Wednesday, December 5, 2012

A brief overview...

...of an overdue update:
Art happened.
It was critiqued, and found variously good, bad, and improving.
The artist FINALLY understood some things that everyone had been trying to tell her. Only took three months.
*sigh*

Well, in response to most of the feedback I've been getting for my recent body of work, I have moved (kicking and screaming) into low-fire glazes and clays, though I'm still producing a little high-fire functional work on the side and using the occasional bit of cone 10 clay.
I take forever to convince, but I will readily admit that low-fire is so. much. better. for what I'm doing now that I've tried it.  No pics of completed cone 06-02 work yet, but here is a pretty of the mushroom I posted weeks ago. It is fired and finished and I love it (mostly).

 The responses I get on the finish intrigue me. 1/2 the people love it, the other half hate it. I both. The stem is a rutile variation of Bauer Clear, and it brings out the texture well, *I* think. Not crazy about the color, but it works. I don't have a good shot of the cap yet, but that worked out quite nicely - a gradation from yellow-brown to green, with deep highlights in the cracks.
And here is a bone dry critter of beastliness.  I'm doing more texture now that I've worked out a) what teachers/classmates meant in their critiques and b) how to achieve the desired results without wanting to stab the thing to frustrated death half way through.

Tomorrow, if the kiln behaves, I will have the first FULL crop of low-fire beasties and environments.  And then next Wednesday is my 1st year review. Lord willing, there will be 2 more kiln firings between now and then.

~Lucy

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Sources

Here are some of the sources/citations I used in the summary/response paper to Sturken and Cartwright Ch. 9.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Hey, look, tangents!


Bullet points on Chapters 7 & 8, because I like bullet points and scattered thoughts.

  • Postmodernist example: The entire genre of filk/parody music (Leslie Fish, Al Yankovic, etc.) is a postmodernist construction. Its entire existence is devoted almost entirely to allusions and parodies of a) other songs, b) other parodies of other songs, or c) popular culture topics (the internet, lolcats, the vagaries of Facebook, and much, much more!)
  • The total worldwide subcultures propagated and supported by technological advances bring to mind a more tangible view (right word? I am not sure) of the Jungian theories of the collective unconscious.
There were more thoughts, but they will have to wait for later, since I want to get home before Sandy makes the roads impassable. 

~Lucy

Friday, October 19, 2012

I've got another still larger Beastie in sections on my work table and the shroom from last week's picture about ready to go in the bisque kiln (slated for Tu-Th). I have finally started to break past the size limit to which I've confined my handbuilt Beasties thus far. However, I run in to a problem with the more expansive, expressive critters - they are too horizontal/heavy to join without breaking when they are at the proper moisture level to be joined. I deal with that issue in current piece by just building the cap and stalk separately and not joining them; I plan to glaze them together, if I join them physically at all. This works to a degree, but now I have to make sure the pieces will a) fit together when dry, b) fit together without overstressing the inside of the cap, c) not fit too loosely that they will break on each other or look loose.

Some plans to help with making successful larger forms:
---buttressing the interstitial space in the double-walled caps
--- a more exaggerated double wall on the caps, but one that swoops from the outer edge down and then up into the cap to give a visual fullness AND make a slot for the stalk to fit into.
For the stalk, I am currently taking super-thin slabs and folding them into/onto/over themselves and each other, so that they form deep ridges and bumps.  I'm fond of the way this works on the stalk tops (stems) but it's not translating well where it spreads out at the bottom, so I'm thinking that another approach might involve a separately built center stalk section and then threading/layering coils off of it.

On another note, I love the Loafer's Glory clay body.

No pictures this week.

~Lucy

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Shrooms.

Larger and larger still. This one is about 6 inches high, unless the roots splay out more.  I'm working out the construction challenges in the root systems. This one has 3 sections of clay that I pounded out about 1/8" thick, saturated, then folded up on themselves and joined to others until something vaguely stalk-like emerged. I think I'll try 2 different systems on the next 2: this approach again, except formed *around* a central tall stalk for structural support; and a very thick base -nearly solid - that I'll carve in to.

Friday, October 12, 2012

New work in progress

Got a bisque kiln unloaded today, and am now able to photograph them without worrying about breakage (as much).
Here're some mushroom creatures, first generation. More recent ones have more texture all over, and double walled bottoms (pics to come). Name: Walking Fungi, or Migrating Mushrooms; something like that.
These are very flared pinch pots, and I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do the stems.  They have roots now, and those will get bigger.

I'm still stuck using the crapcam on my phone until I find my transfer cable, so the resolution sucks, but I think it will work for now.

These are some Capacious Ovovores form the desert region, and their prey, the Sedimentovoid Pseudopods. Right now I am just getting the basics of how to construct them so that they will freaking STAY. TOGETHER. DARNIT!  Having multiple piece-construction is not new to me, but until recently I was working in vessel forms and always had a central stable base to come back to, structurally.  These more active forms are fun and challenging.  As I get the basic technical aspects down they will develop more texture and a larger scale.





That's all for now, more later.
~Lucy


Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Hey, look, link!

ADD and television viewing in children:
http://www.whitedot.org/issue/iss_story.asp?slug=ADHD%20Toddlers

A glorious Steampunk comic (an alternate approach to technology and society in history, as portrayed by art!):
http://girlgeniusonline.com/

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Here's a better image, though still camera phone since what I thought was my camera cable is actually a charger for a cell phone I haven't had in years. Reality is somewhere between these two images.




