General Interest
Final grades have been submitted, I was applauded for my 5-year work anniversary milestone at Morningside University’s annual holiday banquet, and supply orders for the next semester have been placed! Over winter break, I will be working on a number of studio projects in ceramics and painting. I will share more about those as they unfold.
I look forward to 2025!
As you may or may not recall (it’s been several years now!), I took advantage of an opportunity in January 2021 to include a digital image of my painting Velocity on a shielded microSD card loaded onto the Peregrine lunar lander. I’m a space enthusiast who got a kick out of the idea that I’d have a digital artwork archive on the Moon as well as Earth, and other blog readers thought it was really cool as well; someone shared the news with the Sioux City Journal such that there ended up being local press coverage about it!
The Peregrine was initially supposed to go up in late 2021, but it was delayed for a variety of reasons including pandemic supply chain troubles. For a couple of years, the launch date just kept getting pushed back. Finally, at the beginning of this year, it was ready. On January 8th, 2024, the Peregrine was launched… but by January 18th, it had reentered Earth’s atmosphere, burned, and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. After months of investigation concluded, it turns out that a faulty valve was to blame.
As the “first contracted mission of NASA's commercial lunar payload program,” this was a rather sad conclusion which means that I am at present still just a terrestrial artist.
I often get asked about my studio practice and processes, so I like to share some photos of how my artwork develops! Here are progress images from my Arts Itoya residency in Japan. Note that I do not take the time to precisely color adjust progress photos, and they are often taken in poor lighting conditions (late at night) and sometimes at angles. I also can forget to pause to take pictures when I’m in a rush!
First, here’s Duality:
Next, Pursuit (Ichi-go Ichi-e):
Then we have Lifelong Renter:
Shingling:
Messenger:
And finally, Fleeting:
After my day trip to Yamanashi City, I spent my last few days in and around Tokyo. It was blazingly hot with heat advisories each day (around 100°F/38°C with 100% humidity), so I tried to mostly stay indoors during 12-4pm if possible. I visited teamLab Planets (an immersive museum experience) one morning, stopped by the Shibuya scramble crossing during the evening, attended another washi paper workshop at Ozu Washi, and tried to return a defective titanium panel to Pigment Tokyo… but they unprofessionally refused to repair or refund it (so now I recommend you stay away from Pigment Tokyo - go to Ozu Washi instead!).
On my last full day, I took a trip to Yokohama’s Zoorasia, one of Japan’s newest and largest zoos, to try one final time to see an adult tanuki (rather than ancient tanuki like Immako and Mirai). I arrived at Zoorasia before it even opened and proceeded towards the tanuki enclosure, but it was already around 95°F and they were snoozing when I got there. After hanging out for about two hours, though, I finally got to see a healthy adult tanuki and took a few nice photos! I also really enjoyed seeing Zoorasia’s proboscis monkey exhibit. I then visited the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in the afternoon.
Before I knew it, my time in Japan had come to a close and I packed up a final time to head back to Sioux City. Due to the day/night cycle and when my flights were scheduled, I was in for approximately 31 hours between when I woke up to when I’d reach my house. I’ve learned I start to hit a wall around hour 22-24; fortunately for me, around hour 24 I had arrived in Chicago, gotten through customs, and had a couple more hours of layover before departure. I found a flat bench and took a 30min nap followed by just resting for another 15min or so, which was such a help.
Once I did get back home and unpacked, only one porcelain souvenir (a soup bowl) broke in my luggage, which was an acceptable loss given how much porcelain I brought back! Weeks later, my residency friend Emily mailed me a very snazzy canvas tote bag silkscreened with her residency logo design.
Overall, this was a really fabulous residency and first visit to Japan. I plan to continue to make artwork inspired by these travels, so stay tuned!
Returning to my summer travels - after I took the shinkansen from Kyoto to Tokyo, the next day Morningside University board member Mia Sudo and I took a day trip to Sioux City’s sister city in Japan: Yamanashi City! I had the honor of meeting the Yamanashi City delegation last fall during their visit to Morningside, and at that time I gave a short speech in Japanese welcoming them and then a slightly longer one in English describing the Morningside Art Department.
Mia was so kind - she put in work ahead of time arranging our transportation and schedule, and then she picked me up from my hotel and accompanied me throughout the visit and even translated for me when my Japanese was insufficient. I really appreciated her support of me and by extension Morningside University!
Yamanashi City welcomed me with open arms - literally and metaphorically! It was lovely to get to see the mayor and other delegation members again as well as meet additional city hall staff. Amongst several other very nice presents, I was gifted with a custom katakana stamp of my name, which was an extremely thoughtful, generous art gift which I will be definitely making use of! After exploring more of city hall, we where whisked away to tour more of Yamanashi City, including a sake brewery (and lunch!), a class visit with 5th grade students where I was allowed to join in on their lesson practicing Japanese calligraphy, a Mt. Fuji photo opportunity, a visit to a local museum and its gardens, and their zoo. Yamanashi City is warm and vibrant, and the people are so very kind!
After leaving Takeo, I took a train to Fukuoka and then a shinkansen (a bullet train) to Kyoto. When I arrived, it was about 3:30pm, which was good timing as I could head directly to my ryokan guest house as check-in started at 3pm. As I was walking there, I saw a street market mostly en route. I asked a passerby if it was a regular event or just today, and she said it was just for today. I decided to walk through it, and it was a local crafts market so I was happy to get to check it out! As I was doing so, people began to start packing up for the day, but I saw probably 70% of the vendors. Then I checked into the ryokan. This was the only ryokan I had booked, as I wanted to try staying in traditional tatami mat and futon set-up. It was great to sleep in, but I did miss having surfaces to put belongings on other than the floor or super low table; I discovered that, overall, I prefer a Western-style room. After I got situated, I went back out and walked around the neighborhood and found a vegan restaurant for dinner!
The Fushimi Inari bamboo forest.
