General Interest

LSU Vet Med Artist Residency Journal 4

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Over the weekend, I had dinner with my good friend Dr. John Pojman and his wife and came into the studio and painted. The following week was mostly focused on my studio practice as well, but there were a few interesting events! The first is that some anatomy folks asked to meet with me, and then after I showed them my studio and its current state of affairs, I followed them back to their lab and nosed around. They had a veritable stockpile of bones, as you might imagine, and also lent me some stain powders which I am excited to explore, though a bit less so now that the methylene blue counter stain has revealed itself to be unstable in coloration… but I still want to see what these others can do, and there’s one made out of lichens that sounds pretty promising.

After sleeping on our conversation, I went back and borrowed a giant bucket full of duplicate bones, as with permission from the school I decided I would create a small body of ceramics with bone impressions for texture. I had been so convinced I would not do ceramics down here though that I didn’t bring any tools along. Thank goodness I got the Morningside University Ver Steeg grant, as I might’ve otherwise balked at the cost of buying new ones! I went to the primary pottery supply store in Baton Rouge and picked up tools, a 25lb bag of white stoneware, and three glazes which I hope to combine together in a way that both accentuates the texture while being reminiscent of bone. We’ll see - I don’t really have time to troubleshoot any part of the glazing, so que será, será.

On Thursday evening, my former graduate faculty member and mentor Kelli Kelley hosted a shindig at her house for me to introduce me to some of her recent MFA alumni and current MFA students. It was really kind of them all to spend this time with me, and I enjoyed seeing Kelli’s studio again - it’s perhaps my platonic ideal of studio. It’s big, has a lot of table space and an extremely high ceiling, and just generally cultivates an air of peaceful, creative energy.

After that gathering I made my way out to dinner with a new friend I made after moseying into Mo’s Art Supply - Emily Seba, a talented illustrator and prop designer who also manages this Mo’s.

The following weekend and beginning of the next week was spent busily crafting a small collection of pinch pots; I have to say that though my new tools are fine, I really miss my Garrity tools. (Buying more would take too long in shipping time though, so I made do with the instantly available ones from Southern Pottery Supply.) I learned that a lot of bones don’t really leave as much in the way of impressions as I’d hoped, but there were a few that served me quite well!

LSU Vet Med Artist Residency Artwork 2 Process

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As I mentioned in my first post about this painting, the coloration of the background comes from my novel usage of veterinary stains and medicine as art media, and I continued that color palette into the subject as well. However, there was a lot of trial and error in the creation of the background, and a cyan coloration that was produced ended up quickly going almost entirely fugitive (bleached out). I reinforced it with acrylic droplets as a final step, but as the painting continues to age, the background purple coloration is also beginning to fade. I may need to redo the whole background eventually, but right now I am adopting a wait-and-see approach!

This painting has already had a number of failed backgrounds, because two of the chemicals I tried to use for pigmentation clearly did not work from the start. The first I attempted was chlorhexidine, and the second was light green stain from Histology. “Wait a minute!” you might say to yourself. “Those chemicals are still listed in the mixed media!”

You’d be correct - I left them in because I kept sandwiching new chemicals between layers of acrylic medium, and I can’t be sure that some of those initial layers didn’t create the compositional effects that later resulted from the Diff-Quik methylene blue counter stain. That is the chemical that brought both the purple and strong cyan into to the background, but the cyan came from watering down or thinning out the stain and it began going fugitive quickly. The purple stuck around long enough that I thought it was permanent, but now it too is beginning to fade. I’ll continue to update you as to where this painting ends up, in terms of both aesthetics and process!

LSU Vet Med Artist Residency Artwork 1 Process

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I tend to be pretty bad about taking process photos, but I’ve been trying to be more intentional about it for this residency! Here are several images of Fortification in progress, culminating in the finished artwork.

Puerto Rico Photos!

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Whew, I’ve been booked up so much that I’ve not had time to download, edit, and upload photos until now! Here are some highlights from my spring break trip to Puerto Rico.

