The Advance to Gogh flyer for participating artists, designed by Jean-Guy Richard! My amazing friend and artist Terri McGaffin has organized the Advance to Gogh exhibition taking place at multiple galleries in downtown Sioux City, and she and Gallery 103 invited me to participate! 51 artists including me brought game boards (and some included game pieces and boxes) to the lottery selection on April 6th. I drew #43, which was Scrabble Junior! I’m looking forward to the opening artwalk on Thursday, July 11, 2024 at 5:30pm beginning at the Sioux City Art Center and proceeding to visit all of the ..read more

This was my first time doing slip resist naked raku ceramics, and it was definitely a learning process for everyone at the workshop, with more experimentation still needed moving forward! I did a fair amount of research the night before the workshop, and I was really glad I did. When we arrived the plan was just to do a one-step slip resist, but I had discovered David Roberts’ ceramics and wanted to try his technique. That required a two-step process (step one: dip into the slip resist, then let dry and step two: dip in clear glaze), which I convinced Wanda to let me do as well. We began with ..read more

On May 2, 2024, I was honored to serve as the ArtWorks 2024 judge for the Sioux City Community School District. This was a massive show with 1,000 student pieces from elementary, middle, and high school students! It was a lot of fun to soak in all of the varied artwork on display, and it was very difficult to award only ten prize placements. I was really wowed by the students’ hard work and talent, and also by the teachers’ creative assignments and support! I returned that evening to see the show’s opening night, and it was packed with admiring folks of all ages. Here are a few photos of part ..read more

I only fired four pieces with the obvara process this go-round, as I had run through a lot last time and I mostly wanted to learn the slip resist methods at this workshop. However, I wanted some obvara burnished pottery to compare to my previous unburnished works, and I’ve also decided my spherical handbuilt pots are a somewhat signature decorative form and so I wanted to have some obvara orbs. I did a smallish bowl as well. The burnish was a mixed success with obvara - it delaminated in a few spots on two of the orbs during the dunking, which to my eye is kind of unsightly as the revealed cla ..read more

I just got back from another raku workshop at Dakota Potters Supply in Sioux Falls, SD! I brought along a group of faculty, alumnae, and students from Morningside University. This workshop specifically focused on obvara and slip resist naked raku. I really like obvara, but since I just did a bunch in the fall, I only put four pieces through the obvara process and ran ten through two slip resist processes: one-step and two-step slip resist. Dakota Potters Supply had tried to troubleshoot the slip resist one-step process in advance of our workshop, but they really hadn’t figured it out so we wer ..read more

I’m excited to share that I will be attending the Arts Itoya residency in Takeo, Japan this summer for a four-week stay! Morningside University has been very supportive, and has given me both a Morningside Experience Grant and Ver Steeg Faculty Scholarship funding to help me accomplish this exciting project. I try to learn at least some of the local language for all of my residencies, with varying levels of success. I’m proficient in Spanish, which helped a lot with my learning some French and Portuguese for residencies; with my recent Greek residency I learned enough to say a few greetings an ..read more

I’ve been preparing for a special raku workshop I’ll be taking faculty, alumni, and students to in late April where we’ll be doing slip resist naked raku as well as obvara again. The slip resist naked raku in particular is a new challenge that is pushing me to explore outside of my comfort zone and develop my skills, as we’ve been advised that we should use terra sigillata and burnish these pieces for the best finish. What is burnishing? Simply put, it’s when you polish the surface of the clay to a high shine. Why burnish? It is a luminous way to finish the surface of a low-fire piece of potte ..read more

Part of an artist’s professional practice is regularly exhibiting artwork in solo and group shows. Solo shows involve their own processes, so this post will focus on group exhibitions. Artists join galleries, cooperatives, or clubs that offer exhibitions, build networks that invite them to various opportunities, and browse aggregated lists of open calls. There’s always been a spectrum to the types of calls out there in terms of their advantages and disadvantages to the artists, but the pandemic unfortunately fostered a boom in predatory and scammy listings. Let’s just start with a description ..read more

For the past couple of years, I’ve been asked to donate artwork to the nonprofit organization Women Aware of Siouxland and agreed. Specifically, my donations have been entered into the silent auction held during their Annual Women of Excellence Awards & Banquet. This year’s event is on March 22, 2024, and I donated two ceramic pieces to their cause… so if you’re in the audience, keep an eye out to see if either strike your fancy ..read more

Every artist has a few pieces they’ve started but not yet finished… and then time passes. Some of them kick around for months or years before they get picked back up again - if they ever do! This painting is a piece I began during my 2019 Argentinian artist residency at BROTA and the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden. I got it quite close to being finished at the time, but there were a few touches left to add… and upon my return to the US, I shifted focus to moving houses and beginning the next school year, then COVID hit… and I just never returned to it until recently! This is a painting of a wat ..read more