UPDATE 2: I found the artist. Visited the Hyatt’s website and looked at the photos of their facilities. The Ellis Room matches the carpet and wall treatments in my photos; two exhibitions were in the Ellis room. One was Northern Arizona University. The University’s website is scant on photos, so I started going after the individual names listed as exhibitors. Bingo. Steve Schaeffer is my mystery artist.

Update 1: found a list of exhibitors: SDSU Alumni and Students, Arizona State University, University of Arizona prof and grads, Watershed 6, NCECA Insternational Resident Artists, Utah State University, Arizona CLAY Juried Exhibition, Maricopa Community Colleges, Northern Arizona University. That narrows it a little.

Please help with this puzzle.

Who: Please tell me if you can identify the artist for any of these pieces.

What: See images below

Where: Hyatt Regency Hotel, Second Floor, during NCECA. I cannot find any reference to who was exhibiting there. I do know it was not Utah State. Those students’ work was amazing, but it was in a different space, a taller corner one with windows.

When: NCECA 2009, Phoenix

Why: Because I want to know what school these people are from, and look up the school.

How: Because somebody will have photos or will remember. If you have forensic-level image editing software, maybe you can sharpen the tag enough to make it out; I’ll send you the hi-res photo.

Something about the material interested me enough to take a photo, because I also took closeups.

But this and the next image… wouldn’t mind seeing these everyday. They’re right up my alley.

Maybe the sculpture in the background is a clue.

As my recent hay-burning and wood-firing experiences have reminded me, I don’t quite have the duds for this stuff. Jeans with wool long undies underneath do okay, and I have steeltoes from architecture. But tops? It’s all for site visits: my flame-resistant wool stuff is all knit, and of course my waterproof stuff isn’t ember-resistant. I don’t fear embers, but I don’t like putting holes in my clothes. Enter the loan of a Carhartt garment over the weekend. (Thank you.) My journey took me within shouting distance of a Gander Mountain store, so I went in and found… women’s Carhartts!

Bibs: Cotton duck, and lined. Pants have that nasty habit of scooting down and exposing the lower back to drafts. Womens shirts don’t tend to run long. My pickStyle #: WR027 Women’s Sandstone Bib Overall/Quilt Lined

Vest: The blog “things white people like” (amusing at times) makes a joke about vests, but my orange down vest (ten years old, American Eagle) is a favorite garment and my windproof/water resistant REI vest is on the list too. Sometimes a vest is all that’s needed; the body’s plenty warm but the exposed arms can shed the extra heat. My pick: Style #: WV001 Women’s Sandstone Mock-Neck Vest/Quilt Lined Unlike the mens vests, it’s cut for somebody with a waist and hips. And the mock-neck is much nicer looking than the mens vests with the knit kinda collar.

Jacket: Because sometimes it’s too cold for a vest. My pick: Style #: WJ130 Women’s Sandstone Active Jac/Quilted Flannel

They’re bomb-proof, fine for some water, and warm. And, oh, stuff doesn’t get stuck in them. Like bits of hay. It can brush off. Except the fleecey lining on the vest. But I could deal with that. Better than picking burr-bits out of my wool hoodie (a fortunate and functional thrift-store find) for a half hour.

Yes, this is ceramics related. I like being comfortable and I like wearing the right stuff for what I’m doing. And, well, it also caters to my gear-headedness.

Today I placed a decent-sized order with The Potters Shop. The bookstore exists in Needham Ma; I found it online while searching for a couple books. It can be found online at http://thepottersshop.blogspot.com. While Amazon is usually my source for used books on the cheap, I was pleased to find several titles priced reasonably on their site. The ordering-by-phone experience was pleasant, too. Check it out.

Anyone have more good book sources? Amazon, Axner, and Aftosa come to mind.

Over the course of a week, I snapped a bunch of photos to share, but wasn’t prompt in posting them. I’ve been in high gear, preparing for a wood firing this weekend and a soda firing in early November.

Sunday October 11: threw the walls for five body-forms. Made a bunch of pods, which are for the woodfire.

Monday: continued with two of the body-forms. TAed for beginning wheel. I also took photos of the five walls before getting started altering – they’re interesting on their own. The photos, though, are on a friend’s phone, and she hasn’t had a chance to email the photos yet.

Tuesday: continued with those two body-forms and brought the other three up to speed. Prepped clay for three more pieces. To work beyond Lillstreet’s clay options, I amend the clay, looking for different flashing and surface qualities. Since these three pieces are for the wood firing, I wanted a bit of a stickier clay to help catch and flux the ash that’ll be coming through the kiln. So, based on my previous (not-yet-documented) experiments with amending clay and making teabowls, I wedged in Custer feldspar.

Wednesday: Threw walls for three wall-forms. Worked on the five body-forms, pictured above, while waiting for the wall-forms to set up. (The body-forms are a different clay, if you’re wondering.) Helped put soda in the soda kiln. Started altering the wall-forms, despised two of them, realized I was going about it all wrong. So I altered the third wall-form, which was much better, balled up the two bad ones, found the clay was into a stiff leather hard, tossed them into some water.

Thursday: Threw two more walls to replace the wall-forms I’d killed the night before. Let them dry. Kept working on the five body-forms, which are about done. Checked the clay from the previous night, found it’d partly slaked, left it on plaster while I wedged some other odds and ends of clay. Altered the two new wall-forms. The image above is the wall-form that’d survived, one of the new ones as a blank, and the other with the lines drawn and starting to get into the initial altering.

Friday: learn and burn. But that’s another story!

Saturday: all day in the studio, working on figuring out those wall-forms. I need some bigger bats  if I’m going to go larger (which I’d like to!) with the wall-forms; as it was, I had to find some greenboard to give myself enough room to alter their footprints. These guys are getting big, and I like it!

Sunday: in the studio, figuring out and finishing those wall-forms. Now they’re drying. While the body-forms tend to have a front and a back, these have multiple fronts, multiple backs. They remind me of photos I’ve seen of Utah canyons. It’s an exciting new development for the project.

Whirlwind! That’s easily a hundred pounds of wet clay at once, and a substantial number of hours. Invigorating. After a year, I’m starting to understand the internal logic. I feel like I’m making progress.

Also, at last, got the grindingstones back from being bisqued… they had been on my shelf drying for weeks. Sorry about the lack of focus; it’s cropped from another shot. But I’m also excited about this form, and haven’t mentioned it much. These will also be going on a trip through a wood kiln. Hurrah.

After the WCC firing, I was driving back with a friend from Lillstreet and we were discussing how I’d been thinking of making really, really large body-forms. We were looking at the interior space in clover-leaves (the highway entrance, not the plant), the edges of woods, various buildings, building types. Some places the forms might work well, some places poorly. A couple of days after that discussion, on October 6, I did a few sketches.

Though at this point I’ve realized how this idea diverges from my initial intent, the sketches I  made are still pretty cool. I’ll take the idea someplace, eventually. The space is one I found and photographed – 1810 North… something… between Clark and Halsted… – and found them when considering spaces to play the forms against. Enjoy.

The structure is a bowtruss with skylight, bearing masonry walls, and tongue and groove roof deck.

The two farther ones have a nice bulging quality to them. Water balloons? The way I described the contours works pretty well.

These fell a little flat; the perspective feels like the viewer is at a distance.

Then I tried getting them to interact with each other more. The dynamic was visually exciting; I’ll make some pieces to explore the idea. As a drawing, I like this.

The sculpture at the far right one gives the best sense of perspective, but I don’t really like how it looks and the middle form is kind of blah.

My pen was misbehaving the whole time I was making these drawings, but in the end I got some valuable information from the process.