Hard at Work Making Ceramics

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I’ve been spending a lot of studio time with ceramics lately as I’ve got several bodies of work in progress simultaneously and each have different time pressures. I’ll discuss each as they continue to develop! However, in these photos I was preparing for the Dakota Potters Supply raku workshop I attended in Sioux Falls this past Saturday, April 23rd along with our ceramics instructor Paul Adamson and two Morningside students.

Since this semester has been so busy, I only had one raku piece ready to go by April 14th (the start of Morningside’s Easter break). I needed to have all the pieces I wanted to bring in the bisque firing by April 20th, which meant finishing the rawware by April 17th to give it time to dry. I cranked out seven more pieces over the holiday, so I was able to bring eight with me to the workshop! My sweet spot is between six to nine pieces for each workshop day, so that worked out perfectly.

In the first image, you can see me in the Morningside ceramics studio as I used the slab roller, a foam square, and a 6” mushroom anvil to prepare a few small platters. In the second photo, I’m handbuilding a vase in my kitchen at home.

Just Returned from the April 2022 CIC Workshop for Department and Division Chairs

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It’s a busy spring - I just returned from the April 2022 Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) Workshop for Department and Division Chairs in Greenville, SC. I attended with two of my Morningside colleagues from the music and business departments.

You might be surprised to find out this was my first full academic conference. I have attended the annual College Art Association’s (CAA) conference twice, but the first time was as a graduate student job seeker, so I worked as a room monitor/projectionist in order to afford the registration cost and went to the job fair and the exhibitor and trade fair. This meant I didn’t really engage with the main conference all that much, as my availability was heavily focused on those three aspects. The second time I attended the CAA, my role was exclusively being a vendor in the exhibitor and trade fair alongside Dr. John Pojman representing QuickCure Clay. I have also attended several raku ceramic workshops at Dakota Potters, but those are geared towards production rather than discourse.

At this April 2022 CIC conference, it was rewarding to get to know my own two colleagues better as well as to get to meet peers from institutions across the United States and work with them on our various session topics. One of the presenters was Morningside’s own Bill Deeds, our retired provost who hired me onboard in his last semester!

After the conference was over, I stopped by the Greenville County Museum of Art and had a great time viewing their four exhibits, which had a heavy concentration of work by Andrew Wyeth, Jasper Johns, Thomas Sills, and David Drake. I really enjoyed Wyeth’s and Johns’ work in particular.

A Taste of Puerto Rico

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I had a great time in Puerto Rico over spring break - we hiked a trail in El Yunque and swam in one of its rivers, had several beach excursions, toured the Rio Camuy Caverns, kayaked the Laguna Grande bioluminescent bay, and went out dancing! Since I fully used my break time, I immediately returned to work so I haven’t had a chance to pull any images off my cameras yet; here’s a cell phone photo on the trail down to the Rio Camuy Caverns to tide you over until then!

Spring Break in Puerto Rico!

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I’ll be visiting Puerto Rico with my friend and colleague Stacey Alex over spring break! As you might imagine, I’m excited to get to soak in the natural beauty of the island. Our planned outdoor itinerary includes kayaking on the Laguna Grande Nature Reserve’s bioluminescent bay, hiking in El Yunque National Forest, a variety of beach visits, and exploring the Rio Camuy Cave Park.

I’ll post some photos when I return!

Title IX Religious Exemptions

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Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal civil rights law which reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

All three of the higher education institutions I have taught at have complied with this law. Up until recently I had believed - mistakenly, it turns out - that any educational institution had to make a choice between adhering to Title IX and receiving federal funding, or opting out of both.

I have now learned that institutions can request religious exemptions to Title IX, receive those exemptions, and then are explicitly allowed to discriminate against their students and employees and still receive federal funding. Furthermore, the Office for Civil Rights has approved every religious exemption Title IX request filed. This includes hundreds of institutions; in late 2016 that number was at 245 and it continues to grow each year. Depending on their religious tenets, institutions can legally discriminate “on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, pregnancy or receipt of abortion while still receiving federal funds.”

