Tiki Time!
So I have a commission for a Tiki. ^_^ I’ll need to keep preparing for the Ceramics SHowcase, but Tiki carving is such fun. Its so silly and campy. You don’t have to take anything about it seriously.
In the mean time I made it down to the Bullseye Glass Gallery. Every time I try to go there they are closed. This is usually because I foget about it until I’m in the neighborhood and I’m never in the neighborhood when they are open. Except I finally was. There was a nice exhibition on painterly glass. I really liked the works of Abi Spring and Ted Sawyer
I also saw this ginormous tile work at restaurant that is making me think about glazes and color. The tiles were flat boring tiles, but the glaze was used in a very painterly way. Makes me want to try that some. Maybe combined with portraiture? I must contemplate this further.
Show is up!!!
If you’re in Portland, You can go to SCRAP and check it out! My show is up and on display.
Thanks to my Husband, Justin Chalmers-McDonald for the photos!
Feel the tentacle love!
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- Feel the tentacle love!
The Upcoming show!!!
Well, here’s the first poster! The show is going up next week and will be up for 2 months at the SCRAP Re:Use gallery. 
Since all my clay is reclaim, and I’ve been using this yummy reclaim glaze (or two) I feel that this is a great place to give my work a first show.
All the weird post human critters you know you want to see. :}
Also, its a good excuse for all you Portlanders who haven’t been to SCRAP yet to go check out the awesomeness that is the creative reuse center of Portland.
Work as a distraction
I need to get blogging again, I think it keeps me honest.
I’ve been working in the studio, but work-that-pays is stressing me out. I feel they have unreasonable expectations of just how much I can do in a day, but then what if they don’t and I’m just not very good at office work. I take the time to do a good job, and to be honest when I see the person who was before me’s work (who did everything they wanted to have done) it was slipshod and poorly done. So I do think they have unreasonable expectations. ON the other hand, I’m having to fight that awful voice inside me that tells me that I’m worthless and I’m always always always going to fail.
I hate that voice. That voice is a piece of shit, but I can’t get it to shut up and go the hell away. Of course I’m going to fail at times, but I also succeed. So why in hell can’t I remember my successes, only and always my failures?
So I feel stressed out at work, and its the time around winter solstice which means I get to struggle with SADs. So working in the studio has been hard. I just want to hibernate, really. Sleep, read, occasionally eat. Write a little.
Still I must persevere. Today I’m going to go to the studio and glaze my work for the show that’s going up next week. (EEP!) I don’t think its going to turn out how I wanted it to, but I hope it will turn out well.
Resisting the lure of hiding
So its near the solstice, right? The winter solstice. The fracking cold and long dark night. Evil.
Usually I’m a little on the batshit crazy side of things, but this year I’m trying light therapy and whatdoyaknow? It works. Sort of. Now I don’t feel completely emotional and crazy, but I’m still feeling tired and finding it hard to concentrait. All I want to do is sleep and run away from the things i have to do that are keeping me from sleeping and feeling ok. Like, you know, the show. Or work. Or people. And definitely cooking. Definitely don’t want to cook anymore. Hell… I could do away with most eating.
So its like this light has evened out the moods, but not saved me from the need to hibernate. Nor is it saving me from the feeling of unpreparedness.
Ergh. Back to work.
Show Prep
I have a show coming up. I’m pretty darn nervous about it, I don’t feel like I’m going to be ready. The things I wanted to do… I don’t know that I can get them done. I kept putting off making sculptures because I was focused on more immediate and financial concerns. I thought I’d still be jobless at this point and have plenty of time to focus on my sculptures.
Ha. What an idiot.
Now I spend every night watching tv and texturing little forms. Not that I’m complaining about being able to do work at home, but this is not exactly how I planned on doing things. I’m also afraid that its not going to look good when its done. ergh.
and I need to make so many more slugs its not even funny. Every time I think I’ve learned my lesson…
Tentacle love
Philip K. Dick was an amazing Author. A while back I read an interview with him just before he died where he laid out the frame work for a story. A main plot point was an alien race that beheld colors in a way that humans can’t, but couldn’t hear.
My mind went immideatly to cephalopods. Cuttle fish to be particular, mostly because of the giant cuttlefish near Austrailia which can put on such a great show. Also because they are known to communicate through using color.
Now we’re finding out out more and more about the intelligence of Octopi. Other animals as well, but Octopi and other cephalopods are just so fascinatingly different.
I can’t imagine eating something so intelligent, it honestly grosses me out to see cooked octopus. I wonder if someday in the future humans will be able to honestly communicate with the alien creatures that haunt our waters, and how humans will effect the evolution of octipi… and vice versa. (I mean, if we’re going to start adopting genese from other creatures, I totally want color changing skin.)
THe most depressing future.
My husband, Justin, is an anaylist. Its just something that he is, not the job he has, unfortunatly. That’s actually the problem, but we’ll get there later. He is very, painfully, rediculously good at reading trends and figuring out what groups of people are going to do, how politicians are going to act. It bores him to death, but he’s also really good at manipulating resources.
