In the desert, summer slows activity down to a crawl. It gives us time to work on ideas that we couldn't get to during the busy season.
This summer, Linda decided to revisit previous ideas that just didn't work out during her first attempt. Many of these involved enlarging smaller sculptures that she had made previously.
One of these examples is the small ceramic sculpture on the right (above). She thought it was such an intriguing form with its undulating surface and piercings, it had to be made larger! But making large ceramic sculptures is not trivial. The medium cannot support itself, has to dry slowly to avoid cracking (a challenge in the desert), and that's BEFORE it goes into the kiln and faces more variables that can cause cracking or exploding. She had to move the idea to "the back burner" during the busy season. This summer, when there was time to revisit it, success! The ceramic sculpture on the left stands 21". Of course, that begged the question, "how big can I make this?"
Because of kiln size limitations, anything larger would need to be in a different medium. So off she went to research sculpting in concrete. Below is Linda's first concrete sculpture standing 32" high. Adding color is the next step. The ultimate goal is to make one that stands 5' tall.
Working with concrete has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Visit our website over the next few months to see progress!
Another small, but exciting relief was the next challenge. The first ceramic sculpture on the right measures 8" across. Linda created the larger, 24" sculpture this summer. Once the larger piece was made, it was cast in plaster in order to create several lightweight pieces with paper clay that could be hung on a wall in different arrangements. So many possibilities!
