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After many years of assisting with his wife’s skyrocketing art career, Michael Lancaster returns to his own work and takes it in a brand new direction.The last twenty years of Michael Lancaster’s life represent a reversal of sorts of the traditional American tale in which the wife puts aside her career in order to support her husband’s. Lancaster, now 52, put his own career as a ceramist in a holding pattern while that of his wife, Barbara Harnack, soared for the last two decades.
It was 1987 when the two left their successful pottery in Malden Bridge in upstate New York and moved to New Mexico. Soon, Lancaster said, “Barbara’s career was so hot, really all I could do was be her assistant.”
He never stopped making ceramics; it’s just that much of the time, he was wedging and pugging clay, throwing raw vessels that his wife would later ornament, packing and shipping her creations to galleries across the country, and helping represent her at major craft fairs. And then there were the large adobe house, guest house and studio the couple built on their Cerrillos, New Mexico, property south of Santa Fe: Lancaster was chief builder and contractor on the job for twelve years, although Harnack did her share of adobe-building as well.
The house was completed in 2005, and perhaps Lancaster would soon have begun to refocus on his own work, but life has a way of changing swiftly. In the fall, Harnack and their seventeen-year-old daughter were in a serious car accident. Though neither suffered major injuries, Harnack sustained serious soft-tissue damage and simply couldn’t keep up her previous pace.
At the craft shows in 2006, the couple purposely took fewer wholesale orders for Harnack’s work to ease her work load. “But then we couldn’t pay the bills,” Lancaster recalled. “She needed to slow down, and I needed to come up with something of my own again,” Lancaster said. “I saw that as an opening.”
He recalled the thought processes that accompanied the economic demand: “So here I am, at age 51, I’m pretty proficient in clay-I can make what I set out to do.” But he didn’t want to make his old favorites-soda-fired vessels and Asian-influenced raku tea bowls in a soft organic palette-or other common ceramic forms at which many other people are talented.
Unbeknownst to Lancaster, the influences of building their home, both the engineering and the construction, had been germinating in the back of his mind. He picked up an idea he had explored many years ago, and began developing it into the Habitat Series. These nonfunctional vessels, essentially cylindrical forms with added feet and funnel-shaped tops, reference ancient forms of residence ranging from lighthouses to Navajo hogans.
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The gestation period between the conception and the first incarnation of the “Journey Workshop†was several years. Monique Giard, the director of Centre de céramique Bonsecours in Montreal, planted the seed of an idea in 2002, but it was not until the summer of 2007, with the help of Meira Mathison, the director of the Metchosin International Summer School of the Arts (MISSA), in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, that I was able to bring the concept to fruition.The premise was straightforward: Bring together a group of ceramics artists with at least rudimentary technical skills and help them find their personal voice. After two weeks of exploration at MISSA, students would return to their respective studios to do the hard work of applying what they had learned to their body of work, with the understanding that we would reconvene in eight months at my studio, Center Street Clay in Sandwich, Illinois, for a gallery exhibition of the group’s work.
In retrospect, the original subtitle to the workshop, “Throwing… Personal Style… Developing a Body of Work,†seems so pragmatic and linear. I intuitively knew the workshop had to develop spontaneously, but what surprised me most was how deeply the class delved into the realm of self-discovery. Most ceramics artists want to make work that is personal, but it’s not always easy to figure out how to do that. For some it is simply a matter of refining techniques, tweaking designs and training the eye to be more discerning during self-critique. For others it involves a near reincarnation.
