John Pojman

QCC Is Licensed!

Some very exciting news - Quick Cure Clay (QCC), the clay I helped Dr. John Pojman develop, is now being licensed by Ranger Industries!  Ranger has products in nationwide stores like Michael's, so it might not be long before you can find it for sale in your neighborhood.  Here's a Greater Baton Rouge Business Report article about the deal (and about other startups that LSU is incubating).

You can see the product listing on Ranger's site as well!

I am so happy about this!  The clay is such a pleasure to work with that it really deserves market success.  And speaking of the clay and how nice it is to use, I've been working on another relief piece recently... more on that soon!

The Advocate Article on My LASM Exhibition

Remember the Polymers in Art Through The Centuries exhibition I'm participating in (thanks to my friend Dr. John Pojman) at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum (LASM)?  It opened March 4, 2017, and was slated to run until June 4 but was extended through September 3 due to the success of the exhibition.  The Advocate, Louisiana's largest daily newspaper, recently published an article on the show, "LASM's exhibit explores the mix of art and science," including a photo of my pieces in the slideshow imagery at the top as well as text about my work.

If you're in the Baton Rouge region and haven't stopped by the exhibition yet, you've still got almost a month!

The Pursuit Blog Post for the 4th of July

I've been so busy that I haven't posted any articles that came out featuring me or my work, but I'm belatedly getting around to it now!  The Pursuit, the LSU College of Science blog, published its post "Science That Glows at LSU: Happy 4th of July!" written by a friend of mine, Dr. Paige Jarreau, which features my artwork and Dr. John Pojman's 3P QuickCure Clay!

Intercambiador ACART Residency Journal 3 - New Artwork!

When I skyped with Juan about coming here, he mentioned that some of my work that interests him the most are my interactive plant pedestals.  I really enjoyed making those, but I made those in graduate school - a period in which I spent almost all my time making artwork and had access to a large woodshop and other facilities as well.  Now that I teach and often only really produce work during the summers and while on residency, it's much simpler to create more transportable (and easily exhibitable, which is a bonus) two-dimensional work.  I've started to push back at that limitation already - my pieces that I made in France are so delicate that showing anywhere other than locally is pretty difficult, and the sculptures I made earlier this summer in Portugal are even more fragile due to the found branches and lichens I used.  I decided I'd take Juan up on the challenge to create some new interactive plant pieces, and began brainstorming even before leaving for Europe.  

The clay I helped Dr. John Pojman create, 3P QuickCure Clay, is waterproof, and that's an angle I've been wanting to explore for a while.  I decided I'd like to create a sculpture that I'd then house in a glass container underwater, and as algae grew in the container, as algae tends to do when provided with water and sunlight, the sculpture would become partially or totally obscured - except I would coat the sculpture in a glow-in-the-dark powder and provide viewers with a black light to set the sculpture aglow.  Even back in Portugal, I'd briefly toyed with the idea of sculpting Balancing Act (my painting of a tower of snails), but then I thought I'd save it for this project instead.

So when I started work in the studio, I began sculpting snails.  

A sculpture is different from a painting, though, and in order to have the 3D version of the tower actually stand on its own, I couldn't have the bottom snail be upside down.  I didn't want them all to be upright, either, though... so I decided to have one snail be on its side and have that snail be on the bottom of the tower in a nod to the potential instability of all the rest.

After assembling all my individual snails into a tower, I hastily patted some glow powder onto it and cured it (the tower was moderately unstable while uncured).  I thought the amount of glow powder that actually adhered to the clay wouldn't be sufficient for my purposes, so after thinking about it for a day, I sprayed it several times with an aerosol satin varnish and each time before the varnish dried I added the glow powder to it until I felt I had a fairly solid coating.

As all this was going on, the fountain water I had collected from the Real Jardín Botánico had been sitting in the window, slowing growing more algae.  Once the sculpture's coating seemed dry, I put it into a glass vessel I had purchased from a Chinese bazaar and poured the fountain water (and some additional tap water) in.

The piece will hopefully be ever evolving as the algae grows, but it's already far enough along for me to share some photos!

Newspaper Article in The Daily Reveille

Here's some more press on the Polymers in Art Through the Centuries exhibition at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum (LASM) and my collaboration with Dr. John Pojman from Louisiana State University (LSU)!  The Daily Reveille even uses a photo of my artwork in the exhibition as the article image!  The show is up through September 3rd, if you will be in the region and want to stop by.

A Photo Gallery from My LASM Exhibition Trip

I have a few more photos to share from my LASM exhibition and associated demos/events!  This was a fantastically fun trip, all thanks to the amazing Dr. John Pojman.

