Upcoming: 2024 ARTcetera Juried Exhibition and Fundraising Auction

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One of my obvara raku vessels was juried into the 2024 ARTcetera exhibition and fundraising auction at the Sioux City Art Center! This exibition opens with a reception on Thursday, March 21, 2024, from 5-7pm. Artworks will be made available for sale at “Buy It Now” prices on March 22, and the exhibition continues through April 18 when the auction is held as a part of a ticketed event evening.

The opening reception will be free to attend, and if you’re interested in buying tickets to attend the auction, you can do so here.

The Sioux City Art Center is located at 225 Nebraska Street in Sioux City, IA, 51101.

A Literal Gold Digger

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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!

Current Group Exhibitions

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Just a reminder that I have artwork in two different group shows right now if you happen to be in these areas: the 29th Arts North International 2024 exhibition in Hopkins, Minnesota through February 24 and the 2024 Arizona Aqueous XXXVIII exhibition in Tubac, Arizona through February 25.

As you can see below, the folks at the Tubac Center for the Arts used my painting Syncretism as an advertisement of the show on their Instagram, which is cool!

Sioux City Art Center Board of Trustees Renewal

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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!

"Art Under Review" Regional High School Exhibition Judge

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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.

I Fired a Kiln!

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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.

My Temporal Artwork: Fugitive Veterinary Stains

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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!

New Year, New Semester!

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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.

New Stoneware!

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I’ve been steadily, slowly making food-safe, high-fire stoneware ceramics as well. Here are some pieces I produced this past year which I hadn’t gotten around to publishing until now!

First we have small plates - I’ve been using them as dessert or appetizer dishes!

Next, I’ve been continuing my landscape vase series! These are “rainy” versions.

My Temporal Artwork: Chromatograms

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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.

New Artwork: Incursion

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As was the case with my last new artwork, I began this painting while in residency at BROTA and the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden but didn’t finish it until now! It’s another painting of the water hyacinth - an attractive plant that due to human spread is now an invasive menace.

My first painting of this plant, Adrift, is intentionally more flat and graphic. It focuses on shape, color, and contour. In this painting, I wanted to add more realism through volume, depth, detail, and light via water reflection. The substrate is another beautiful handmade paper by Ato Menegazzo Papeles in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

This is Incursion, acrylic on artisanal handmade paper, 19.5x15.5”, 2023.

Shelby Prindaville's second painting of a water hyacinth.

Upcoming: 29th Arts North International 2024 Exhibition

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In more good news, I’ve also been juried into the upcoming 29th Arts North International 2024 exhibition which is hosted in Hopkins, Minnesota! My veterinary epidemiology painting Hosts was selected for inclusion. This international opportunity garnered 1060 entries, from which the jurors chose 160 for exhibition.

Exhibition dates and location: 
Saturday, January 13 – Saturday, February 24, 2024
Reception: Saturday, January 13, 2024, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Hopkins Center for the Arts, 1111 Mainstreet, Hopkins, MN 55343

Website: http://www.hopkinsartscenter.com/

There are awards for this exhibition as well, which will presumably be announced at the opening reception!
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Upcoming: 2024 Arizona Aqueous XXXVIII Exhibition

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My artwork was juried into the upcoming national 2024 Arizona Aqueous XXXVIII exhibition! Juror Tracy Lynn Ross selected my sparrowhawk mother and child papyrus paintings Syncretism and Potential.

The show will be on display from January 5 - February 25, 2024 in the Tubac Center of the Arts located at 9 Plaza Road, Tubac, AZ 85646. There are awards, so I’ll look forward to the announcement of those - presumably at the opening reception on Friday, January 5th from 5-7pm.

New Artwork: Adrift

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Every artist has a few pieces they’ve started but not yet finished… and then time passes. Some of them kick around for months or years before they get picked back up again - if they ever do!

This painting is a piece I began during my 2019 Argentinian artist residency at BROTA and the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden. I got it quite close to being finished at the time, but there were a few touches left to add… and upon my return to the US, I shifted focus to moving houses and beginning the next school year, then COVID hit… and I just never returned to it until recently!

This is a painting of a water hyacinth, which is simultaneously a beautiful tropical aquatic plant native to South America and also a globally invasive scourge. In places where it can withstand the winters, it quickly multiplies until it covers all the available surface area of bodies of water. In doing so, it not only crowds out other, native surface plants and can make surface transportation difficult (for both people and wildlife), but it also shades out the underwater ecosystem. Along with many other territories, it is an invasive plant in the US Southeast, and at one point the US Congress considered but ultimately didn’t pass a bill to introduce hippopotamus to Louisiana to help manage the water hyacinth population.

This is Adrift, acrylic on artisanal handmade paper, 19.25x14.5”, 2023.

"Adrift" water hyacinth painting by artist Shelby Prindaville.

My Obvara Raku Vases

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And here’s the last batch of obvara raku ceramics from my recent workshop at Dakota Potters Supply - these are the burnished vases!

This first oblong vase was the only one that I saw and heard crack during the sequential baths. It is still usable decoratively, but it does have that asterisk about it so I likely won’t exhibit or sell it. (Note, I purposely selected photos of it that don’t draw attention to the relatively large crack.)

While at the workshop, I thought that was my only casualty - but when I was applying kitchen wax to the surfaces at home, I noticed this next squat vase has a small hairline crack as well. It’s not nearly as apparent as the above piece’s flaw as it requires close examination to spot. While a crack is never ideal, in a low-fired piece like these which was always going to be decorative (not water-tight nor food-safe), it’s far less problematic than it would be in a piece intended for that kind of usage. I’ll probably keep this one myself!