Last March, the Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP) filed a class action lawsuit seeking to remedy this glaring civil rights loophole. As stated in the legal complaint, the institutional and legally sanctioned discrimination faced by these diverse populations includes “conversion therapy, expulsion, denial of housing and healthcare, sexual and physical abuse and harassment, as well as the less visible, but no less damaging, consequences of institutionalized shame, fear, anxiety and loneliness” on our taxpayer dime.

If you too find this religious exemption to Title IX to be deeply troubling, please consider donating to the REAP team (through their parent organization Soulforce, which received an 89/100 on Charity Navigator).

Rolling with Ceramic Glaze Changes

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Speaking of glazes: I’ve been learning that the discipline of ceramics involves many variables, and some of the variables are less constant than I’d expect. In the discipline of painting, when I use up paint and I need to buy replacement tubes, they are very consistent in formulation so they are almost never perceptibly different. In ceramics, due to weight, volume, and cost issues we mix most of our glazes ourselves. This introduces a lot more human error compounded by potential supply line vendor changes in the ingredients and user contamination. To continue the comparison, it’d be like if I switched brands and sometimes even types of paint and expected continuity!

To state it simply: I’ve learned that when a bucket of glaze is gone and we remix it, I cannot expect the same aesthetics or behavior from the new glaze as from the old, even if they are purportedly the same. In some ways this is disconcerting, of course. But it is also a real opportunity, and it adds some exciting pressure and novelty into the glazing process. The novelty is self-explanatory; the pressure comes from if you want consistency since you only have as long as those buckets last for the desired effects to relatively predictably result.

Below is how Cone 6 Larry’s Black under Iron White looked with the bucket of Iron White that we were using last year.

You can see that the Iron White behaved in a very glossy way, was relatively thin at one coat but varied in thickness dependent on number and types of application coats with opacity ranging from translucent to decently opaque. At its most opaque, it was white. The Larry’s Black underneath went to a glossy and stable spectrum of various values of blue dependent on the application thickness of both colors.

We used up that bucket of glaze a few months ago, and the new Cone 6 Iron White appeared. Below are two new pieces that use Green Tweed, Larry’s Black, and the new mix of Iron White.

This Iron White is thicker at one application coat, a little yellower, and more opaque and matte. It also interacts quite differently with Larry’s Black. The matte-over-gloss effect causes the Iron White to crater and blister atop Larry’s Black; you can see it does not do that over Green Tweed as Green Tweed is itself more of a matte glaze.

Cratering and blistering are frequently considered “glaze defects,” but I enjoy the texture that some “glaze defects” provide - if you review my body of stoneware ceramic work you’ll notice that I am drawn to crawling as well.

Since these were my first pieces with the new bucket of Iron White, I didn’t know about this new interaction yet - I was expecting glossy results aligned to that first batch above. Now that I know, I’ve glazed a bunch of new ceramics with this cratering/blistering effect in mind, and they are waiting in the kiln until it’s filled up and ready to fire. I’m excited to see them come out!

Hot Water

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My travel through artist residencies to different parts of the world has contributed a lot to my artistic oeuvre and practice. But its impact surpasses professional rewards; it has materially changed the ways in which I see and operate within the world both big and small. One of the smaller persistent changes is that every time I have a hot shower, I really appreciate it.

I took hot water in the shower - and out of the shower! - for granted growing up. I liked it, but I don’t remember truly feeling grateful for it until after I lived without it for weeks at a time. I’ve probably only lived a cumulative of around three months without hot water. It is somewhat surprising to me that such a short period of deprivation or negative novelty can have this lasting an impact. I’m so happy it has, though! Because again, every time I step into a hot shower now, I’m impressed and thankful. I just finished a hot shower, in fact, and was marveling at it which led to my writing this post.

I recognize that this story reflects my privilege; that I was able to take hot water for granted growing up and that travel, rather than economic hardship, has led to my reevaluation of hot showers are both very fortunate circumstances. But now I am additionally fortunate for my gratitude, this transformation of an expectation into an abiding appreciation.

Do you have any “hot water” transformations?

Speaking Of Ashlar...!