My first full day in Kyoto started off rainy. I had breakfast at a different vegan cafe (where many of the waitresses were artists and we bonded over our shared love!) and then headed to Fushimi Inari Taisha, a famous Shinto shrine. The entrance and early part of the shrine complex were full of tourists, but I managed to set out on a small forested trail which no one else was brave or foolish enough to attempt. In the beginning, it was pretty cool to get away from the crowds, but towards the middle I started to wonder if I was making poor life choices as the trail got pretty steep (and it was very wet); going up it wasn’t too bad but I was already not fancying going back down. Towards the back half, there was a beautiful bamboo forest and I met the tiniest frog I’ve ever seen! The trail abruptly ran into a blockade, and the only option in a forward-ish direction was a small offshoot of a path atop pressed down leaves. Since I didn’t particularly want to turn around and do the slippery downhill trek, I tried my luck and eventually this leaf corridor connected with a real pathway (with inlaid steps). After a little while longer, I ran into my first person for a while! As I looped my way back towards the front I ran into more and more folks and the famous rows of torii gates.
The tiniest frog, with a blade of grass and a forming water droplet for scale.
After Fushimi Inari Taisha, I had lunch and then headed to the Raku Museum. As you may already know, I have really enjoyed learning raku processes and wanted to see the works in this institution. I learned that Raku is a family name, and the Raku family gained renown for their style of ceramics such that their name became the name for the set of processes. What a legacy!
The Raku Museum is small, so I finished and still had some time in the day. It had also stopped raining! I decided to head to the famous (and sometimes infamous) Gion district known for geishas, which is right next to a well-known street full of restaurants. I walked around Gion, visited a small contemporary art museum there, and finished the evening with some vegan ramen.
The next day again started off rainy. I took a train to Nara to visit the famous Nara Park, which has thousands of wild sika deer, sacred in the Shinto religion, which have acclimated to living on the grounds and enjoy eating “crackers” that vendors sell to tourists to feed to the deer. I walked around Nara Park for a few hours, and then had lunch and took a train into Osaka. I stopped at a summer festival, Aizen, which was smaller than I imagined but was nevertheless interesting to attend. Then I headed to the Osaka Aquarium, as I heard it was world-class. I really enjoyed a number of the exhibits; I can’t recall having seen a flounder swim before, and I also was delighted and alarmed by the gurnards or sea robins (Triglidae) which have “walking rays” aka legs. They also had a kawaii or “cute” wing, where I very much enjoyed watching the spotted garden eels!
This is the Google Translate image of a sign outside Mirai’s enclosure.
The following morning I checked out of the ryokan, but I had them store my luggage as I wanted to explore more of Kyoto (and I couldn’t check in to my Tokyo hotel until 3pm). I then went to the Kyoto City Zoo for attempt number two at seeing tanuki that I could paint. Unfortunately they also only had one tanuki, and she was Immako’s twin Mirai. She, too, has already outlived the normal tanuki lifespan and has grave medical issues but is soldiering on. I did get to see a Japanese giant salamander, though, which was very cool! The zoo was right next door to Kyoto’s KYOCERA Museum of Art, so I went there afterwards and took in a Takashi Murakami exhibition as well as a local Japanese arts and crafts exhibition. I was really pleased with how much Murakami was using metal leaf in this exhibited artwork and with his written reflections on the material’s connection to Japan, since I intentionally chose to work with it quite a bit during this artist residency. On the way back to the ryokan, I passed a small photography museum so I checked that out as well!
Then I picked up my small suitcase and took a train and then a shinkansen to Toyko! I purposefully reserved a seat on this one so I could sit on the window side with Mt. Fuji, and then kept checking my map so I could look out the window when it was time! Fujisan was pretty cool; it had its own little cloud hat.
Once we got to the studio, I began to paint! I tend to put in pretty long hours, so there was far less exploring going on - but there was a bit. While all the residents get along well, several enjoy independence. Emily and I both get along really well and like the same destinations so we began doing pretty much everything together. We asked a volunteer with the residency, Charlie, if he’d mind showing us a nearby koi store. With the owners’ permission, I used my underwater camera to take photos, much to Emily’s delight! We got some good images and the koi store owners were so very sweet. Japanese hospitality is outrageous. Despite the fact that it was clear we weren’t going to be customers, and they’d already done us a favor by letting us take photos of the fish, they also sat us down, showed us some documentary clips of their store and fish at different times, plied us with tea, coffee, and cookies, and offered their home’s art up for viewing as well as their bathroom to us. I need to up my hospitality game!
I learned that their average koi’s lifespan is 100 years, but that the oldest koi fish in Japan lived for 200 years! They also shared that this is the slowest time of year for their shop, and that the most spectacular fish come through in October and November. However, they are going to be getting new stock in next week so we plan to return!
We also began to explore a bit more of the culinary scene in Takeo, but it’s rough being a vegetarian here. Our favorite places include Irie, a Jamaican/Italian bar with a delightful owner and employee pair, as well as Sol de Verano (a Spanish tapas bar with delicious Basque cheesecake) and a tofu hot pot and gelato place. We also tend to eat at least one meal per day from a konbini (Family Mart or 7-11).
Hiro took four of us who wanted to go on an excursion to a hydrangea temple and shrine which is up a mountain in Takeo, and that was really beautiful, though my ears refused to pop for some time so I was happy when I could finally hear again!
Intersperse that with a lot of studio time, and a few late night onsen visits, and you have a full picture of my second week!
After flying into Fukuoka, I took an express train into Takeo. It’s about an hour and a half away, and I got there in the late afternoon. Hiro picked me up, and when I got to the residency three of the four other artists had already arrived! They include Stewart from New Mexico, Anna from Massachusetts, and Won from South Korea. Hiro showed me my room, where he had already stowed my two large pieces of luggage I had shipped with the takkyubin. He then gathered everyone together to show us the studio space, which is approximately a half mile away from the house. While that’s definitely walkable, Arts Itoya has very kindly provided each of the residents with an electric bike! This is actually my first time riding one, and I love it. Often if the ride is pretty flat I’ll just leave it off, but when there’s a fair amount of uphill I turn it on and the motor does most of the work! The problem was that one of the bikes was in the shop and Hiro wanted to pick it up, so he jogged to the studio while we rode behind him, and then we all walked to the bike shop together to pick up the other bike. We then explored the studio, made some requests (I needed way more tabletop than was currently on offer), and we rode back! Stewart is also vegetarian, so we then tried to find a place to have dinner and located a pizza shop not too far away so we headed there. It turns out it’s run by an Italian who moved to Takeo with his Japanese wife; they are both very nice. After that, we headed home and went to bed.
