During my second semester here at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale I began working in terra cotta slipware. After a small solo show in the summer, I started experimenting with making paper stencils and resists. This jar was decorated with hand-cut thick vinyl stencil stock, and then faceted through the wet clay sometime in September or October of 2013.
During this time I was reading most of the critical craft theory that has been published in the last ten or fifteen years. I have been especially inspired by the work of Richard Sennett and David Pye. Sennett’s ideas of domain shift were an important part of experiments that I made in the early part of the fall semester. Sennett posits that taking a tool, technique, or process from one craft and using it in another media, industry, or application is a great, and common, source of creative invention. He calls this a domain shift. If he is right, “the redux” is certainly not the intellectual property of post-post-modernists, it has been a part of the life cycles of technology since before the start of the iron age.
My response was to work in paper models, wire worked jewelry with pearls, leather work, kites, paint, calligraphy, book arts, and digitally created and altered imagery in the beginning part of the Fall semester. I also dove into reading about geometric solids and the intersection between mathematics and art. Since I have little familiarity with most of these tools and ideas, they outcomes were of varying quality.
I began to use a vinyl cutter to cut paper and vinyl stencils for clay slip decoration that were based on imagery that I adapted from altered photographs and imagery from very old Japanese textile designs.
