my piece for my man.

wolfgang tillmans is an artist i really like.
i like his style,
he inspires me,
causes me to think.

his work is described as open-ended and unresolved,
he loves variety and possibility.

i found these photos on his website

so my ceramics teacher Tricia McGuigan gave us an assignment to make an urn for an artist, and i chose him.
i dont know if its morbid to tell you that,
since he's still alive.

i thought that he'd want options though....
so i gave him lots.



there you go wolfgang,
love to you,
shannon

ceramics 1, how cute

I am in my 5th year of college, graduating this semester (yes!!) with a degree in fine art, and am in the midst of taking a Ceramics I class.

It's traumatizing.


??????????????????????
clay? bats? engobe?
??????????????????????
??????????????????????
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I'm used to indesign, curves and f-stops.

talk about going back to square one.

needing some form of familiarity, i've been photographing
my clay pots as they progress----------------------------------

this is pre-firing/////////////////////////all the foreigntools!

my first child!

so odd, i love it.

this next one is a response to a drawing i did a few years ago, which you can read about here if you'd like. drawing was also a fear-inducer for me.... ahh! doing things with Not the computer! scary, but eventually, fun...!

++ at this very moment,
i have 5 cylinders in the kiln that i threw on the WHEEL.

get ready for those beauties.
very screwed up beauties,
and actually, not completely cylindrical
but hey
its ceramics 1.



------------ go try something new!
((((pizza w/ sprinkles? drawing? etc.))))

cardboard-sparkle-love

last semester in my design class, we had to pick a verse out of the Bible and use it in an installation piece on campus. my friend jehoaddan and i worked together on this------ we chose II Peter 1:7 ------------------ a verse about love and faith and virtue

so, naturally, we used lots of neon and lots of sparkles.

how RAD are these letters?? they're about two feet tall, made of cardboard that we found in the trash and hot-glue, and jehoaddan was the mastermind behind these beauties. i honestly have no idea how she did it. genius. for typeface-lovers, this is called Auto 2- my current fave!

we xacto-knifed each of these skinny letters out of the tinfoil, and WOW is tinfoil ever delicate.

here's jehoaddan in the studio,

& me with lots of sparkles,

from making THIS!
it took literally hundreds of dollars of sparkles.
who knew glitter was so expensive? are you kidding me?

so here's the entire thing--- it took a few days to install, lots and lots and lots of fishing line and hammering and wondering how to hang cardboard words from a tree in mid-air.

fishing line--------!

i think this is my favorite photo of this project---- i love this view.

jehoaddan tied little pieces of neon string onto the millions of pieces of fishing line so that people wouldnt do unexpected faceplants.

oh my lanta.
i love type.
--------------- shannon

craft time! ----felt flower awesome headbands

i've found my 2nd calling: making headbands out of felt. talk about a stress-releaser, a creativity outlet, and a GREAT GIFT!! i gave the one above to my friend blythe after she declared a love for felt on her blog. people were charging $15+ for things like this on etsy, and i had an "i can make that" moment, so i went to joannes, came home, and crafted!

this one i made for rosanna:

she discovered tons of uses for this little felt wonder. ie:

felt celebration!
>>>>>>>>>>>shan

are you BUSY? >>>>>>art project!<<<<<<<<<<<<<

i was busy this week.

SO BUSY.

busy busy busy.
with papers, photography, emails, art projects, presentations, meetings, eating, sleeping, yoga, coffee.....

yesterday kind of marked the end of my semester at Biola... I finished a big project that I'm really excited about. I also finished a big 6 page paper. And yes, 6 pages equals BIG in my eyes!