The Baton Rouge Ebb & Flow Festival

Dr. John Pojman and I had a demo station set up at the Ebb & Flow Festival today in Baton Rouge - a student of his joined us and we formed part of the Louisiana Art & Science Museum brigade and demonstrated the non-Newtonian fluid behavior of cornstarch plus water as well as QuickCure Clay.  We also got a chance to take in the rest of the festival, and I happened to see two friends of mine had an art booth selling their own paintings!  It was a beautiful day (I managed to get sunburnt!) and I topped it off by getting a snowcone from one of the vendors.  The festival will continue tomorrow, but our booth was a Saturday-only event.

Radio Interview with The Jim Engster Show

Dr. John Pojman and I will be guests on The Jim Engster Show today at 4:35pm CDT talking about polymers and art!  You can livestream it or listen to it later as a podcast.  This show is broadcast on six different radio stations across Louisiana.

Video Clip of LASM QCC Demo

I have a full schedule of demonstrations, lectures, and interviews for the next couple of days associated with the Polymers in Art Through the Centuries exhibition going on at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum (LASM) - the first took place earlier this evening!  An LASM public relations staff member posted livestream video to Facebook throughout the night - here's a snippet:

Polymers in Art Through the Centuries Exhibition at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum

My collaboration with Dr. John Pojman and his company 3P (Pojman Polymer Products) has led to my exhibiting in this amazing show!  Polymers in Art Through the Centuries is a fantastically interesting exhibition held at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum (LASM) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Polymers in Art Through the Centuries opened today!  Its show dates are March 4 - June 4, 2017, and it is held in the Soupçon Gallery in the LASM.  For information about the LASM hours of operation and cost of admission (though please note that there are a number of free admission days), please check this link out.

I will be demonstrating 3P QuickCure Clay and discussing my work with the sculptural and relief medium along with Dr. John Pojman onsite at the LASM during their Art After Hours: The Substance of Art event on Thursday, March 30, 2017 from 5:30 - 7:30pm.  Other artists including Monica Zeringue, violist and composer Christian Frederickson, and local dance company Of Moving Colors will be contributing to the evening as well, and A Work in Process: Paintings by Gustave Blache III and It’s Academic: A Hands-On Art Experience will also be open for viewing.  Complimentary wine and appetizers are included with admission, which is $7.50 for adults, $5.50 for college students with ID, and free for members.

A Sneak Peek at My In-Progress Sloth Bas Relief

As I've mentioned before, I'm teaching an extra course this semester - Honors Seminar: Interdisciplinary Art.  The course is structured into a few different sections, with the first exploring my own interdisciplinary interests (science and art, particularly involving the fields of ecology, biology, anatomy, botany, and my collaborative work in chemistry with Dr. John Pojman developing 3P QuickCure Clay).  

For this segment, the students must use QCC and make at least one piece of artwork that explores the fields listed above that are interdisciplinary interests of mine.  Since it's such a personal-to-me assignment, I decided I'd join in on the project.  I'd considered doing a sloth for a while - I met and got to directly interact with one named Peregrina in Peru during my 2014 residency there - but I didn't want the piece to be too cutesy so I kept dismissing the subject matter until I felt ready to tackle it with a somewhat more complex take on the animal.   I decided the time is now, mostly due to finding this elongated panel (its dimensions are 6x12") which felt like a perfect match to the gangly nature of the sloth.  

I plan to paint it, so the end piece will look considerably different than this, but here's a sneak peek at the relief work before adding any paint.

The Pursuit 2015 Article on 3P Quick Cure Clay

The Pursuit, LSU College of Science's annual magazine, wrote an article in their 2015 issue about 3P Quick Cure Clay, Dr. Pojman, and our collaboration (although they accidentally misattributed my role to a Jessica Nelson).  You can read the article, entitled "LSU Chemistry Professor Creates Multi-Use Quick Cure Clay", on page 23 of 60 here if you're interested!

The Saga of My Most Recently Commissioned Amphiuma Painting

Recently, I was hired to do another commissioned painting of an amphiuma - an aquatic salamander with vestigial legs that looks like an otherworldly sea serpent or eel.  My patron saw my first commissioned amphiuma painting done for Dr. John Pojman (it hangs in his office above his amphiuma Chrissy's aquarium) and wanted an original piece for herself.

The new amphiuma commission.

The previously commissioned portrait of John's amphiuma Chrissy.

