches

This is a "2 Face". One side is referenced to sleeping head by Brancusi.
10 x 7 x 5 inches

HMMM another 2 face. When I was a kid going down into a dark basement, or other spooky spot, I couldn't help worrying about monsters. To cope I imagined becoming friends with them. I told myself it made just as much sense for them to be unintentionally scary and upset about being misunderstood and fearing to be forever lonely. Even it they turned out to be awful, I could maybe confuse them by my behavior....or at least not feel so hopeless and fearful during my demise. By then I had turned on the light, grabbed the laundry and run back upstairs.
13.5 x 8 x 8 inches

Relates to the style of the first painting I remember making when I was five years old, a hand making a peace sign. I was also thinking of a peace poster from the 1960's. thinking about how sculptures of partial bodies are kind of like flowers, freshly cut to regard but why not add detail of the cut on the limb itself? Rapid scrap build approach.
8 x 7 x 6 inches

Removable head. If I ever get around to it, the idea is to have other heads as well.
8 x 5.5 x 4.5 inches

Improv. Used two firm slabs cut to a book-matched contour which I then joined using soft slabs to follow the contour. I pushed out the firm slab sides to create a figure expressing a full weight of female bodying, whether older with fibroids or young and pregnant. She is unbound and unworried. Dancing with closed eyes is a way of enjoying and celebrating the body one is. The calm almost smile and her self-enfolding arms express self recognition and acceptance. She embodies a celebration of being that I need as an antidote.
Terracotta and white slip. 11 x 10 x 6.5 inches

Another rapid scrap build start. I ask for scraps piling up by a neighbor and give myself 30 minutes or less to build fast. In this case just thinking "head". Then refining later. Intent was to give color with loose single swipes of underglaze, engobe, or acrylic wash, similar to brushwork on Picasso vases.
12 x 9 x 7 inches

I sometimes think of characters with physical conundrums which people should be able to relate to through their own body sensibility.
11.5 x 10 x 5 inches

Started as a 10 pound "pinch pot" and ended up as a gravitationally challenged clown cookie jar.
16 x 13.5 x 10 inches

Trying to find interesting balance between representation of hats and retaining identity as blobs of lumpy clay.
11 x 9 x 4 inches each

I was thinking about the once viral straw man fallacy, "guns don't kill people....yadda yadda", and trying to rephrase it in a way that would reset the assertion to make it representative of the actual social condition of concern. The mercy beseeching pose and expression of the tower/owl/man on the Keep tower relates to the central victim of the firing squad in Goya's painting, "Execution of the defenders of Madrid, the third of May, 1808." That was perhaps a first political protest painting in the western canon of art history. Madrid was also the first major city to experience aerial bombing of civilians, a precedent set by Franco and his fascist accomplices. Since then it has become a recurrent practice, spiting the notion of laws of war.
17.5 x 8 x 8 inches

Considering a theme to use for a doorstop, I asked myself, "What theory of cosmos could be expressed using a human body conundrum?" my answer was this guy who sticks his head outside (of the cosmos) through the wall. Instead of what he may have expected, his head emerges from his own butt and sees the room behind himself. He seems to be enjoying a sense of discovery. I also like cats. Susan hid this piece in the laundry room. I am endlessly amused with this kind of thing, but Susan finds it distasteful/embarrassing to guests.
8 x 6 x 5 inches.

This is a cat feeding toy. Put a treat in the middle and they love trying to get it out. I love the way I was able to use the grog in the clay to create something like a taste bud surface to the tongues.
10 x 10 x 4 inches

Wet-on-dry 2 face improvisation.
9 x 5 x 4 inches

Another 2 face improv "Creetchie".
8.5 x 4 x 4 inches

And yet another 2 face "Creetchie" improv. The blue side was a try at regression to make and paint as if a kindergartener again.
7.5 x 7 x 6 inches

Character from my Two Faced "Creetchies" series. This is an ongoing series of improvisational character creations in which each side is developed as a counterpoint to the other.
Terracotta with underglazes and stain. 6.5 x 5 x 4.5 inches

This was my very first 2 face "Creetchie" and it is wearing a sarong, which is inevitable given all the time I have spent in Indonesia.
11.5 x 6 x 5.5 inches

Yet yet another 2 face improv "Creetchie".
9 x 8 x 5 inches

Another physical conundrum sculpture.
9.5x 9 x7inches

The physical conundrum of being a figure on an Etruscan pot is that heading in one direction is the same as approaching from the opposite direction. This dude with a spear chases the enemy who is himself.
9.5 x 8.5 x 8.5 inches

A physical conundrum seen in the similarity between crucifixion pose and hug welcome pose. The duality of loving togetherness and isolated victimhood. Not exactly the right words, but very much a great example of physical comedy in service of moral philosophy.
Painted, like most of my sculpture. Cast from a mold. Can make multiples. 5.5 x 4.5 inches.

OK, you probably noticed, I like cats. Here is a followup to the fresh cut hand. A cat does not pick a flower up to regard it'; a cat grabs or steps on it.
8.5 x 7 x 4 inches

If you are my age, you had one shot each year to see special recurring TV shows, usually on holidays. This piece is referencing a Halloween show scene. This kid had problems making his ghost costume. He stands in a circle of kids taking turns telling what great things they received. Every time he says, "I got a rock." I made this rock gooey and sweet like candy sticking to his face.
8 x 6 x 6 inches