Wednesday, September 12, 2012

A few more vaguely connected thoughts

-I suspect that given enough time and few enough distractions, I could derail this week's writing to long discussion/debate on gender culture, queer theory, and vagaries of feminism. This blog post will address some of those elements since I don't really have the space or time to meander my thoughts quite that much in the paper.
-Freud annoys me greatly, both on a personal level and on a cultural level, and I find the continued use of his (and Karl Jung's) psychology mind-numbingly aggravating in the face of so much social progress between then and now.
-Also, blogs.  I adore reading and discussing cultural, queer, feminist, and gender theories (especially since those overlap rather a large bit), and some of the psychoanalytical theory that this week's articles discussed has had a very far-reaching influence on the development of these theories.
Some blogs (may include reposts from  former or future blogs, because my thoughts tend to circulate):
http://arewomenhuman.me/
http://captainawkward.com/



Friday, August 31, 2012

Technology: So useful that you spend 2 hours trying to get it to work.

Anyway, I'm very sorry to any/all of you who have been searching for my Writing One; it disappeared into the ether when the wifi was glitching Wednesday night. Here's the text from that, since I can't figure out how to post an attachment in a Moodle comment.


Lucy McInnes, Writing One
As I understand it, visual culture encompasses the physical manifestations of art, the written and spoken discussions, the theories of art is it relates to itself, to politics, to religion, to social media and social identities.  Visual art is that physical representation of the social/mental/verbal creativity. Visual culture exists everywhere, but the visual art brings elements of that culture together, forms a conscious narrative in response to the cultural setting.  The visual culture exists all around us; beginning with the color blocks and picture books of childhood, the culturally understood symbols pervade the entirety of our world. Cartoon people in pants or skirts, the national flag, a simplified black stick-man on a yellow diamond-shaped road sign, parodies of classic paintings, all of these symbols and more comprise a non-verbal dialog on which we as humans – primarily in Western society – have agreed.  Visual culture and visual art are like a Venn diagram from science class; the visual culture informs the visual art and vice versa, but while all of visual art relates to the overarching visual culture, some of the visual culture exists outside of visual art. 
Sturken and Cartwright’s presentation of reflection versus representation Sturken and Cartwright also point out the ways in which visual art has critiqued the assumed veracity of these visual cultural images. In Magritte’s “La Trahison des Images” (The Treachery of Images), the visual art critiques the assumptions of the visual culture. Magritte and those who follow his line of thought draw the viewer’s attention to the degree to which our world – our species – relies so heavily on visual information as to interpret the images as the object.  This article also discusses the “myth of photographic truth” and the myriad ways that our lives in this culture and time are framed for us within a greater visual narrative.  Our culture has become so overwhelmingly visual that the photograph is taken as an absolute and incontrovertible truth, though different photographers and points of view can present varying values of truth about the same scene.  A truer interpretation of any image relies on multiple sources of information and interpretation, using denotative and connotative meaning and many forms of context for each image.
The artwork I make takes its form in closely equal parts from the world of visual arts, the greater visual culture, and the literary/visual culture bases in science fiction and science fantasy.  My art examines extant mutations within past and present taxonomies (primarily small mammals, plants, and reptiles) and extrapolates from there.  Some questions I try to ask or answer in this body of work include, What would happen if animals had evolved differently?  Could these two families or classes, kingdoms even, be combined in an at least somewhat plausible creature?  What is the purpose of this creature in its environment, and how does the larger ecosystem work around its inhabitants? My purpose is to ask these questions of both myself and the viewer, and I relish the possible answers.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

A Very Tangential Note

[For those of you from my class, this relates (very) tangentially to my notes on my own work in relation to Writing One.  For anyone not from my class, this may still be interesting. For the sake of readers not in Art 620 and for my own stream of consciousness, sections of writing assignments may be duplicated here in this and later posts.]

My art comes from a world in my head. Maybe that's not the best way to phrase it, but that's the working title.  Two decades of reading science fiction and fantasy children's stories, novels, novellas, and comics have seeped into my subconscious and play a heavy role in the development of my artistic concepts.  For anyone not familiar with the nuances of science fiction/fantasy, a recent NASA interviewer/blogger has done a very nice article on the topic:
http://astrophysics.gsfc.nasa.gov/outreach/podcast/wordpress/index.php/2012/08/20/jillians-blog-relating-science-and-science-fiction-at-otakon/

The art I make - my Beasties and their world - exists not as an artistic exploration of hard science but as an exploration of possibility.  I'm looking at extant mutations within past and present taxonomies (primarily small mammals, plants, and reptiles) and extrapolating from there.  Some questions I try to ask or answer in this body of work include, What would happen if animals had evolved differently?  Could these two families or classes, kingdoms even, be combined in an at least somewhat plausible creature?  What is the purpose of this creature in its environment, and how does the larger ecosystem work around its inhabitants?

I am under no illusion that I will answer every question, and indeed I will pose more both to myself and the viewer.  My Beasties are first and foremost creatures of possibility, and not probability.  I will think my job well done to inspire curiosity and creativity within the viewer.

~LFM

A Shiny New Blog

My name is Lucy McInnes, and this is my art blog.

I don't know what else to put up here right now, so have a picture of a Beastie:


Sprout