Week 4 - BTS Work
This week was entirely uneventful in terms of personal making, but I did some behind-the-scenes work.
On Monday, I drove my sculpture in the crate I constructed to Wheeling, WV with the moral support of my good friend Clio. I was so glad to have company on the long and bumpy drive to calm my anxieties about my crate not being sufficient enough. It fit perfectly in my truck bed, though I had to load it in on its side and was worried that the padding wouldn’t be enough to keep the two parts from grinding against each other.
But it made it there entirely unscathed! Overall, I’m very proud to have made the crate entirely on my own and gained some useful knowledge and experience for the future.
clio and i celebrating the successful transport
I’m so honored to be a part of “Intercollegiate”— the other works in the show that I’ve seen so far are incredible and I really wish I could make it out for the “Ceramics Take Over Wheeling” festival. Our show opening kicks off the 4-day event and is housed at Bethany College in a beautiful, historic building. I’m crossing my fingers that my piece miraculously sells! In any case, Wheeling is a really cool city that I’m eager to return to and spend some time exploring, and I could honestly see myself living there.
In the studio this week, I made test tiles for our glaze chemistry course and glazed some stuff for the Dirtbags Valentine’s sale at Canary Club this coming Thursday.
In other behind-the-scenes work, I added a wild clay page to my website (https://khbart.com/wildclay) that I’ll update as I collect, process, and test samples. It’s just bare bones right now, though. I also collected some clay from the river at Cherokee Park. The sample I dug was right by a huge tree and was full of roots and other organic debris, so I’m interested in testing it as a slip and seeing the effects of the ash from the plant matter. I’ve begun reading a book on natural glazes in tangent with our assigned glaze chemistry readings and am eager to start running some tests.