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I always provide Ash with a water bowl in addition to misting. I know she drinks from the misted droplets and the water in her food rather than standing water, but I like providing her with a spot to soak if she wishes. She somewhat regularly drags coconut fiber bedding into the dish, and that’s her prerogative!

Recently, though, I saw her sitting protectively atop the wet coir in the dish one evening - a behavior I’ve not witnessed before - and I thought I spotted a bit of white that looked suspicious. I took a photo and then the next morning when she’d moved off to sleep, I investigated! Sure enough, I unearthed an egg. I’m not sure if it’s her first egg or not, but it’s the first I’ve spotted from her! She created her own lay site and ensured the right humidity - what a clever gecko she is.

Since Ash has been a solitary gecko since around eight months old, she is very likely laying infertile eggs. There is an ever so small - microscopically tiny! - chance that she could successfully undergo parthenogenesis, but I’m not holding my breath. However, this is a maturity milestone! I left the egg in the dish as she might want to circle back and eat it to reclaim some of the nutrients.

Ashlar Update!

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I haven’t updated you on Ashlar - my pet gargoyle gecko - in a while, but she’s doing very well! Ash is a little over three years old, has a strong preference for the Fig & Insects Pangea Gecko Diet, changes color regularly, and makes full use of her vivarium. Here are a few new photos of her!

Cross Off Another Bucket List Item: I've Done Raku!

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I’ve always wanted to do raku firing ever since I first saw a piece of raku pottery and learned of the technique as a child - but it’s never been an opportunity I could take advantage of until now! A few months ago I attended a Saturday raku workshop at Dakota Potters Supply in Sioux Falls, SD, joined by my ceramics faculty member Paul Adamson and graduating senior Anna Uehling. Raku, first practiced in Japan, is a low-firing technique that makes use of wide temperature swings, reduction, and carbon trapping to create some really ornate artwork. Due to the low-fire nature of the process, the pieces are mostly decorative; they are neither watertight nor food-safe.

Here is a slideshow of the day’s adventures. This post will be followed by a series of posts exploring each of the three different glazing techniques I tried! There were five different techniques available, and I was most interested this first go-round in three of them.

  • Crackle glazes (either clear or white), with the goal that carbon gets trapped in the crackles

  • The “baked potato” technique, wherein you coat the bisqueware in ferric chloride, sprinkle it with sugar, salt, and/or horsehair, and then bundle it up in aluminum foil like a baked potato before firing it

  • Copper glazes

  • Ferric chloride spray

  • Horsehair and/or feather application

Polyspermy in Plants

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I’ve been making hybrid aloe and gastrolea seedlings from my own collection for about a year now, and in my curiosity I looked up whether plants can combine genetics from more than one father in the same seed, which is called polyspermy. This is different than seed pods on the same raceme containing different parentage (one flower being fertilized by one neighbor and another by a different one), which is a common phenomenon; the type of polyspermy in plants that I’m talking about means that one seed has three (or more) biological parents. The answer is apparently yes, but it’s such new research that there’s not yet clear information about which plants can and which cannot; proving it’s even possible only happened four years ago!

I think it’s pretty cool how much there still is to learn and research and document in the world!

Distrust of the Medical Community

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I’m going to preface and close this post with my strong support of getting vaccinated, both in general and specifically with the COVID-19 vaccine. I have received both doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine; the sooner we achieve local and global herd immunity, the sooner we can regain a more normal world.

The United States is beginning to approach a new stage in the COVID-19 vaccination process: we are running out of people excited to queue, and are now attempting to convince those who are passively or actively opposing getting a COVID-19 vaccine to join the vaccinated so that we can reach herd immunity.

I have several students who have told me that they have rejected the chance to get vaccinated against COVID-19. While I haven’t grilled them on their own individual rationales, I know that there may be more than just political beliefs at play. The medical community is not infallible, and those patients who are privileged and/or lucky enough to have always received stellar health care are very fortunate - but others unfortunately do not have the same experiences.

