In October, I worked in the ceramics studio at the Mendocino Art Center. I made clay figures that had some resemblance to, or aspects of, ancient shawabtis and contemporary vigango (singular: kigango).  Shawabtis are Egyptian figurines placed in tombs; in the afterlife, if you are called to do work, these figures come to life and do your work.  Vigango are wooden grave markers (4-5 feet tall) currently used in Kenya.  They help keep the deceased spirit present in real life.  Here are the bisque fired group of figures. I tried various glazes but was not very enthusiastic about the outcome. The smaller grouping uses an red iron and rutile wash.

Last month I finished working (for a while) on the idea of raven carts.  Here are the last ones that I made:

Now I have returned to working on a piece of marble, obtained from a quarry near Birmingham some years ago.  Last week, I moved the stone (and its clay model) out to nearby McIntosh where I will be working on it at George Ferreira’s studio, next to his Ice House Gallery.

I’ve been back at home in Gainesville for a while now. When I returned, I tried to replicate the glaze effects that I achieved in Mendocino last year. To make a long story short, I could not do it. Perhaps, in Gainesville, the composition of the rutile was different or the mineral content of the water was to blame. There were too many factors to sort out. However, in the last month I have had some success with new glaze recipes.  Now, I am back to making new carts and I feel the new ones are improvements in design compared to the earlier ones.

For this cart. I used a 5  x  20%  base glaze (kaolin, silica, wollastonite, frit 3134 and potash feldspar), plus 1% cobalt oxide and 4% each of rutile and tin oxide. There is a black underglaze, Mayo UG 50, diluted to gray with water and painted over the entire cart; after that, one coat of the glaze is painted on vertically.  The firing is oxidation, at cone 6, and the clay is porcelain.

During the last few weeks I have been experimenting with glazes and continuing to explore variations in types of ceramic carts.  These pieces are about 6-8 inches tall. They have wooden (dowel) axles and  wooden cotter pins that hold the ceramic wheels in place.

I am back at the Mendocino Art Center for a 6 week stint.  Just finished a few days in the sculpture yard working with aluminum styrofoam casting and with bronze wax-investment casting.  Here is what I made:

An aluminum tryptic:

A bronze piece, sprued and then chased:

It now appears that I am not going to make the ceramic cuneiform-like translation of the Rilke verse into a ceramic artifact.  This is what emerged from my prior attempt to carve the porcelain letters.  The ceramic pieces are now placed into a holding fame made of cherry wood. This is it:

November 21, 2015

I have now  returned from spending October at the Mendocino Art Center.  While there,  I further explored stamping porcelain letters and hieroglyphic-like marks onto “ancient” clay runes.  This is a work in progress, as I am trying to find a satisfying method for making these artifacts.

This pit-fired example is one of my first attempts. It is 6 inches long and about 3/4″ thick with a small, hollow space within.  It feels rather heavy when held in the hand.

My attempt at carving  words (taken from Rilke’s epitaph)  is pictured below but these words are not reversed and thus cannot be used for stamping.

My next effort will be to translate the Rilke words into cuneiform markings and then cut them onto a clay, rune-like object.  Below is the code I will use. I downloaded this code  from the web (sorry but I did not record the link) and then reconstructed the code  in vector graphics.   Letters  within brackets are invented symbols since the ancient cuneiform language evidently did not depict a few letters from our alphabet. The translation of the Rilke verse that I intend to place on the runes is shown below the codes.