Studio Update: We are so back

Hello everyone! It's my first blog update in a hot minute so everyone is legally required to give me a big high five today, I don't make the rules. I took a lot of breaks from the studio over the summer to reset and refuel my creative energy but I'm glad to be back into production mode. I think I have the opposite of the normal seasonal depression. I always feel so energized in gloomy, sad, cold months. However, in the Summer, I always struggle a lot more with doing normal tasks. It's hard to make work in that state so I always try to give myself a little grace and patience. It has also been a Summer of goodbyes. I sometimes hate ceramics for taking people away from me as they go on to new and cool opportunities. In the same breath, I also love ceramics for bringing new cool people constantly into my life. Though I think we all know how Ceramics is a love hate relationship, in all aspects.

That being said, I have spent the last couple weeks in the studio and I'm excited to share a bit about what I've been up to and what I plan to make! I started working on a new body of work and I'm really looking forward to the possibilities it holds. It's a large scale "flat" sculpture. I will include images below so that ya'll can understand what I mean. I am excited about this because it feels like the right evolution of storytelling for me. It will allow me to keep my work in the same 2d universe while also blending the lines with 3d. It also gives me some really fun shapes to work with and a creative way to think about inversed images.

Near the end of the summer, I had my friend take some headshots of me in the studio. They should be back any day now and I feel really excited to have an actual headshot I can use, finally. ( I am a real artist)

This week classes started back up for my post bacc program, though that affects pretty little in terms of altering my goals. It just means I have a few extra responsibilities. I am glad to have everyone back in the studio again and I feel a lot of connection with the two studio mates that share the spaces next to mine. I think we will do a good job of inspiring and holding each other accountable this year.

Aside from finishing up my sculpture, my main focus this past week and a half has been on putting together an artist talk and preparing work for an artist demo for Kennesaw State University. This is an incredible opportunity and I want to make sure I come well prepared. I plan to talk for 35ish minutes and follow with a surface decoration demo. I have spent a ton of time these past two weeks on my computer, making sense of what I want to say and how to say it. I think that it is a fine line between talking about your work and trauma dumping. Though one friend told me " all artist talks are trauma dumps" and that made me feel both better and worse. Even so, I have written pages and pages of what my work represents and found new things that I hadn't considered before, both about me and about my work. And then I have edited that down to what feels most important for people to know. I have had a lot of conversations with studio mates this week about deciding what to hold on to for yourself. Art is so personal, and I think sometimes you make work to express something you don't have words for, so to then find words for it seems like one of the world's little tricks. Regardless, I have put a talk together that I feel really proud of and that I'm excited to share. I gave a practice talk to my studio mates on Wednesday and got really good feedback. With a couple tweaks and a few more practice run throughs with friends, I feel like I will be more than ready. I am also just so excited to step back into a studio that at one time felt like a home to me. My undergrad professor, Jeff, has been so supportive of my advancements as an artist and I'm just so grateful for him and this opportunity.

Image 1: a sneak peak of my upcoming headshots. AHHH

Image 2: Making my flat sculpture

Image 3: flat sculpture continued

Image 4: Flat sculpture is decorated!

Image 5: decoration continued

Image 6: another piece I am working on