The next day, I began unpacking, did some laundry since I’d already been in Japan for a week, and sifted through my photos to see what I’d start to work on in the studio. The last resident also arrived: Emily from California. We’re a surprisingly US-heavy house - apparently a weird coincidence as most of the stays are more internationally diverse. The next few days, I mostly stuck to the house as I began to sketch out a number of pieces from my room’s desk, but I joined Emily on an excursion to a small botanical garden in Takeo and then visited a shrine with a 3,000 year-old camphor tree.
I invited Emily to go to Fukuoka with me that Thursday. I wanted to go to Fukuoka pretty early on during the residency for a few reasons: 1) the weather was only going to get rainier and hotter; 2) I wanted to go to Fukuoka Zoo to see tanuki and hopefully get some good images to paint from; 3) Rina, the woman I befriended in the Yakushima airport, was staying in Fukuoka for just a week before heading back to her home in Tokyo and she wanted to meet up again.
We headed out at 6:45am, as that would get us to the zoo right around their opening time of 9am and I suspected that our chances of seeing active tanuki were highest right in the morning since they’re nocturnal. On our walk to the zoo, we happened to see a dead Japanese centipede in the road. Mukade are a pretty iconic Japanese insect so it was interesting to see one; they’re quite large and have a nasty bite. When we got to the zoo ticket office, the worker looked really surprised that the only exhibit we asked about was the tanuki. We nevertheless beelined it to that spot, and after some confusion, we realized it was a very poorly positioned cage behind another caged hallway. There was a lone tanuki inhabiting it, but she wasn’t out - she was curled up in a bed in a hut and we could just make out a little fur. There were a lot of signs, though; upon translating them, we learned that this tanuki was named Immako and she was an ancient little tanuki who had already outlived their average lifespan. Wild tanuki typically live 6-8 years in the wild and 11-13 years in captivity. Immako is 13.75 years old. There was another sign discussing her kidney problems and sharing that sometimes she’s not in her cage at all as she’s receiving kidney treatment.
None of this boded well, but Emily and I decided to circle back and took in some of the other animal exhibits in the meantime. Around 10:30am, our explorations took us right near her cage again so Emily suggested checking back in. I thought it was probably too soon but why not… but when we came back, the zookeepers were getting their breakfasts ready and Immako was up and waiting patiently for it! Unfortunately, while Immako is a very sweet being, she no longer really visually captures “tanuki.” I hope she breaks all the tanuki lifespan records, but for my painting purposes, she wasn’t representative enough of the species as a whole.
After we finished with the zoo, we checked out the botanical garden that is right beside the zoo as your admittance is included to both when you enter either. The zoo had a number of species but on the grand scheme of zoos was a smaller one; the botanical garden on the other hand surpassed our expectations and had some amazing outdoor gardens and greenhouses. Emily currently almost exclusively paints koi fish, and we found our first koi fish in Japan in one of the fountains at the botanical garden. We also saw a wild snake! They had some beautiful roses in the rose garden, and I particularly liked the ones that were grown into tree forms. In the greenhouses, not only did they have some truly stunning specimens (their Welwitschia mirabilis were spectacular and their barrel cacti were also very impressive) but they also had an orchid sale! That was a little torturous, honestly, as I wanted to buy a number of their plants but I’ve looked into it before and transporting plants internationally is a giant headache involving getting a CITES certificate and dealing with customs and it just isn’t practical at this time for me.
Post-garden, we met up with Rina at a vegan cafe and had a really nice late lunch. Then Emily and I walked through downtown Fukuoka to a soufflé pancake restaurant so we could try the famed Japanese soufflé pancakes! After that, we returned to Takeo. That evening, we decided to visit the onsen in Takeo for the first time! We splurged a little for the outdoor onsen at 740¥ (the indoor one is 500¥), and also had to rent towels for another 300¥ since we didn’t bring any along. We discovered the outdoor onsen actually has three different pools and a sauna inside; there’s the outdoor hot bath at 41°C, the indoor hot bath at 42.5°C, and a cold pool called a mizuburo (that doesn’t have a listed temperature but a worker said is maybe around 14°C) which is icy cold. Our tolerance of the outdoor hot bath is probably only around 8 minutes, but then a plunge into the cold bath for a couple minutes and dipping a hand towel into its water to perch on your neck or head in the hot bath means you can cycle through for much longer!
The next day I drew again, and then on Saturday I was finally ready to haul all my art materials to the studio to begin to paint!
On day four, I flew to Yakushima! At this point, I have two large suitcases, one roller carry-on, and a backpack. Trying to haul all of that to a remote island on a tiny plane sounded like a bad, expensive idea to me. Fortunately, Japan has already solved this problem and I sincerely wish all countries have this: takkyubin! These are luggage transport services that will ship your luggage to your next destination, and you can ask for them to hold the delivery for a few days as well. This meant that when I shipped my two large suitcases on the 28th, I asked that they be delivered on June 1st in Takeo (where the artist residency is located). I just took my roller carry-on and backpack along to Yakushima!
My flights from Tokyo to Kagoshima and Kagoshima to Yakushima were each delayed, as an incoming typhoon was disrupting weather patterns and causing a lot of rain and wind. The YES Yakushima tour service was also messaging me about maybe canceling / swapping my tours around, which was worrying, as they had been inundated the day before and had to shuffle those folks’ tours plus they were worried I and other travelers would be delayed overnight. Fortunately, I arrived that evening, and by that night the tour company had decided we’d stick to the original plan (which was my preference too!). In the bathhouse late that evening, I encountered the largest hunstmen spiders I’ve ever seen! They were larger than my hands. My one Yaksuhima regret is that I didn’t manage to get photos of them - by the time I left it was closed for the night, and every other time I brought my underwater camera, it was earlier and they weren’t out… but I was either out on an excursion or too tired to go the other late evenings.
