End of Summer Update & Move to Cobb

The past 5 weeks have been a whirlwind, with wrapping up my summer at Touchstone and making the big move to California to begin my long-term residency at Cobb Mountain Art and Ecology Project. The move went very smoothly, all thanks to my amazing mom - I don’t know what I would’ve done without her help. It felt good to surrender some sculptures along the way, too. I was fortunate to leave behind two for the Indiana Clay Conference and one (the top part of a 6’ one) in my grandma’s garden, and many with mom/in Montana home storage. Only a couple breaks while packing/repacking.

Leaving Touchstone was very sad, but the excitement for the future helped push me onward.

I’m here at Cobb now, and mostly settled. Still taking care of logistical life stuff and figuring out how I will financially sustain myself here, but doing everything in my power to make it all happen. Despite those inevitable stressors, I am so, so, so happy to be here. I’m very pleased with both my living and studio spaces, and am loving getting to know everyone in my new cohort, all of whom are incredibly inspiring and cool people.

To back up — in my last blog, I mentioned my pots that came out of the IUS summer woodfire. I was super impressed by the ash buildup on all my pieces, and on the mug in particular. It had the Touchstone wild clay slip brushed on the outside. Love the crust and color variation. I had a handful of little clay tests come out of that too that were pretty informative (not pictured here - hope to step up my Glazy game and start uploading tests on there soon).

I decided to not fire the larger sculpture I made at Touchstone in an obvara firing and instead just bisqued it and took it with me to Cobb. It wouldn’t fit in the Touchstone wood firing, but I’m hopeful to fire it in one here, or potentially squeeze it in the soda kiln. No cracks from the bisque!

My last week at Touchstone was a blast — it was one of the larger workshop weeks, so the campus was lively, and I spent as much time as I could hanging with my friends and doing all my favorite things one last time. One of the nights, I threw a cocktail party for everyone and made up a menu with some speciality Touchstone-inspired drinks, coinciding with a glorious bonfire. So much fun.

My experience at Touchstone was very positive. I really hope to return next summer, at least for a workshop!

My last few weeks in the Touchstone studio, I finished a handful of vessels, had one mug explode from an incorrectly-programmed bisque (that really sucked), FINALLY cast the four part mold I made at the start of the summer, and worked on a pill box commission for a close friend that ended up taking way longer than anticipated because of multiple different setbacks (cracks and sagger box mishaps). I also tried altering my forms more on the wheel before carving/adding, throwing them a bit thinner and pushing them more when they’re wet. Still trying to speed up my process for these and trying different approaches.

I fired my casts to ^6, playing with some of Jordan’s commercial glazes, and had some pretty awesome turn outs. I also had two sagger boxes, one with a precarious rock stack that fell over in the firing and got a very heavy reduction, and one that for some reason only reduced a little bit? I wish I’d gotten more consistent with the reduction saggers. But glad to have played around them this summer and have a starting point for whenever I’m in another ^6 studio.

Oh, yeah, I lost a bunch of rocks and smaller pieces in that ^6 because I put them on kiln stilts that were in an unlabeled, box of mixed lowfire and highfire stilts. The lowfire ones melted into blobs and ruined my pieces and the shelves beneath them (luckily some were on cookies though). So that was some stupid last minute shelf grinding and wasted time.

I left some pots behind for the Touchstone wood firing, which unfortunately took place just a week after I left. I grinded/cleaned all the posts and helped move wood to do my part in the firing. Unfortunately, my cups all kinda turned out badly. The wild clay slip on my mug peeled off (weird, I think because I put it on bisque instead of bone dry but I’d not had this problem in the past..), and the two cups just turned out pretty dry and boring. BUT the vase I put in was positioned in the front of the soda chamber and turned out EPIC! I am leaving it behind for the Touchstone member show and plan to refire the other cups here at Cobb.

That’s a good segway into what I’ve been thinking about this past week at Cobb. I’m unhappy with how my surfaces look when they’re not blasted with wood or soda ash. The clays I’ve been working with are all iron-rich stonewares that go dark in reduction and don’t show much color variation or flashing. I like working with wild clay slips, but think the nuances in those would be brought out better over a lighter claybody. I’ve been thinking about a lighter stoneware recipe for a while, and the tests I got back from the IUS woodfire gave me some information to move forward with. But now, in a more limited studio where I have to buy most of my dry/raw materials, I have to be more intentional about my next moves. So in my time here so far, I cast a batch of cups with a random stoneware casting slip I bought from Clay People in Richmond, CA.

It’s Laguna’s “Speckstone” stoneware in slip form and was only in stock because someone had special ordered it. I’m not entirely sure how it’ll turn out in the soda, but found a photo of the clay woodfired to ^12 and it’s just a dark speckled stoneware. I am in the process of testing out a handful of different flashing slips and some terra sigs and plan to fire them all in the resident soda firing that we’ve scheduled for the first week of October. I’m working on a batch of thrown/altered vessels alongside this in the stoneware I brought with me (just the same ol’ IUS shop stoneware I’ve been using) that I will also try out these slips/sigs on. I’m hoping that some of the slips will turn out nicely, even over the dark/iron rich clays. I also really need work to sell at the Fall Open House sale, soooooo… really hoping some of these turn out.

Once I get through my old clay, I’ll hopefully have decided on a lighter stoneware recipe to work with. For the time being, I will keep testing. I bought some premixed woodfire clay to play around with, too (Helmer Wood from East Bay Clay), and a handful of dry materials to test out recipes. All the while, I am still very interested in formulating glazes/slips from local materials. I’ve got some rocks I need to crush up and test, and have acquired some rhyolite and dacite from a man named Tim Carlson, who is writing a book on found materials for ceramic clay/glazes. He collected them from an old mine near Table Rock, just 30 minutes from here. Both of them are fluxes that he adds into his clays and has made into glazes I will do some wood ash line blends when I get around to grinding them up.

Cobb Mountain was once an active volcano, and there are tons of igneous rock sites around here. I intend on locating a pumice and obsidian site with some other residents who are interested. A few of the other residents and I went to a nearby watering hole yesterday within a cooled lava flow formed into what I believe to be “lovejoy basalt” with serpentine and quartz veins. I collected some rocks from there to test out when I get around to it. Additionally, there is a lot of wild clay on the property that I want to harvest and test. So much to do - and lots of time to do it.

For the time being, I am focused on building my inventory, which means working with reliable clay and figuring out surfaces that do my forms justice. So as much as I want to go rock/clay hunting right now, testing slips and sigs from manufactured dry materials it is.

Other fun CA things:

- Been getting some great exercise chucking wood for work trade, going on walks around the property, and biking up and down the mountain!

- Lots of Catan playing, star gazing, resident bonding, and dog petting

- Woodfired pizza party during Casey’s soda workshop was epic and delicious - as were the couple communal meals/potlucks we’ve done so far. Excited for more of those.

- We stopped at the Pinball Museum in Alameda after stopping by the clay stores in San Fransisco - super fun!

- I drove down to Sonoma to visit Melissa Weiss and see the work she’d made during her short term residency at Sonoma Ceramics Studio. So great to see her, and got to meet two of the studio techs there, one of which is partners with one of my clay-quantainces! Hoping our paths all cross again soon.

And in great news, my tarantula survived the drive, molted, and has since been rehoused in a much roomier enclosure.

‘Til next blog! (: