Teaching
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!
Today I selected artwork for USD's Fall 2024 Student Art Exhibition and helped install the show, which will have its opening reception tomorrow (Thursday, December 12th) from 7-9pm at Cee Cee's Gallery in Vermillion, South Dakota. If you are planning on coming based on my previous post about this, note the updated time.
As long as the weather isn’t frightful, I plan to be in attendance at the reception as well - so I may see you there!
I’ve been invited to give an artist talk at the University of South Dakota (USD) in Vermillion, South Dakota on Monday, November 18th at 2pm in the Warren M. Lee Center for Fine Arts! This event is open to the public - if you’re interested in attending, here is the Facebook event page for it.
Both beforehand and afterwards, I will hold studio visits with individual students, and later in the semester will guest curate USD's Fall 2024 Student Art Exhibition, which will have its reception on Thursday, December 12th from 6-8pm at Cee Cee's Gallery in Vermillion, South Dakota.
I’m very excited to connect with the USD art students, faculty, and community in each of these ways! Many thanks to USD’s Associate Professor of Art Amber Hansen for these invitations.
My ceramics colleague Paul and I attended another Dakota Potters Supply raku ceramics workshop this past weekend! I was fortunate enough to receive partial funding from the Morningside Fall 2024 Faculty Conference Travel Fund, which allowed me to really experiment with new techniques.
We were hoping to bring three students along as well, but trimming disasters and a rescheduled athletic event took two out in advance and illness struck the third on the morning of the workshop. Fortunately, there were a bunch of other artists in attendance and Paul and I had brought quite a few pieces to finish, so we still had a lot of opportunities to learn and grow. I tried a new-to-me technique out, significantly improved in my honey raku technique, and picked up supplies to test out a method in our upcoming workshop in April that I saw another artist successfully using! I also demonstrated some techniques other artists in attendance hadn’t yet been exposed to, so there was a productive exchange of information all around.
Here are a few photos from the day itself, and once I’ve had time to photograph the pieces I made, I’ll do a series of posts on the artwork.
While I haven’t finished posting about my summer adventures, time is still progressing and the new academic year has begun! Today is the first day of classes this fall at Morningside University. I am teaching Design and Graphic Design I as well as overseeing Graphic Design Internship and Advanced Studies in Graphic Design.
It’s fun to get to see familiar and new faces, and I’m looking forward to getting to see all the new artwork my students will be making!
I just got back from another raku workshop at Dakota Potters Supply in Sioux Falls, SD! I brought along a group of faculty, alumnae, and students from Morningside University.
This workshop specifically focused on obvara and slip resist naked raku. I really like obvara, but since I just did a bunch in the fall, I only put four pieces through the obvara process and ran ten through two slip resist processes: one-step and two-step slip resist. Dakota Potters Supply had tried to troubleshoot the slip resist one-step process in advance of our workshop, but they really hadn’t figured it out so we were all experimenting and troubleshooting with our the slip resist attempts throughout the day.
I still need to edit the photos of my pieces - plus, two of them were underfired enough that Dakota Potters Supply kept them back to refire again later, so I don’t know when those might rejoin me (if they stay whole)!
Here are photos from the day of the workshop (Saturday, April 20, 2024):
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.
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!
The head art teacher for the Sioux City Community School District reached out to me last year and asked if we would be willing to host a competitive art show in Morningside’s Eppley Art Gallery for three regional high schools’ artists: North, East, and West High Schools. Each high school’s art teacher would select the entries, and then I was asked to judge the pieces and award prizes as well as provide a critique of the artwork for the students.
I enthusiastically agreed! The show, Art Under Review, has been on exhibition in Eppley Art Gallery from the beginning of the spring semester on January 10. I will be announcing awards and critique feedback on January 31. The visiting student artists will also get to attend an art workshop and take a campus tour. The show will continue through February 2, 2024.
In Spring 2024, I will be teaching Graphic Design I, Painting I, Advanced Studies in Ceramics, Arts Internship, Arts Administration Internship, Senior Art Seminar, and Arts Administration Senior Project at Morningside University.
After asking about it repeatedly for three years, I successfully convinced the lovely folks over at Dakota Potters Supply to allow us to do an obvara raku workshop on October 21, 2023! Obvara is a low-fire scalding-and-sealing process wherein you create a fermented sourdough/beer bath, plunge approximately 980°C naked ceramics fresh out of the kiln into it, wait for them to start to bloom with different tan-to-brown markings, and then arrest the surface carbonization process by rinsing the pieces off in a water bath. Obvara has an even higher chance of cracking due to the extreme thermal shocks involved than non-bath raku processes.
Getting the chance to do raku is relatively rare, and many ceramists haven’t even heard of obvara, let alone had the opportunity to do it - so I’m really grateful for the experience! Joining me on the trip were Morningside faculty Paul Adamson, alumni Calissa Hanson and Deb Murakami, and students Laura Greene, Taylor Greene, and Lauren Hedlund.
