GROUND WATER: OUT OF SIGHT/SITE OUT OF MIND

Our show opened at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland.  There is a short write-up on their website:
http://sculpturecenter.org/show_details/2011_Late_Fall_GroundWater.html
It's open until December 17.  I wish some of my Rutgers students and colleagues could go, but it seems like a long drive.  So let me start to tell you about the pieces I was involved in creating.

First of all, my primary partner in this worl is Donna Webb, a Professor and Ceramic Artist at U. Akron.  Here are a couple of images from her studio on Dopler Street in Akron, near Highland Square.

We started our collaboration in earnest about six months ago.  We talked about a lot of different ideas that related to water.  Many of our experiements during the first couple of months had something to do with the interactions of clay and water.  My favorite studies involved taking dry chunks of clay and adding water.  The form of the clay was transformed over a periods of minutes to hours.

As the water is soaed into the clay, platlets become distsinct.  The patterns vary with the size of the surface, the smoothness of the surface, the amount of water, and periods of drying an re-wetting.