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Here are some quick pics snapped during prep for last Monday’s firing at Bennett! Thank you to Julia, Zhaozhao, Derrick, and Emma for coming with me to Pewabic and glazing the pots ahead of time. If we waited to do this until just before the firing, the pots probably would have blown up, so doing this in advance was a necessary step. Unfortunately we didn’t come up with a great way for the kids to do this part, but I think that’s just the nature of putting on an event like the one we did for the first time (rather, I’ve never organized a pottery building/firing workshop before, so this was a learning experience for all of us). However, the kids were able to learn more about glazing during the firing on Monday. Keep scrollin 2 see how the pots came out during the firing. 

–Nathan, Group 2

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Clay Project Continued!  This past Monday we wrapped up the clay coil pot project we started with the kids two weeks earlier. The whole point was to keep the kids engaged in a part of the process of clay, while engaging with their local cultural and physical history. 

It was a really fun day! I arrived at Bennett early, at about 12:45, and met the Pewabic Street Team. Alethea, Annie, and Steven set up the mobile kilns quickly, and we were heating them both by 1:20 or so. We loaded the wood kiln not long after, with five pots. The rest were on the bus and got to Bennett around 2. These went in the gas kiln, which fired fast. The kids came out and were so excited, it was impossible to keep them in their groups. They were free to amble around the blacktop and visit the various stations, including the three clay cities– rolled out maps brought by the Street Team, where kids could build the city of Detroit in their image. The Pewabic Van was another station in and of itself; panels on the inside walls pulled away to reveal historical facts about the pottery house and accessible info about clay and firing/making processes. 

Lastly there was the spectacle of the firing itself. The small raku kilns fired quickly, the gas kiln was especially fast, and we were able to take out the hot pots and place them in the trash cans to reduce within a half hour or so of starting that kiln up. The kids got to see the flames when we added more combustible material over the pots, and were buggin out at that point. Unfortunately, we ran out of time before we could quench the pots into the water buckets, so most of the kids were not able to see the pots emerge finished, but they will next time we’re at Bennett! Some of the bottoms burst, but they still exist as cool weird sculptures that the kids got to make collaboratively with us. The Detroit clay held up great in the kilns and worked well with the glazes. The pots are shiny and cool! It was a little chaotic, but not so bad because the kids didn’t have to do too much except communicate and enjoy themselves and learn about the firing and participate in it. Firings are best done as community events, where people can get together and talk to each other! This was that, and I appreciated the help from everyone who made this work. I think the kids will be able to remember it when they see the pots in their classrooms.

Group #2, Nathan & Madison

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Cool write-up from Tina and Anna about this thing I’ve been working towards for weeks! Only halfway done, but here are some great pictures of the pots these crazy 9 yr olds came up with. I’ll be posting from the Detroit Connections blog myself next week, after the firing, with more details about the ins and outs of the process. Thanks!

   This Wednesday, with the clay that was taken right from the grounds of Detroit and processed by one of our college students, Nathan, and his friend, the kids were told to make a collaborative coil pot. As the college students each put a big chunk of clay on the table, the kids’ eyes sparked with excitement to play with the clay. They were fascinated to get a hands-on experience with the material they don’t usually get to work with. Before we dived into making the pot, Melanie gathers the kids to explain the project itself and few techniques that could be used for making the pot. Some kids were having a hard time focusing on the directions with the playful material sitting right in front of them. Then, college students prompted the kids by providing different examples of pottery and asking the group to come up with a theme of the pot such as space, face, nature, and animals. College students also went over the directions of how to assemble a collaborative coil pot and assigned each kid to make two to five coils with the clay. Each kid was given clay that is a size of an orange. Kids dived into interacting with the clay as soon as all the instructions were over. First, they pounded the clay to get the air out so that it won’t pop in the process of firing. They seemed to have a lot of fun with pounding the clay, but we had to calm few kids down from beating too hard and getting the clay all over the place. After getting the air out of the clay, kids went on to make the coil and passed the finished coil to college students who helped the kids assemble the pot. Then, they were given extra clay to create add-ons to the pot or something separate from the pot. For example, for my group, we picked the space theme, and our kids made a satellite, an alien, and an asteroid. Some stayed to the point until their teachers had to get them because they were so into making something out of the clay. Although we did have some kids who had difficulties in creating an object, they still enjoyed the overall experience of just playing the clay. Since this is a two-week project, we will be firing the pots with the portable kiln from Pewabic next week!