The next day started at 7:30am with a prepared vegetarian breakfast at the guesthouse (asked for in advance when I arrived), and then at 8:30am we set out on an island tour! We stopped at a tea farm, several waterfalls, drove a road known for Yakushima deer and monkey (but saw few monkeys, due to the hot weather that day), and stopped at a natural hot spring outdoor onsen. The tour concluded around 4:30pm, and at 7:30pm I had signed up for a turtle egg-laying evening tour. In between, I took a nap and ate. The turtle tour involved waiting until after nightfall when a sea turtle was already in the process of laying eggs and then carefully going in a group to watch her with the aid of red-light flashlights. My turtle was a loggerhead, which is the more common species. They rarely get green sea turtles on shore laying eggs, but it does occasionally happen. No cameras were allowed on the beach, and it was so dark I’m not sure they’d have done much anyhow. It was a cool excursion, though, as much in observing the logistics of the event coordination as in observing the turtle herself! We got back around 11pm, and the following day I had an early morning ahead so I crashed.
I woke up at 6:30am in preparation for a departure to the Yakushima Diving Center at 7:30am. We went over safety procedures and picked our beach entry spot, and then did a reef dive for about an hour. I’ve done scuba diving several times before in 2019, and I loved it then and continue to love it now. We saw an octopus, a moray eel, three green sea turtles, a beautiful nudibranch, starfish, fish, anemones, and a giant clam. I got some decent photos of one of the sea turtles and some nudibranch and fish, but it’s a fight to get my camera to focus and animals that are moving a lot (the octopus and eel in particular) are next to impossible to capture, at least at my current skill level. I got back to the guesthouse around noon, so I walked to a nearby restaurant for lunch, had some more rocky beach time myself, and then walked up to the main road and visited a few souvenir shops before going home and enjoying the bathhouse and having an early night.
My last full day in Yakushima was a seven-hour forest hike! We departed at 7:30am for the Yakusugi Land & Yamato Sugi hike, which was rated as a 3/5 of difficulty but which I’d probably rate as more of a 4/5 due to constant elevation changes and lack of a trail for most of the hike. It also started raining about a third of the way into the hike, and none of the guest hikers felt like using an umbrella was possible because of the trees/branches all around us so we all just got soaked. It did feel very apropos for Yakushima. A decent part of this hike was in territory which has small leeches. Our guide tried to get us to see them as cute, but I was adamant that I did not want one. While I kept getting dirt on me that looked suspicious, I and one other hiker made it through without a leech! Our guide and two other hikers got one each. I did get bitten by something that I was allergic to though, so I rocked a large bite wound thereafter. The other most rigorous hike I’ve done was an 8-hour hike up and down two mountains in the Peruvian Amazon - this one was more intense, but at 37 I am actually fitter than I was at 27 so I performed better on this one! In fact, I was the fastest woman on the hike; we had our male guide and a male guest hiker who were faster, then me, and then a mother and daughter along. We got back to the guesthouse at 4:30pm and I hopped into the bathhouse right when it opened at 5pm, tried to hang up all my wet belongings, had an early dinner, and was asleep by 8:30pm or so.
The next day I ate another prepared guesthouse breakfast, packed up, and then took a taxi to the airport at 10am. My flight wasn’t until noon, but I wanted to check out the shops and an art gallery near the airport (the airport is so tiny it’s within walking distance to several stores). I popped my luggage in a coin locker and wandered around for about an hour. Then I headed back to the airport and made my way through security. At the gate, a Japanese reiki therapist named Rina befriended me and we chatted until we boarded the plane to Fukuoka!
I departed my house at 5am on May 23rd, and by about 6:30pm on May 24th (including the time change) I arrived at my hotel in Tokyo. My flights went well, though somehow my vegetarian meal requests did not make it through to All Nippon Airways; this meant for the first meal I was given a banana, but then the flight attendants managed to scrounge me leftover vegetarian meals from first class (after normal meal services concluded) and in the process of all the negotiations around food, they enjoyed my very beginner Japanese so much that they gifted me with ANA swag at the end of the flight! I now have a small ANA sketchbook with surprisingly decent paper, postcards, and I think a balloon..? I haven’t opened it yet to know for sure.
Once I got to my hotel and even though I’d been up for over 24 hours at that point, I summoned the energy to go to the nearby 7-11 to see if I could withdraw money with my debit card, as I wasn’t able to when I was in Athens and I needed to be able to here due to the many cash-only establishments. Fortunately, it worked! I then bought some konbini (Japanese convenience store) snacks including onigiri, radish salad, and a yogurt drink. Then I crashed.
Over the next several days, the jet lag only allowed me to sleep for about 4-6 hours a night, which put a bit of a damper on my overall energy levels and did require that I give myself some grace. Due to the number of time zones between the US and Japan, it can take up to a week to recover from jet lag.
Shelby Prindaville with a live Japanese rhinoceros beetle (Trypoxylus dichotomus) in Mushisha.
On my first full day in Tokyo, I went to a beetle pet shop called Mushisha. There are some beautiful native beetles in Japan that children capture and keep as pets, and that interest has cultivated a variety of beetle-related pastimes including raising beetle species from around the world from grubs as pets and holding beetle battles. I knew I wanted to be able to photograph the beetles, so I had prepared a short speech ahead of time in Japanese explaining my wishes, and then wandered around taking bad photos through the cages. Then I gifted the staff with my business card and my greeting cards of mosquitoes, and explained that my paintings are very detailed and I wanted to photograph the beetles out of their cages. They very, very kindly acquiesced and I negotiated first one beetle, then a total of four. I also asked for the species info, and after I finished with the fourth they gave me the list and somehow none of the beetles I photographed were native to Japan! So then I got to photograph a bonus fifth beetle, as I really wanted to paint a native species as well. Once I finished, I got their email address so I can send them images of the paintings I will do of their beetles.