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First, you come closer. Greg Penner’s small ceramic sculptures pull you across the room with their bright, shiny surfaces and saturated colors, which the artist calls luscious, as if he were describing candy. Memories waft up, of porcelain dolls kept safe behind glass doors in grandma’s kitchen, or wallpaper images in a room where you slept as a child. Hovering somewhere between fine art and kitsch, Penner’s images seem cute, comical and playfully absurd. Then you realize all is not well here.Psychological self-portraiture has a long established place in the history of art. Renaissance masters left confident, positive images of themselves to posterity. Modern artists, beginning with Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, produced more disturbing (or, at least, more honest) self-portraits. Much of recent feminist art is concerned with women’s bodies and self-image, though relatively little contemporary art addresses the barrage of media images aimed at men, and the negative effects they have on male self-esteem. Expression of self in ceramic art, Penner notes, is still more limited. Penner explores fallibility and self-contempt regarding masculine self-image through ceramic sculpture and found objects. “Popular culture, especially through mass media like television and film, is sending ever stronger messages to men regarding their appearance, or subsequently, their deficiencies in appearance,†says Penner. “An efficient means to explore issues involving social and popular contemporary culture is the integration of found objects into art—objects produced for mass consumption.â€
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Section: Clay Bodies, Subsection: General
Description
Anything can be dried if it is done slowly and evenly enough. To dry faster optimize the body recipe, ware cross section, drying process and develop a good test to rate drying performance.
Article
I admit it again. I blissfully ignore countless warnings and suffer endless problems. Eventually, however, I get the point. When it comes to drying ceramics, my learning has been true to form. I have an uncanny capacity to break the rules and get away with it, then act surprised when problems strike! I heard an appropriate quotation that applies well: “I have failed before. And I can do it again!â€. Anyway, I have compiled a few points about drying. They might seem simple, but that doesn’t seem to stop a lot of others from tripping over the snags the way I have.
Ware shrinks when it dries. In most cases cracks happen when the shrinkage occurs unevenly enough within a piece to overcome its inherent strength to resist. So, it is not the speed of drying, but the unevenness of drying that results in ware either cracking or harboring residual stresses. The influence of evenness of drying is well demonstrated by considering that one studio or plant may dry ware in a uniform manner without failure in half the time another is doing it with high losses. If you are a small production company or potter you may think that you can dry functional ware, for example, out in the open if you turn and rotate it often enough. Unless you live in a damp swamp and use a non plastic clay, I seriously doubt you will get away with this for long. Unless you have a robot you simply cannot turn it often enough to keep the drying even. For complicated shapes certain sections will dry before others no matter how you orient it. For smaller production, why not simply cover the ware well in cloth (use a fabric that drapes well and does not let air blow through it).
How can you get more uniform drying? Consider these suggestions.
Isolate the stage in the process where variations in water content within a piece (drying gradients) are first introduced (i.e. an early unshielded draft, ware left out too long). Plastic clay easily absorbs stresses created by a 3% spread in water content between the driest and wettest sections of a piece. Once introduced, however, this spread tends to remain throughout the rest of the drying process. In later stages, it can put great stress on the stiffening piece, inviting weaker sections to seek relief.
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Section: Clay Bodies, Subsection: General
Description
Guidelines for collecting, testing, reprocessing scrap clay in a multi-person ceramic studio.
Article
In any studio or production facility scrap clay accumulates quickly. In a large art center, for example, smaller amounts of a dozen different bodies may be in use. In a production situation it is more likely that just one kind of clay is employed and the major challenge is dealing with scrap volumes. Typically procedures and equipment are in place to incorporate a percentage of scrap into fresh clay mixes or to use it for certain types of production. Let us then take on the other challenge: the art center or studio.
Everyone likes to have clay with consistent properties but you can forget about that when using bodies prepared from scrap. The trick is gathering some information about the working and fired properties so you can either choose a suitable use for each scrap batch or adjust and fine-tune it to a specific use. You thus need a way to test this unique new clay body and evaluate it for its basic properties. Unlike typical clay formulation efforts you cannot choose to remove something from the recipe, you can only add things. If you are instructing in a school studio and see an opportunity to turn buckets of scrap clay into an educational opportunity you are not alone.
Some Guidelines on Collecting Scrap
-Mix the biggest possible batch, testing effort on small ones is pointless.
-Decide how many collection containers you need and rules for the types of clay allowed into each. The stricter the rules the more likely you can predict what sort of concoction each is. On the other hand, the better your ability to evaluate and adjust a batch the more relaxed the rules will need to be. Actually since people do not tend to follow rules anyway it is best to treat every batch of scrap as if it could have anything in it (including previous batches of scrap).
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