In addition, I learned about honey raku from a ceramist at this year’s ArtSplash festival - it’s basically like horsehair, feather, or sugar raku surface carbonization, but with honey! I brought some along and we tried it out too - though I want to experiment with it some more at future workshops as I was so excited about the obvara opportunity that I only kept one textured plate aside for honey raku.
Here are some photos from the workshop itself, soon to be followed by pictures of my finished pieces! I applied for and was granted funding from our Faculty Development Committee to help with my costs, so I made and brought 18 pieces along this go-round - both to make up for any thermal shock victims, and because I didn’t need to apply glaze to my obvara or honey raku ceramics so I could get more processed compared to when I need to apply 1-8 layers of glaze to each piece on-site before firing (for crackle and copper glazes or ferric chloride dips). If you’ve been following my raku workshop production, 18 is about double the number of ceramics I typically aim to bring.
Time flies, and we’re starting up another school year again! This Fall 2023 I will be teaching Design, Graphic Design I, Graphic Design Internship, and Advanced Studies in Graphic Design at Morningside University. I will also be taking Intro to Japanese!
Miriam Moore’s new Sioux City Garden Club logo design!
I love to partner with community organizations in art department coursework with beneficial, real-world projects. This semester, I agreed to host a design competition within our graphic design program for the Sioux City Garden Club! Their president, La Vone Sopher, reached out to me and we worked out a plan: students in Graphic Design I and II would submit logo designs, and the club would proffer a $50 first place (and use that logo) as well as a $25 second place prize.
Students in these two courses submitted 26 designs, and there were a lot of quality options for the garden club to choose from! The board winnowed it down to six, and had the club members vote to select their first and second place designs. Graphic design and history major Miriam Moore’s logo was the winner!
I like to take on these sorts of projects - even though it invariably adds to my workload - because students get to work with actual clients, the top designers receive compensation, and all students create portfolio pieces while the winner sees their work enter the community. It also raises both the winning artists’ and our art department’s visibility… particularly when we issue press releases about the successful conclusion of the partnership!
Here’s the Morningside University press release (complete with a quote from me), which was picked up by KWIT and a KTIV television interview.
Me and one of our brand new alumni at the 2023 Morningside University graduation ceremony!
This was a special year for me, as this graduating class is the first I’ve had at Morningside University where I’ve seen them through from start to finish - it’s my fourth year here, too!
Graduation was on Saturday, May 13th, and it’s always heartwarming with a dusting of saudade. I’m excited to see my students continue to progress in their professional and personal lives, but it’s always a little sad not to have them around nearly as much as I’ve become accustomed to. New students will be arriving in the fall, though, so the cycle will begin again!
Now that I’ve gotten the last workshop’s pieces published, I can tell you about the one I just finished! It took place on Saturday, April 22, 2023. Despite that late April date, the weather was decidedly more wintry - it was 34 degrees Fahrenheit with snow on the ground when we arrived, and I think it warmed up to around 40 by the time we left 8 hours later. Fortunately, the inside of the garage/storage room we glazed within got a bit warmer with the help of some space heaters, but I was still happy I wore my snow boots for extra warmth!
Possibly due to the weather, though, I had my best raku luck yet! I brought nine pieces, and all nine survived without even one crack - and my glaze results all fell on a scale of good to fantastic. I’ll share those with you shortly, but here are some photos from the workshop day itself first. In attendance from Morningside University was me, our ceramics instructor Paul Adamson, alumna Deb Allard and student Hannah Nichols.
I just completed another raku workshop this past weekend, and as I was looking through my files I realized I’ve not yet published the raku pieces I made at my last one in April 2022. Clearly I should do that before sharing my latest workshop photos and products!
On my April 2022 raku workshop, I wanted to try to carbonize various plant fronds or leaves onto the surface of my pieces. This was a complete experiment, and it was mostly a failure. I tried a variety of ferns and tropicals out, and one after another, they burned away without leaving a trace. Here are some plates that I attempted to salvage after that didn’t work out. With the first, I pivoted to a sugar and horsehair application. With the second, I tried to use ferric chloride to stain the surface with plant leaves that weren’t carbonizing, but they just left those not-terribly-appealing ferric chloride splotches.
Once I realized those techniques were not working, I tried etching fern fronds onto a plate in a “baked potato” aluminum foil saggar firing; it kind of worked, but I think it’s underwhelming. Since none of those plant techniques were doing super well, I just put a litho carb copper glaze onto my final plate.
I also made a rounded crackle vessel and the glaze turned out really well, but the ceramic physically cracked due to thermal shock so it’s got that permanent asterisk associated with it.
I glazed this spherical vessel with copper glazes (Copper Sand is on the exterior and I think that’s Midnight Luster on the interior), and it came out looking like a little planet! This one’s a definite favorite.
And finally, the one plant piece that turned out beautifully and justified all the failures: this is another “baked potato” saggar firing, and the Muehlenbeckia axillaris vines I used carbonized perfectly into this vase’s surface.