Anyway. Feeling stressed and busy reminded me of an art project I did last year that i was TOO BUSY to post! :)

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I'm obsessed with my vegan calendar (click! check it out!) by Jill Bliss. It has literally changed my life----- I'm attached to it---------It makes me happy! IT MAKES SCHEDULING FUN!


so, i'm attached, and i WILL admit that my obsessive attachment also indicates: I'm a busy girl. I'm probably overcommitted! I need to say the word no more often so that i have more time for yoga and baking and reading magazines and changing the world. My awesome calendar made by the beautiful Jill Bliss is connected to my heart because without it i wouldn't be able to remember the millions of homework assignments, the library books that are due, the lunch dates, the birthdays, the meetings, and oh yes: "stay sane" is also itemized on my calendar's pages.


noticing this obsession, i decided to rip out all of the pages of my calendars from the past 3 years and put them on display. One more thing that i am obsessed with is saving my to-do lists! I secretly get lots and lots of joy out of making to-do lists, and i really REALLY love making them funny. i love making myself laugh as i read my to-do's, and i love making them pretty, and i love making them on neon paper and writing on them with colorful pens.

this project is a collection of all the to-do lists, all the calendar pages, and all the busyness that's in my life. i hope you can connect with it in some way, unless you live in the middle of nowhere and bake your own bread and don't have email, in which case #1) i'm jealous and #2) you're fine--- and aren't plagued with the disease of being busy like the rest of us.

this is what the whole project looked like from far away

i was a stalker and photographed people looking at it

one of my favorite parts about making to-do lists is the titles. "do this so you don't go crazy"..... "this will be fun i promise"...... "YAY THURSDAY!"...... or "gives me anxiety"
i also enjoy including things like breathing and smiling and having fun on my lists. if i didn't i think i'd get depressed.

tape :)!

and to finish off, please enhance your soul and read this quote by Thomas Merton in his essay Rain and the Rhinoceros, an essay about our busy culture, and the importance of noticing the small glories in each day. Like the rain.

Of course the festival of rain cannot be stopped, even in the city. The woman from the delicatessen scampers along the sidewalk with a newspaper over her head. The streets, suddenly washed, became transparent and alive, and the noise of traffic becomes a plashing of fountains.

One would think that urban man in a rainstorm would have to take account of nature in its wetness and freshness, its baptism and its renewal. But the rain brings no renewal to the city... and the obsessed citizens plunge through the rain bearing the load of their obsessions, slightly more vulnerable than before, but still only barely aware of external realities. They do not see that the streets shine beautifully, that they themselves are walking on stars and water, that they are running in skies to catch a bus or taxi... Their complaints are mechanical and without spirit.

Merton goes on in the end of the essay to say:
Then the quails begin their sweet whistling in the wet bushes. Their noise is absolutely useless, and so is the delight I take in it. There is nothing I would rather hear, not because it is a better noise than the other noises, but because tit is the voice of the present moment, the present festival.

Doesn't that just give you goosebumps? One of my roommates literally got goosebumps and the other literally had tears at the sound of that quote. I love those words. the present festival. love it!

bedazz////// clothespin and bottle /////////

here's a few more pieces from my 10 experiments in 2 hours project

this one's called terror-stricken

and in this one i cut up all the words from this list of feeling-words (all feelings revolving around fear), strung them together with thread, and put them in this bottle.

when you take the string out of the bottle
its like a clothesline of words

but the words are all things like
agitated, ill-at-ease, fearful, overwhelmed...

so yeah,
shannon

bedazz ////////polaroids//////////

this series kind of happened on a whim, which i love.
i didn't know what to do for this one assignment in my design class, so i decided to raid my bins of collections and treasures {for anyone who isn't me: my junk bins} and just make something. anything.

these are the parameters i created for myself >>
• make ten things
• each must be made in fifteen minutes
• only use found items from the bins
• bedazzle
• incorporate feeling words from those feeling charts "today i feel:"
• listen to the same song over and over
['it's you i like' by mr.rogers, but by donny]

here are three of the 15 minute bedazzlers.

what do you think?
and, do you want more explanation, or do you just like looking?

do you mind taking 15 seconds to answer?
rock it,
shan