The problem is that he doesn’t want to work for Republicans. As everyone is finding out now (thanks to the Occupy Movement) and what I’ve been hearing about for years (thanks to my Husband) the Republicans have been gaming the system for the rich and coating it with the Classic American Myth to get everyone else to protect them. The idea that you get what you earn, that if you’re poor its your own fault, if you just wanted it you’d work harder and get more.
This ideal is fine, except that its a lie. No one works harder than farmers, and they only get around $28,000 a year, unless they own a mega farm.
He’s seen his opportunities dry up from the day he graduated college. People act as though this recession started in ’08, but really, my generation has been struggling since ’01. My friends from college all have low paying jobs, high debt, and cannot advance. Our wages are stagnate, and have been for a while.
All this because the system has been gamed to protect the rich. The minimum wage hadn’t been increased in ages, and then when it was, it was a desperate joke. (Seriously, no one can live off of $7.25 an hour.) Taxes on the rich have been lowered, regulations have been loosened, and regulating bodies have had their budgets slashed so that they don’t have the personnel nor man hours to do their jobs. The income gap at the top is ridiculous, a new aristocracy has emerged, all under Republican lead initiatives and ideas.
So my brilliant (and he is) analyst husband can’t stomach the thought of working for them, while he and his friends and his family are shaken down and hung out to dry by these Robbers in Politicians robes. He gave up on the idea of working directly for the government.
By the time that happened, and by the time he decided to go for his masters, he’s been out of school for so long that he can’t get in to the programs that would actually get him a job. THey have literally told him not to apply. They don’t have the money (budgets being slashed because there aren’t the tax dollars) and you have to be in the educational system to get further in the educational system.
So now he’s looking at just trying to get a job and excelling in that, but there are no jobs, and every time he goes looking for a new one he keeps getting pushed back down the ladder.
This makes me angry. As an artist, I by the very nature of the deal, have to slip in and out of systems. I feel fluidity in my movement, and though I’m struggling with my own self-promotional issues I do not feel as though I have lost every opportunity. (Far from it.) To see someone so cut off and crushed by a rich-serving system, and to have that be someone I love? I am angry.
The one reason I do not march with Occupy Portland is because they refuse to solidify behind any real goals or ideas. They just scream about this inequality and expect someone else to do it. Not me. Here is what I’d like to see:
Tax rates on CEO’s tied to the lowest paid worker in their company.
Taxes raised on people making over $250,000; and even more on those making over $500,000.
Funding for Regulation– I’m sick of poisoned food and products making it over from China.
Funding for Transportation, including High Speed Rail and Light Rail in American Cities.
Funding for Schools from the bottom to the top– Throwing money at the problems doesn’t’ work, but not having enough money to pay for educations doesn’t work either.
Let there be light and lots of it.
Seasonal depression has always been a bane of mine. I didn’t know why I burst out crying when Mrs. Mugg told me I couldn’t go outside for recesses in the 4th grade, but I did. Not all at once mind you. I don’t remember what my infraction was, but the sentence to the indoors was handed down, and then we went to lunch. I sat alone, away from everyone else (not too uncommon) faced the window and staaaared at the sunlight. Wasn’t too long before the waterworks began.
Yep, I’ve had this for as long as I remember. You’d think then, that I’d have tried the light box long before now.
I hate light in the morning. I mean, I really hate unnatural, ugly, flat light. I don’t notice it at night because you’re eased into it by the setting of the sun, but in the morning, you wake up to glorious, beautiful, soft darkness. I can see fine, I can remember where everything is in physical space, so I just don’t turn on lights.
Exept I could barely get out of bed on Saturday, and Sunday I was inches from a fight with my husband all day. Monday started out with a random crying fit in the grocerey and a terrible day of work full of my inability to focus and lots of repetative, detail oriented tasks.
That night i got the light box. Sadly, I can’t mock it by calling it the happy light because that is the model name.
The next day was drastically different. I still wasn’t perfect, but Hell, I’ll take not about to burst into tears and able to focus.
I’m just sorry it took me this long to do it.
Work is a Vampire
Seriously. Ergh. I’ve been working part time jobs up till now, but that doesn’t really pay enough bills just now. So now I have a full time job and no energy or life force left to really do the things I want. Ugh. Thus my disappearance.
Not that I’ve stopped doing ceramics. I’d have a melt-down of epic proportions if THAT happened, but things like writing on my blog has definitely fallen to the wayside, and I only get 6 hours a week in the studio, as compared to the 40 I was getting before. 
So sad.
Still, I find ways to cope. Now I bring work home to go all texture on. ^_^ Sitting in front of the TV, watching DR Who or whatever I feel like at the moment and poking intricate texture into the pieces. Very relaxing. I will be ready for my show in January!
As for Christmas, I’m going to be in a Pop-up-store in Portland this year. It opens on the 17th, I believe, and its on the intersection of SW Morrison, 10th, and the Max line. Eeee!