The rest of the below vases are completely unblemished. This little bud vase is the smallest of the bunch.

Next we have a larger, somewhat soft rectangular vase!

And finally, a somewhat flared cylindrical vase.

I hope you’re as into the obvara pieces as I am. I really like the aesthetics this process produces - but more than that, from a conceptual standpoint I love the organic chaos that creates those aesthetics.

My Obvara Raku Plates and Platters

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In my previous post, I shared the obvara raku bowls I made on my October 21, 2023 workshop at Dakota Potters Supply. I also made some plates and platters! As always, you can click on any of the photos below to see them larger.

This first burnished plate depicts a bear, and you can’t convince me otherwise.

This next burnished plate is smaller than the first - it’d be good to hold jewelry or other small items.

A small obvara raku plate by artist Shelby Prindaville.

This final piece is the largest - it’s a platter or tray, and it has some light texture on its inside surface.

My Obvara Raku Bowls

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Here is the first batch of my obvara raku pieces from my Dakota Potters Supply workshop on October 21, 2023 - I made enough that I plan to publish three posts covering the artwork! This post shares my obvara bowls and bowl-like vessels.

Again, as background, 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.

The obvara process itself scalds and somewhat seals the surface of the pottery, but I went ahead and added a thin layer of kitchen wax to these pieces as well for extra protection and sheen unification. All of the below images in each gallery row are of the same artwork from different angles.

This first open bowl has a smooth surface!

This second piece is another open bowl, but this time the surface has some light texture as well as a more variable form.

This third piece is smooth and a bit more closed, though there’s a quite variable lip. All of the pieces I’ll be showing you are handbuilt, pinch-pot designs.

Next we have another smooth and even more closed vessel! This one was a favorite of my fellow workshop attendees; they loved how the obvara surface turned out.

While you can click into each of the above images to see them larger, I want to close this post out with just one large image of the last smooth bowl I made!

An obvara raku handbuilt bowl by artist Shelby Prindaville.

An Obvara Raku Workshop!

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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.

Photos of My Solo Show "Materiality"

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Whew, it’s a busy fall! My solo show Materiality has closed, and I’ve been hard at work with the aim of getting all the sold pieces from it into the hands of the buyers. Here are some photos of the exhibition and reception! I was very pleased with the show installation and flow, which was due to our amazing preparator Shannon Sargent. There was great community turnout for the reception - it was a fantastic event.

2023 Annals of Iowa Cover Art Contest Winner!

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I was chosen as a 2023 Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs' Annals of Iowa cover art contest winner! Annals of Iowa is a quarterly journal from the State Historical Society of Iowa. Mine is the Summer 2023 edition, which is Volume 82, Number 3.

This is a competitive opportunity facilitated through the Iowa Arts Council. The cover artist not only has their artwork reproduced on the cover, but also writes an artist statement that “speaks to the artist's overall work, in addition to specifically referencing the featured work and its connection to Iowa history” which serves as the introduction to that editions’ contents.

“Founded in 1863, the Annals examines the deeds, misdeeds, and accomplishments of our predecessors and shows how those actions fit into the larger mosaic of Iowa's history. It is distributed to hundreds of subscribers throughout the United States and Canada, and its digital footprint is even larger, with with over 3.1 million downloads from readers throughout the globe, including over 850,000 downloads in 2022 (State Historical Society of Iowa).”

The digital issues are published online after a year, presumably to encourage subscription and/or individual volume purchases for more timely consumption. Below are a couple of photos of my print volume for now, and then next year I should be able to share the full digital version!

If you’d like to read my artist statement now, I’ve reproduced it here for you:

I am an interdisciplinary artist combining science and a wide range of art disciplines to examine the human role in shaping an ecological balance and encourage a more connected and conservation-focused approach.  I served as the artist in residence at Whiterock Conservancy, located outside of Coon Rapids, IA, for a couple of weeks in the summer of 2021.  While there, I began (and continued to work on post-residency) a body of work including painted reliefs, ceramics, and chromatograms.  For my series Literal Landscapes: Whiterock Conservancy, I explored and documented this 5,500-acre non-profit land trust through ecosystem samples I collected – including plants, fungi, soils, ash, minerals, and water – and ground up into a slurry with denatured alcohol in a mortar and pestle.  I then "printed" a variety of blends from different Whiterock locations onto filter paper using chromatography.  

Chromatography is a technique for separating out the individual components of a mixture.  For example, let’s imagine you have two different black inks.  In the first, the black was created through mixture of red, yellow, and blue pigments, while the second uses only a true black pigment.  If you made chromatograms with each of these black inks, in the first you would begin with black ink but end up with individual red, yellow, and blue sections; in the second you would start and end with black.

Each of my Whiterock chromatograms looks like an abstracted landscape and is literally composed from the landscape.  They contain organic and inorganic pigment layers including chlorophyll A and B, carotenoids, anthocyanins, flavonoids, and metal oxides and hydroxides.  This issue’s cover artwork’s ecosystem samples came from Whiterock’s Middle Raccoon River beach and Fig Avenue.  The bottom of the piece beautifully displays the native blue clay and capillary action trails which reference Whiterock’s riparian habitats, while the top evokes prairie and oak savanna.  Fittingly, Whiterock Conservancy is restoring one of the largest areas of native oak savanna remaining in Iowa.

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.


Shelby Prindaville

Literal Landscapes: Whiterock Conservancy 12 - Beach and Fig Ave, 2021, mixed media chromatogram