Then I walked to a very small vegan restaurant with a unique quirk - it only caters to single diners, and requests that there be no talking aside from ordering and payment. Some reviews found this to be a hostile choice, but as someone who dines alone frequently I wanted to experience this atmosphere! I found it very meditative, and would happily eat there again.
After that, I started my quest for decorative washi paper that I could use as a painting substrate. I stopped at Bingoya, which was kind of on the way back, and bought a really lovely sheet there. Then I went to Pigment Tokyo. This was the shop I was the most hyped for, as it sells metal-leaf papers and titanium panels, the likes of which I’d not yet seen for sale anywhere else. I bought several hundred dollars’ worth of supplies there! However, I later discovered they sold me a packaged-up, flawed titanium panel and then refused to refund it or fix it when I returned to Tokyo after my artist residency. They apparently only have a maximum of one week for returns, which implies real quality issues. I don’t recommend them. I later found similar products with much better customer service at Ozu Washi.
Shelby Prindaville at the Tsugu Tsugu kintsugi workshop.
On day two, I went to an antiques fair and flea market; then I had planned another activity but I just returned to the hotel and took a nap before joining a real kintsugi workshop in the afternoon. Real kintsugi uses urushi lacquer, and is actually food safe. Most modern kintsugi uses epoxy. Real kintsugi takes two to three months, as you apply multiple layers of lacquer and each has to cure, so we were just doing the finishing layer. It was educational, but this workshop was quite expensive so I wouldn’t recommend it to folks who just want a cultural experience.
On day three, I continued my quest for washi paper and I went to four more shops that sell it and bought another several hundred dollars’ worth of paper. I don’t expect to use it all immediately - some will definitely be for future use. I also came to the realization that I had already acquired so many new art materials that I was not going to be able to fit them into my existing luggage, so I bought a new piece of luggage at this point. This was always in the cards, and is what I did in Athens as well. Fortunately, Reddit has some really helpful Japan-focused subreddits, so I learned of a shop that sells them at wholesale prices and got a really good deal on one! Most of the stores were selling large suitcases for 24,000 - 88,000¥ (about $153 - $560), but I got mine for under 8,000¥ ($50).
At the final shop of the day called Ozu Washi, I bought a ton of paper and also attended a washi paper-making workshop! This was way cheaper than the kintsugi workshop and also way more involved - I think anyone visiting Tokyo who might be vaguely interested should do one of these washi workshops as it was definitely a lot of bang for your buck. I will go back and do another one in July, as there are different processes and I’d like to see how some of the others work. The kind I did, pictured below, is called rakusui-shi / sukashi washi / lace washi.
Below are a few more photos from my first few days in Tokyo! The first is of the inside of Mushisha, the second is of the single diners only restaurant with window signage, and the last two are of parts of the inside of Pigment Tokyo - but again, I would encourage you to support other art supply stores instead, due to their poor quality control and extremely short return policy. I recommend Ozu Washi instead.
I’ve been preparing for a special raku workshop I’ll be taking faculty, alumni, and students to in late April where we’ll be doing slip resist naked raku as well as obvara again. The slip resist naked raku in particular is a new challenge that is pushing me to explore outside of my comfort zone and develop my skills, as we’ve been advised that we should use terra sigillata and burnish these pieces for the best finish.
What is burnishing? Simply put, it’s when you polish the surface of the clay to a high shine. Why burnish? It is a luminous way to finish the surface of a low-fire piece of pottery that will not be receiving any glazing, spray acrylic coatings, or other surface alterations like wax or paint.
I’ve dipped my toe into burnishing before, as I tend to make very smooth pieces and have casually burnished parts of a piece while smoothing. However, I’d never really looked into burnishing before or set out to fully burnish a piece and keep its burnish post-firing.
After researching, I believe there are six main variables. Those are:
clay body
clay body wetness level
lubricant
polisher(s)
bisque temperature / cone
final firing’s temperature / cone
I also learned that any piece I’d partially burnished before automatically lost its shine during the quartz inversion and vitrification stages in a high fire, and that it’s also a waste to do with pottery that you’ll end up glazing as the glaze will take the place of the burnished surface. Good to know! Burnishing is really for low-fire, “naked” processes. (You might think to yourself that I have done some of those processes before, including obvara and saggar-fired raku. And I have! So I now want to try using burnished ceramics for those, too!)
My clay body is Chad’s Bod, which I believe is a new local mix that’s proven to handle the thermal shock of raku well but means I don’t think anyone’s published any information on how it handles burnishing. I was advised by the workshop coordinators to apply the terra sigillata to leatherhard pottery and then burnish with pantyhose, a soft cloth, or a plastic bag. I gave that a try, but then gave up quickly on the cloth/plastic bag approach and moved back to my tried and true agate tools. The terra sig began to sort of start to mix into the clay body, but I did get a very nice shine! However, once bone dry, all of those pieces lost their luster. I spent some time digging online and found out that’s to be expected, as at a microscopic level the clay surface wrinkles enough to disrupt that reflectiveness as it fully dries out. I reapplied another layer of terra sig and reburnished a couple of these pieces, but the terra sigillata began to delaminate / flake off. Upon googling, that’s also a frequent problem with this specific sequence (burnished leatherhard pottery with a terra sig layer atop when bone dry and reburnishing). I tried another lubricant I read about online, vegetable oil, for the second burnish of a couple more of these pieces in the hopes that it’d be less likely to flake off, and it seemed to reduce the delamination a bit but there were still hot spots. So my first four pieces have some minor surface irregularities.
Next, I decided to try the advice I saw online to apply the terra sig to bone dry ceramics. I did so, and that did seem to be a better solution. The terra sig seems less likely to delaminate. On one of those, I tried putting the terra sig on and letting it fully dry, then using vegetable oil to burnish; that worked out pretty well. Then I tried putting the terra sig on and burnishing it once it was mostly soaked in, and that also worked out pretty well. Since the latter is the faster method, that’s what I plan to do moving forward.