I also lost a large platter-like vessel (it broke into quite a few pieces and was not salvageable) and had another plate fuse with a kiln brick and lose part of its bottom. I eventually recycled that broken platter-like piece in my rock tumbler!
After I made my 100% wild, site-specific Whiterock Conservancy ceramic collection entitled 41.816, -94.646 Ceramics, I knew I wanted to add other geographic coordinates to my oeuvre. Upon discussing this wish with family and friends, my father suggested that I might be able to get some wild clay from the brick plant Cloud Ceramics in my hometown of Concordia, Kansas. We brainstormed different supplies of ash for me to create custom ash glazes with, and settled on ash from my parents’ Republican River Valley firewood and the local Cloud County landfill (they burn organics like fallen tree limbs).
Several calls and trips my dad took to fetch the requisite media later, I had two different colors of native clay as well as the two aforementioned sources of ash. The clay from the brick plant arrived in dry chunks, and it had a lot of rocks and different densities of clays embedded in the pieces. After trying a couple of other methods (sifting and straining), I ended up going back to my tried-and-true, low-tech solution for cleaning the clay: meticulously smushing little pieces of it by hand to remove the debris and equalize consistencies.
I began working on this series in late November. I had a deadline of mid-February if I wanted to include 100% site-specific ceramics in my solo show in the Frank Carlson Design Room. That’s a turnaround of less than three months! I tasked my studio assistant work study students with helping me clean the clay, which helped speed up the process. I also tried to keep the pieces relatively small to maximize the number of pieces I’d be able to complete.
Here are some photos of the process!
As you can see above, after we cleaned the clay I handbuilt 30 ceramic pieces (15 out of each clay color) and bisque fired them. I then separated them into two different firings: half went into a cone 8 electric kiln firing and half went into a cone 9 gas reduction firing. After sifting the ash and removing all the larger chunks, I created 9 different custom ash glazes: 8 using all possible combinations of yellow clay, grey clay, landfill ash, and fireplace ash in 1:3 ratios, and 1 hybrid glaze with 1:1:1:1 proportions of each. I wasn’t sure what any of the glazes would look like, so I ensured each color of clay and kiln setting had the full range of options and asked my work study students to take copious notes so that we could learn from the results.
Here are my 39.57, -97.66 Ceramics! I managed to finish these in time to include in my Frank Carlson Design Room solo show. I like them all, but I am particularly in love with the ones that came out of the cone 9 gas reduction firing. I’ve only fired a few times in gas kilns so far, and this is the first time I’ve gotten really good reduction - it’s gorgeous! I like them so much that I want to make more (and larger) pieces to add into this collection, and glaze with a little more intention now that I know what the custom glazes I created will do. The clay cleaning process is tedious enough that there is a limit to how long I’ll want to keep working with each wild batch of clay, but my interest hasn’t waned in the Concordia series yet.
I’ve had a great time so far at my North Carolina State University visit; I’ve already participated in an honors lunch, the moral leadership panel, and an honors dinner with students. Today I'll be guest lecturing in NC State University's honors philosophy seminar HON 355 Feelings of/from Technology: Analog Bodies in Digital Spaces on art, technology, and the New Aesthetic!
If you’re interested, here’s the course description: “While we live in a Digital Age, we have only begun to understand its full significance. What new possibilities arise in a virtualized future? Can we escape scarcity, this planet, even death? What problems might our technologies solve? Modern technologies also raise new existential challenges: Why has the increased prosperity that technologies provide been met with seemingly impoverished and unhappy lives, loneliness, and alienation? How does technology mediate our sense of identity and the relations we have with society, nature, and ourselves? This course will explore the phenomenology of technological life - that is, the descriptive study aimed at looking at the relations between humans and our world, a technologically-mediated world. We will use this experiential and descriptive approach to consider the moral dimensions and psychological and sociological consequences of digital and emerging technologies, especially information and communications technologies (ICTs) like the internet and social media.”
Below is the YouTube video of my speech given on Friday, February 17, 2023 in the Pause PAWS notable alumni speaker series at Concordia High School (CHS), and here’s a link to our KNCK radio interview, embedded into the NCK Today article, “Professional Artist and Educator Shelby Prindaville Presents to Concordia High School Students.” My solo show in the Frank Carlson Design Room is in connection with this speaker event.
I wasn’t expecting to receive any gifts, so when the CHS Student Council President Jenna McFadden presented me with a framed honorary letter with an explanatory plaque at the end of my speech (see the photo in the NCK Today article image below), I was surprised and humbled! I had a great time connecting with the CHS student body, got to see some great student artwork (one such talented artist is Daegan DeGraff - check out her Facebook artist page!), and really appreciated getting to work with Brandt Hutchinson and his colleagues in this community service.
Happy New Year! This spring 2023, I will be teaching ART 210 Graphic Design I, ART 225 Painting I, ART 470 Graphic Design Internship, and ART 490 Senior Art Seminar here at Morningside University.