A lot of people including myself bring up the Tuskegee Syphilis Study when discussing this topic. It wasn’t that long ago; it lasted for 40 years and only ended in the 1970s (after a number of earlier attempts to shut it down were unsuccessful). That’s still within the lifespan of people around today. But here’s another example from right now in 2021: nonconsensual pelvic exams unrelated to medical need have been and are still regularly being performed in the United States on women under general anesthesia - with one of the explicit rationales being that if women were asked for their consent beforehand, they might not give it. The state I’m currently living in - Iowa - banned this practice in 2017. That’s only four years ago. Furthermore, most of my life has been spent living in states that allowed or still currently allow this practice. Some doctors and medical institutions continue to lobby for nonconsensual exams under general anesthesia to continue. These can also extend to involuntary rectal exams on both sexes as well as penile and prostate exams. This is, sadly, just another of many examples of systemic medical transgressions and disparities.

As mentioned in the opening of this post, I have recently been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, and I am grateful for that! I hope we can convince more folks to join us in this fight to attain herd immunity. But in order to do so, we need to acknowledge that some have legitimate concerns backed by personal or community experiences - and we also need to do better at tackling medical inequalities and oversteps. You can take action, too - through contacting your representatives and advocating for change, donating to organizations that are fighting these battles on the policy and legal fronts, and so on!

It's Commencement!

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Well, that was a strange and hard academic year we just finished, due to the pandemic, but I’m proud of our community for getting through it as best we could and being able to celebrate a range of accomplishments along the way.

Today is the graduation for our class of 2021! We had a wonderful string of senior thesis shows over the past month - the disciplines of graphic design, photography, animation, ceramics, drawing, and painting were all variously on display in the exhibitions of Courtney Klocke, Anna Uehling, Abby Koch, Kazune Oguro, and Carissa Powell. In fact, Kaz and Carissa’s two-person show will stay up through May 17th if you haven’t yet seen it and want to stop in!

Scandals in the Houseplant Hobby Part II

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If you haven’t read my blog post titled “Scandals in the Houseplant Hobby,” I recommend you do that first, as this is a follow-up!

To recap: plants, notably the Philodendron ‘Pink Congo,’ that have been gassed (or occasionally painted) with ethylene to induce a temporary discoloration that may appear to unsuspecting buyers as a permanent variegation have begun to enter the houseplant trade. At the time of my first post, ‘Pink Congo’ was the only affected type I could list with specificity, but I mentioned that others were out there.

This spring, I’ve so far noticed two more pop up on one of the Facebook groups for houseplants - and this time, they’re both succulents. The first is Crassula ‘Buddha’s Temple’ and the second is Sinocrassula yunnanensis. Here are a couple screenshots I took of the plants for sale - in the second picture, it’s the middle row of plants that are impacted. Both were advertised as being Korean imports.

With the Crassula ‘Buddha’s Temple,’ people challenged the seller who initially defended these plants as untreated, natural variegation, but then a day later returned and admitted that upon follow-up, her importer confirmed that they were fakes. However, at least when I saw it, the Sinocrassula yunnanensis sales post made by a different seller hadn’t attracted any questions or consternation.

To me, both plants look really unnatural and kind of diseased or wrong, but then again I am deep in the hobby and know what plants ought to look like - I also think painted succulents and dyed and fake flowers look bad, so clearly my taste isn’t everyone’s as those treatments do have a ready audience in more amateur growers! I do wholeheartedly believe that any altered plant - whether it be gassed with ethylene, painted, dyed, glued with false flowers, etc. - should come with a clear label that lays out what has been done, the lifespan of the manipulation, and the impact to the health of the plant.

It's National Poetry Month!

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I’ve always enjoyed attending annual state poet laureate presentations and have several books of poetry in my own collection. So when Morningside’s creative writing instructor Brendan Todt reached out to me to ask if I’d be willing to record a video of myself reading a poem aloud in support of National Poetry Month for a virtual 2021 Morningside Friday is Writing Day event shared online, I said sure!

Brendan suggested it might be nice if I chose an art-themed poem, which was an interesting challenge. I ended up selecting Three for the Mona Lisa by John Stone!