Once I troubleshot and mostly resolved the delamination / flaking issue, I refocused on getting a perfect burnish. In my mind, Magdalene Odundo’s ouevre is my gold standard for burnishing. Her handbuilt pieces have such a flawless burnish and high shine. My best pieces thus far still have some ridges and low spots… but I’m also just starting my burnishing journey!
I’ve come to believe that to get that clean a result, the piece itself needs to be flawless pre-terra-sigillata and then I need to try to ensure a perfectly even terra sig application. Easier said than done, but now that’s the next step I’ve been working on.
Amongst all of this, I was worried as I’d read that some beautifully burnished pieces lose their burnish in the bisque fire due to the quartz inversion stage and my friend Susan also witnessed that firsthand. My studio typically bisque fires to cone 08, and that’s not too far from the cone 06 to 04 temperature of our normal raku firing. I decided to risk putting my first five burnished pieces into a cone 08 bisque kiln load to see what would happen, as if they lost it there, it’s very likely they’d lose it in the raku too. I am very, very pleased to report that they kept their luster! This also means I am quite hopeful that they will be able to keep it through the raku firing processes as well.
Whew, this is getting long! I’m writing all this out for a couple of reasons. The first is that as much as I can find it frustrating at times, I deeply enjoy creative problem-solving and wanted to share a taste of such an experience with you. The second is that after spending a lot of time researching burnishing online, there are a lot of vague or contradictory pieces of advice out there. I want to provide a resource that explicitly spells out every variable I’ve used and tried so that future burnishers can easily compare notes.
So - below are my current, best burnishing techniques and I will update this post with any new insights as they come:
clay body: Chad’s Bod clay body, smoothed as perfectly as possible (but not burnished) during the forming and leatherhard clay stages using wooden ribs and plastic spreader; try to have a completely flush surface with no bumps, pits, or scratches
clay body wetness level: wait for the clay body to become bone dry
lubricant: apply terra sigillata as the lubricant because it performs well and it is whiter than the clay body which will increase the contrast of the final product; apply it carefully with a fan brush to both the interior and exterior of the piece and try not to leave any visible brush marks; brush it on continuously until you’ve put two to three layers onto the main decorative areas, and at least one onto hard-to-access interiors
polishers: after you’re finished applying the terra sigillata (when it’s not so wet as to come off on your fingers, but the bone dry pottery sucks all the moisture out very quickly so I do it pretty much immediately upon finishing application), use a combination of the plastic spreader, agate tools, needle tool, and river stone to polish, not pressing very hard and trying to go in multiple directions to catch any imperfect lower spots
bisque fire at cone 08
raku fire at cone 06 to 04 (fingers crossed!)
On the left, an unburnished Chad’s Bod bisqueware vessel. On the right, a terra sigillata burnished bisqueware piece (on this piece, I did not apply terra sigillata nor burnished the interior). Note the difference in sheen and color.
Part of an artist’s professional practice is regularly exhibiting artwork in solo and group shows. Solo shows involve their own processes, so this post will focus on group exhibitions.
Artists join galleries, cooperatives, or clubs that offer exhibitions, build networks that invite them to various opportunities, and browse aggregated lists of open calls. There’s always been a spectrum to the types of calls out there in terms of their advantages and disadvantages to the artists, but the pandemic unfortunately fostered a boom in predatory and scammy listings.
Let’s just start with a description of the general process: most group exhibition calls have application fees that range from $15-75, which you pay just to be considered. If you are fortunate enough to be accepted and the exhibition is not local, artists are typically expected to pay for the artwork transportation costs (either driving and delivering the work in person to regional sites or outbound-and-return shipping to further afield locations). If artwork is damaged in transit (two of my pieces this year have been due to poor packing on the gallery’s end, as they arrived in showable condition, were exhibited, and then returned to me with broken frames), it’s also on the artist to pay for repairs.
Some shows do have cash awards which can help tip the financial equation back into the artist’s favor, but typically only a couple of pieces receive prizes - so a common scenario might be that 300 artists pay $40 to enter 3 pieces for consideration for Exhibition X, 35 artists’ 50 artworks might be accepted and those artists spend an average of $100 on shipping, and then the top two juror’s choice artworks receive prizes of $500 and $250. The $11,250 raised in the application process beyond the show awards pays for the show advertising and listing fees on aggregation websites, juror honorariums, gallery overhead, and reception catering. 465 artists pay $40 and get rejected, 33 artists pay $140 and participate in the show, and 2 artists respectively net profit $360 and $110 and participate in the show.
While I have won a number of cash awards at shows, my overall application and exhibition record is financially net negative. So why do it? Well, it is a cost of being in this business, much like licensing fees, union membership, or uniforms can be in some industries. In the world of academia in particular, your artistic profile is in part judged based on your exhibition record. Exhibitions can come with benefits beyond prizes, too - they may lead to artwork sales, press coverage, juror requests, and additional opportunities.
There are good, meh, and bad calls out there. Good calls tend to have free to low application fees, physical gallery shows as well as digital access, prizes, and a sizeable audience of viewers. Meh calls might cost more than you’d like to apply, don’t come with prizes or reserve the prizes for an in-group (prizes go to members of X collective), or may have too general a call such that they’re pretty intentionally aiming to raise money rather than seeking out specific subsets of artists/artwork for their real show vision, but nevertheless have physical gallery shows and a sizeable audience of viewers. Bad calls are clear cash grabs - they are often online-only shows with application fees or are “free to enter and a small fee for selected artists” but then accept every artist, and don’t actually have an audience of viewers. These predatory organizations also usually host numerous online “shows” simultaneously, because the purpose isn’t highlighting the artwork - it’s to rake in as many fees as possible.
There were always a few predatory organizations, and it can be tricky to tell the difference between meh and bad sometimes, particularly with newly-launched ones. But during the pandemic, a lot of shows were forced to move online and it masked which organizations were illegitimate, which simultaneously encouraged the growth of scammy sites and inculcated worse standards in inexperienced artists.