Unfortunately, after mailing the new piece off to my customer and tracking it through delivery, there was radio silence.  I worried that she didn't like the piece but also considered that she may have just been waiting to open it on a specific date (an upcoming birthday, for instance) so I made a mental note to send her an email in a week or two to check in.  Before I could, she emailed me, and it transpired that the package was, in fact, not delivered (or possibly, not delivered properly and stolen off communal property).

Queue multiple weeks of back-and-forth with UPS, but finally the insurance paid out such that I had been paid to make the commission and my client received a refund on never having received the commission, so we were both made mostly whole again.  Even though it's possible it's now lurking in a box in a UPS subbasement or was pawned for the value of the frame, I like to imagine the painting is hanging in a place of pride over a drug lord's couch somewhere.  Since I do have the digital image, though, I can at least run off reproductions, so it's not completely lost to the world.

Another Greater Baton Rouge Business Report Article on 3P Quick Cure Clay

I'm so pleased 3P Quick Cure Clay has been getting so much press lately!  This latest article titled "An LSU professor has invented a curious clay with a range of applications, from art to industry" from the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report highlights my work with the product here:

About two years before officially launching 3P QuickCure Clay, Pojman reached out to art students at LSU to get some insight on his products. Pojman started working with former LSU graduate student Shelby Prindaville to mold his mixture into something more useful to artists by perfecting the consistency. Then he began selling it online.

“He would send me test products, and I would tell him what needed to be tweaked,” Prindaville says. “At some point we reached the stage where I thought it was a really viable sculpting medium and I started making things with it. And he figured out how to make it cheaply enough that he launched the product out into the world.”

The final version of 3P QuickCure Clay allows artists to bypass much of the difficult and tricky parts of sculpting, eliminating the need for a kiln. Also, 3P Quick Cure Clay is strong enough to build sculptures without first creating wire and paper “skeletons” or armatures, Prindaville says.

Prindaville used the medium to create a series of small sculptures of lizards called Anoles. The whimsical figures depict the lizards in various positions, like one balancing straight up its thin tail, that are impossible to create using other types of clay without wire armatures.

Prindaville, now the art program director at the University of Saint Mary in Kansas, uses 3PQuickCure Clay in her classroom because students can cure their work with a heat gun before the class period ends. She says the college cancels classes for one week each spring and students work on projects outside the school’s curriculum.

“Last year, I invited John to come up; he shipped us a large amount of clay and sold us a large amount of the clay. The students did all sorts of stuff and they created a show at the end,” Prindaville says. Some of the student’s creations now mingle alongside the chemistry books and salamander tank in Pojman’s office at LSU.

Dig Baton Rouge "Breaking the Mold" Article on 3P Quick Cure Clay

And here's Dig Baton Rouge with their new article "Breaking the Mold" on 3P Quick Cure Clay including some discussion of my work with it:

Working together with former LSU graduate student Shelby Prindaville, Pojman developed the clay from its original houseware repair model to a final product fit as an artist aid.

“So that’s how it evolved into art,” said Pojman.

[...]

Pojman’s website contains examples of several art projects using QuickCure from the University of Saint Mary in Kansas where Prindaville serves as the art program director. “It was really exciting just to work with the students, get their feedback on features they liked, and also help them use it, and then see where their creativity went,” said Pojman.

Of the works the students created using QuickCure, Pojman notes his favorite are the lizards as they demonstrate the strength of the clay.  “That’s not something you can do with regular ceramics,” said Pojman.

Greater Baton Rouge Business Report Article on 3P Quick Cure Clay

I was interviewed for this article on Dr. John Pojman's innovative 3P Quick Cure Clay.  Here's an excerpt:

About four years ago, Pojman started working with former LSU graduate student Shelby Prindaville to mold his mixture into something useful to artists, and began selling it online. Now 3P QuickCure Clay can be found in art stores in New Orleans and New Mexico.

The clay they developed allows artists to bypass much of the difficult and tricky parts of sculpting, eliminating the need for a kiln. Also, 3P QuickCure Clay is strong enough to build sculptures without first creating wire and paper “skeletons” or armatures.

Prindaville is now art program director at the University of Saint Mary in Kansas, and uses 3PQuickCure Clay in her classroom because students can use a heat gun to cure their work before the class period ends. She orders it by the pound from Pojman, who produces it from his office space at the Louisiana Business and Technology Center at LSU—a step up from his garage where he used to mix it on weekends.

“I think it’s a really interesting and innovative medium,” Prindaville says. “The great things is, it gives instant results. With regular clay you have to be careful about the moisture, and you can’t apply wet clay to a finished product, but with 3P you can apply wet to dry.”