Group #7 Tina and Anna 

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work in progress of not yet anything

monotype made in many layers with leftover ink

will fit to some purpose in the next couple days

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Dancing Bearparty, monotype

printed last Thursday

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Bisquick, monotype

printed last thursday

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Halo Burger, monotype

not thrilled with the registration here, nor with the quality of the pink/blue sky, but this was worth a first go. I may paint into this print at some point for clarity or, something, idk

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Last Thursday’s negatives

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Source Imagery for last Thursday’s monoprints: Shitty bear costumes, disposable camera photo of Halo Burger sign (Birch Run, MI location) taken this summer, and nutrition facts from the back of a bisquick box

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Final picdump for the day: another thing I’ve been chugging away on lately. A tapestry with a big wooly smiley face! 4′x4′. At this point I’m a lot further along than these pictures show, but still have a lot to do.

I haven’t been able to get into the print studio a lot lately to do my own work, so in the posts to follow I’m going to sort of jump around and show pictures of all the things I’ve been working on lately and keeping busy with. Hopefully this weekend will allow more time to print it up

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Here are some quick pics I snapped to document the process of stealing Detroit clay from construction sites around the city, with my compadres Henry and Leo. All of Detroit is clay! Deposited many thousands of years ago by the Detroit river. It comes out of the ground a pukish green, but fires to a lovely red-brown. This clay was swiped in Brush Park, where soon there will likely be a big expensive apartment complex. We have to test it for lead, but if it gets the all-clear, this clay will go towards a pottery workshop I’m running collaboratively with Pewabic at Bennett Elementary, in Southwest Detroit, in the first two weeks of November.

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This is the fire sculpture after it got going, in all its glory. Sort of a collaborative work-- with the fire, with partygoers, with Ken and the builders, with the rain

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Here are some pictures of the fire sculpture we set off at Ken Shenstone’s, after the Michigan Mud ceramics conference, in Albion. Ken is pictured at the helm of the red-orange tractor, and that’s Kwitty dumping four or five gallons of kerosene on the thing, on account of it was pouring rain the entire weekend. In the third picture, Nick Brown is blasting one end of the sculpture with a propane weed burner. It took about ten minutes of that to get fires started on either ends of the sculpture, which contained about six cords of wood, cut several months beforehand.

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Couple quick pics from two weekends ago, at Ken Shenstone’s place in Albion, MI. Ken is a good friend and a master potter, who built probably the greatest, most obscenely large anagama kiln in the US. Something like 56 feet long? Elena and Leo for scale. In addition, there is the pumpkin we three collaborated on.

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We welcome Kiki Smith to Ann Arbor this week as a Penny W. Stamps Distinguished Speaker and an Artist-in-Residence at Stamps Printmedia Studios.

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Some pictures from a visit to Signal Return in Eastern Market, in Detroit. Thanks to Lee Marchalonis for showing us around! I had a chuckle at this shoutout to Jeffry Mitchell in a book printed there, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at this year’s NCECA. He is a kind person and his work reflects it

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Susan Crowell’s bees. I help her every now and then with her beekeeping, but this was my first time actually going into the hive, so I didn’t try too hard to take great pictures. But they were calm and congenial things. Good colors on their bodies. This is one of the ways that Susan’s art carries through her daily life. She makes ceramic forms that depict pollen, blown up as if one were looking through an electron microscope.