The aggregation website Call For Entry, or CaFÉ, used to be the industry standard aggregation website, with EntryThingy in second and Submittable in third. I say CaFÉ “used to be” the industry standard because it’s now verging on the unethical by allowing bad, pay-to-play companies to drown out the real calls (presumably they allow it because those companies pay CaFÉ per listing). Though I never kept track, I’d guess that I used to see 1 bad call for every 10 meh or good calls; now on CaFÉ it’s more like 10 bad calls for every 1 meh or good call.
I think there’s now space for a newcomer to create a better listing engine that filters or eliminates those bad calls entirely, or maybe real art organizations just need to use Submittable more. EntryThingy is OK, but it’s always had suboptimal UI - but now that CaFÉ has sold out, maybe EntryThingy is better for the time being?
For the past couple of years, I’ve been asked to donate artwork to the nonprofit organization Women Aware of Siouxland and agreed. Specifically, my donations have been entered into the silent auction held during their Annual Women of Excellence Awards & Banquet. This year’s event is on March 22, 2024, and I donated two ceramic pieces to their cause… so if you’re in the audience, keep an eye out to see if either strike your fancy!
The gold-plated ring I found in recycled studio clay. It’s seen better days!
Recently, I was in the ceramics studio one morning rolling out a slab to make a few new plates. Our slab roller is permanently set to what I consider too thick (maybe a half inch?), so I always roll it out further by hand. I was rolling a plate out to about 1/4”, and what looked like a little piece of dried clay was disrupting the surface. I considered leaving it in as eventually the water in wet clay gets pulled into drier clay bits and it all melds together, but as I continued rolling it was continuing to be an issue so I decided to pick it out.
As I stuck my fingernail under and pulled, it turned out to be a way bigger mass than I’d thought… and it appeared to be metal. After rinsing, it revealed itself to be a gold ring! Well, a formerly gold-plated ring that’s been significantly banged about through at least one pug mill processing. I don’t know how long it’s been kicking around the ceramics studio - days, weeks, months, and years are all viable timelines! It’s a shared studio space and we recycle our clay, so I don’t know if we’ll ever find out more about the timeline and its owner but I’ll update if we do. My guess is a student forgot to remove their hand jewelry before throwing and didn’t notice as their ring got sucked into the clay body. The piece never came together, so they recycled it back into our studio clay ecosystem and eventually, I found it! I posted my find to Reddit, and a fellow ceramicist thinks it could be this ring.
I asked our ceramics instructor Paul and my retired colleague Susan what they’ve found in shared clay in studios, and their answers were needle tools (scary!), metal ribs, bolts, and sponges. So far I’m the only one who’s found a gold ring.
If you’re familiar with children’s and young-adult literature, you might agree that this could be a promising beginning that could lead to future magical shenanigans or inherited kingdoms!
I was appointed to the Sioux City Art Center’s Board of Trustees in January 2021, and subsequently elected and reelected as President of the Board of Trustees in 2022 and 2023. City board appointments are for two-year terms, so my term was ending in December 2023. The Sioux City Art Center’s director and board asked me to seek to renew my appointment in October 2023, so I reapplied and waited for City Council to deliberate. They sent out my renewal letter and certificate recently!
I began my journey with ceramics in early 2020, and now four years later I’ve hit a new milestone. I mostly loaded and then fired a kiln all by myself - and I didn’t burn down the university!
It doesn’t take four years to learn to fire kilns independently, of course - I could have prioritized it much sooner, but we’ve always had a ceramics faculty member who ran the kiln room. Managing it during the active school year means not only firing the kilns, but also taking into consideration the sizes and types of ceramics being produced as well as the student artists’ timelines in order to load the kilns in the best possible way. This meant I’d usually be getting in the way if I loaded my own pieces in wherever I wanted or independently decided to fire a kiln. Plus, since my pieces are not tied to assignment due dates, mine are almost always the least important to get into a specific load! I therefore followed the same protocols as the students: dropping my finished pieces off on the waiting-to-be-loaded shelves and letting our ceramics instructor Paul take it from there. However, over time I’ve asked about and observed how the process works.
Over academic breaks, I’m often the only one aside from Paul who’s still producing ceramics. This winter break, I made a sufficient quantity of items that it seemed to me it’d be less work for him if I just loaded my work myself into each kiln - so I did. Then, between the two of us we made enough work that we filled the glaze kiln almost full… and last night, I glazed some more pieces which filled it completely.
All the dominoes had aligned: his ceramics class has only just started gearing up, so none of them are using glaze yet. I’d mostly loaded the kiln myself with a few additions from him, and we had maximized the space. It was ready to fire, I knew how to fire it, and Paul wasn’t around. I took the plunge and did it myself!
I came in this morning and checked it, and everything still looked good! Paul also happened to be in and he confirmed that I did it correctly. It still needs to cool in order to unload - I always knew it took a couple of days, but I’d never tracked the time super closely until now. I began this load at approximately 6pm on Monday and it was a Cone 6 high-fire glaze load, meaning it was set to reach approximately 2230°F. By 5pm on Tuesday it was in the cooling process and had gotten down to 358°F. That’s still too hot to unload; my research indicates that you can rush to begin unloading around 200°F by wearing full protective body coverings and being careful about where you place the pieces, but that sounds like a lot of bother and can risk cracking damage. Instead of returning late this evening, I’ll just wait until tomorrow when it has fully cooled down to ambient temperature.
I recently posted about my temporal chromatograms, and now I’d like to post about my temporal veterinary artwork!
I love using new media, so when I got the chance to be the first-ever artist in residence at a veterinary school in the United States (at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine in 2022), I set myself the challenge of using veterinary chemicals, medicines, materials, and tools in each of my pieces created there. As far as I know, no one else has attempted to use either stains from clinical pathology and histology or veterinary chemicals and medicine as paint before. This meant I had no idea how archival any of the artwork would be.
I soon found out that a lot of the veterinary stain and chemical pigmentation rapidly goes fugitive, which is a term we use in art when pigmentation bleaches out over time and/or with exposure to sunlight.
While a number of my paintings from my LSU Vet Med residency have therefore undergone a transformation, the most drastic one is that of Wild Card. Its background actively changed as I was painting it; the initial coloration was intensely cyan and purple. The cyan started disappearing within days, but the purple was more stable. However, the purple began to fade away in a matter of weeks. Here is a comparison of Wild Card on the day I finished the painting, and then another photo approximately a year-and-a-half later.
Again, I still find the latter result compelling. Fortunately, so did the viewers! The purplish background splotches went fugitive sufficiently quickly such that the version of the painting I exhibited in my solo show at LSU Vet Med had already mostly resolved to that of the above right image, and I sold the piece to a very nice emergency veterinarian who said he thought Wild Card had “aged like fine wine.” The novelty of how it will continue to age also interests us both!
Some artists primarily work in transitory media - their artwork dissolves, melts, is eaten, is a performance, and so on. Often the documentation of this sort of artwork in many ways supplants the original; suddenly the photograph or video is the primary way that audiences engage with the piece. Andy Goldsworthy’s work is a good example.
Most of my artwork is intended to be of archival quality - I want it to endure for centuries, if not millennia! However, some of my pieces do have a more limited lifespan, at least in terms of continuing to match the photo documentation I took when I created the original artwork. My chromatography series are in that category, and I discussed this in the artist statement I published in this summer’s Annals of Iowa journal (Volume 82, Number 3). Here’s the pertinent excerpt:
“Over time and exposure to sunlight, the less stable plant pigments in these chromatograms (the greens, blues, purples, and reds) degrade, while the more stable colors (the yellows, browns, and blacks) remain; my Literal Landscapes become more and more sepia as they age. To me, this is a reminder that our natural world is vibrant but vulnerable, and that we should relish what we have while stepping up our interventions to improve our ecological balance for future generations… or the living earth around us will continue to dull.”
What does that change actually look like, you might ask? I thought it would be interesting to rephotograph one of the chromatograms to show you! Here is a side-by-side comparison of Literal Landscapes: Whiterock Conservancy 1, mixed media chromatogram including natural ecosystem pigments, alcohol, and gel medium on filter paper, 8x8", 2021; the first image was taken immediately after making the piece, while the second was taken over two years later.
To be clear, I still find the current versions compelling! The aging process of these chromatograms unsurprisingly mirrors what happens in nature as plants progress through seasons. They’re currently evoking autumn to me, while their original versions were more spring/summer. I bet a photo taken further down the line would show continued movement towards the monochromatic, so I might repeat this experiment again in a couple more years to try to determine when they will achieve their final evolution.
I’m not always good about taking as many in-process photos as I could, but I do try to remember to do so! Here are the ones I took from my first half of Phoenix Athens residency artwork. Keep in mind the overall lighting, angles, flatness of papyrus, color accuracy, and so on are not that important to me when taking progress pictures; there are sometimes big jumps in the overall quality between them and the finished portfolio image, where I take great care with all of those factors. You can click into any of the images to see them larger and page through them.
Potential:
Syncretism:
The Seed:
Marginated:
Symbolism:
I started off my fifth week by working in the studio, this time with the angle grinder and a diamond blade, cutting all my found pieces of street and paving tiles and stones to approximately the same height and then cementing them into a mosaic. I continued working in the studio (mostly painting) on Tuesday and Wednesday as well. On Thursday, I took an early morning hike up Mount Lycabettus again with my new field biologist friend as he had located one of a wild male fox’s dens, and knew I’d like to see it! Fox time is even earlier than tortoise time, so afterward I had breakfast at a cafe on the mountain and then revisited my two tortoises. The smaller, likely female tortoise had just finished her repast and began to enter her burrow. The rest of the day I was back to work, and I kept it half of Friday as well… and then, it was installation time for my show.
I bought L-shaped installation screws from the local hardware store and installation went relatively smoothly… except for one wall, which after we laboriously installed most of Marginated (I paired one tile of it with one tile from Symbolism in a separate spot) had a too-big-to-ignore blank area, but it was too small for any other artwork. I really didn’t want to move Marginated, so I thought about it and realized that a small mirror would be conceptually powerful and aesthetically perfect. I’d titled my show Athenian Habitat, so a mirror puts the viewer into the ecosystem - which they are - and adds some actual life and movement into the exhibition. The next problem was where to find the right mirror! I thought it was possible one might be sold at the general store I purchased my tree slice from, and I was right… but they were only sold as a part of a mixed media home decor sculpture which had two circular mirrors but also several decorative tin discs and a metal rod and plate display.
I went to five other stores (a home goods store, a pharmacy, a supermarket, and two hardware stores) and none of them had what I wanted and weren’t sure exactly where to go though I was recommended Ikea (which is quite a distance away!). I didn’t want to spend another day or two hunting for another option, so I decided that one of the mirrors in the mixed media home decor sculpture would work… if I could get them off in one piece, as they were soldered onto the other metal design elements and armature.
I had to overpay for the components I wanted since they came attached to a bunch I didn’t, and then as I walked back I began just trying to dissemble it by hand. I got the smaller of the two mirrors involved off pretty easily! Then I started working on the big one as I arrived back at the gallery. Dimitri came over to try to help, but he shattered the larger one in his attempt. I eventually got it off anyhow, but the shattered glass was distracting rather than complementary so I went with the smaller of the mirrors.
On Saturday it was really hot, so I had intended to go to the Byzantine & Christian Museum but I ended up just going back to the studio to work. Dimitri and Maria put together a barbecue dinner (with some vegetarian options!) that evening in part to celebrate my exhibition opening, which was very fun! I did make my visit to the Byzantine Museum happen on Sunday, though, even though it was again really hot (due to the heat wave named Cerberus), and then Dimitri and Maria had such a nice time they wanted a redux dinner… but this time the police shut down their outdoor grilling. They persevered with hot plates and a griddle indoors, and I enjoyed their Za'atar pita dressing!
