Menorahs

Can't Sleep; Clown Will Eat Me

The head of this column sculpture is based on the clown bed that Homer built for Bart in the Simpsons episode "Lisa's First Word."

Other Simpsons-related work, clockwise from the top:

• Zombie marge surrounded by 13 skulls


• Non-Zombie Marge


• Two Maggie Simpson coins


• Three Clay Collage faces containing portions of
  Maggie, C. Montgomery Burns, and Lisa respectively.

The Duchess

The character of the Duchess is often left out of film versions of Alice.

Perhaps the filmmakers are afraid of confusing the viewer with another unstable, violent, confusing female authority figure. Perhaps it is the demented songs that seem to promote child abuse (although who can resist joining in with the chorus of "Wow! wow! wow!"?)

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes;
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

Wow! wow! wow!

One of John Tenniel's original illustrations of the Duchess from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Duchess was the first boss in American McGee's Alice PC game. If she catches up with you, she gnaws on your head in a gruesome way. When she is defeated, she sneezes her own head off.

Screaming Cat Thing

Another cat-like entity, this time from Dr. Seuss' great work of literature, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. This one gave me nightmares as a child. I dreamed I was in a claustrophobic pod in outer space. There was an alien with a wide toothless mouth and its howl was not only physically painful to me, but it seemed to splinter me across space and time.

Here is a later reconstruction:

The rhyme that goes with it is:

I do not like
this one so well.
All he does
is yell,yell,yell.
I will not have this one about.
When he comes in
I put him out.

I once made another, larger version of this, but it exploded in the kiln due to some air trapped in the head behind the tongue. Among other casualties, it blew the foot off a Leg of Mutton. So it goes.

I once attempted to render the screaming cat thing's quiet, mouse-like counterpart in clay, but it turned to shit. So it goes.

Cat Columns of the Past

Here are four old cat column sculptures that I gave away as gifts.

Dan's Cat

A Cat for My Parents

Danielle's Cat

Lisa's Cat

Except for the mangling of the Jabberwocky poem, I liked Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland film when I saw it a few days ago. Now I'm reconsidering. I think it would have been a better movie if it had either been a new visual reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll's books without the crappy adventure plot or a film version of the PC game American McGee's Alice.

New Cat Column

This is a new cat column sculpture to replace the last one which lost an ear.

This sculpture was damaged in several areas, probably while being transferred from the shelf into the kiln. It lost an eyelash, a tooth, and a rim of one of the nested cups that make up the column, as indicated by the arrows in the images below.

Cat Column with Eye Maggots

This is one of a series of column sculptures based on Lewis Carroll characters, in this case the venerable Cheshire Cat. This version has worm-like projections coming out of its eye sockets. It was mostly an experiment to see if they would survive the whole bisque kiln experience. Small projections are often lost.

I submitted this and two other sculptures for an exhibition called "The Monsters That Made Us." I received an email asking me to write an explanation how the sculptures fit into the the theme and I can't think of anything coherent to write.

Imitations of Random Thrift Store Objects

I haven't posted to this blog since November 2006. One of my recent clay projects was making copies/interpretations of figures from thrift stores. Here are the two that I completed before I got bored with it and moved on to something else.

Yes, Grandma is naked in my version.

Purple Caterpiller Pipe

This pipe is my mother's birthday present. I told her I was going to send it and she asked, "Can you really smoke out of it?" You can, but the pipe chamber is a little too wide. They smoke better with a narrower chamber.

Giraluna in the Wall

My car was broken into and in trashing my house I threw one of the giralunas at the wall. It became embedded in the wall. Here it is.

Pikaia

Pikaia is a worm-like marine creature from the Burgess Shale. It has a notochord, so it was placed in our very own phylum Chordada(sic). Since pikaia is the earliest known chordate, it could our hallowed ancestor. Thus I present this entry as a form of ancestor worship. Let us get down on our knees and pray to our Great Grandmother Pikaia.

It's really hard to get upset over a crack in my windshield when it's as beautiful as this one.

Eva Walsko, my great grandmother. My attempts to start a cult based on her worship have been poorly received.

Megasquid and Snakebite

The outdoor, defective Megasquid is almost buried by this year's monsoons. I went outside to take pictures of it just after the sun went down. I was standing near it when I heard a buzzing sound under my flimsy Target sandal. I thought it was a large insect, but I had stepped on a small rattlesnake. I quickly moved away as soon as I noticed what it was. The snake retreated to a skeletal creosote bush, obviously very upset. I laughed at my brush with danger, although I don't think the small, scared reptile could have killed me. Going to work tomorrow at the Wretched Institution is much scarier to me than stepping on a snake. I was thinking that maybe it did bite me but I didn't feel it and now the poison is slowly working its way up my legs and torso to my brain. Any moment now I'll be dead. I see tiny fang marks on my foot, but I might be hallucinating them.


Megasquid buried up to its eyes

Caterpillar Pipes

Earlier this year I thought making clay paraphernalia might be my ticket out of my hated profession. Bongs are difficult because it's hard to make the size of the holes to come out right. Pipes are slightly easier, but they smoke very hot and there is also a problem with the airways sealing up during the glazing process. These two seem to have come out right, although I haven't tried them yet.



Here are some strange, insignia-like marks which appeared mysteriously on my skin. Do you think I might have cancer? Do you think I might be a little obsessed with my body? Consider the restraint I'm showing considering that I was naked in a shallow pool of transparent liquid.

And, by the way, I haven't made it out of my present line of work yet. Tuesday was the first day of school and I remain an elementary school teacher. Oh the horror.

Hallucigenia

The Burgess Shale is a famous fossil site in the Canadian Rockies. About 505 million years ago, unusual geological conditions caused many soft-bodied Cambrian creatures to remain well preserved up to the early twentieth century when they were discovered by paleontologist Charles Walcott.

The organisms were remarkable in that many seemed to defy classification. One of these was a worm-like creature which was given the name of Hallucigenia, meaning dreamlike. There was an initial confusion over the animal's spatial orientation. Did the strange spikes point up for protection or did it walk on them like stilts? Later finds showed that it walked on the soft tentacles with the rigid spikes pointing up, but it has proved difficult to sculpt that way. There was also a controversy about Hallucigenia's relationship to modern animals. It has been placed in the phylum Onchyphora, in which it joins obscure modern creatures called velvet worms.

Remains of lunch: White Bean and Roasted Garlic Soup and three upside down Hallucigenia.

Hallucigenia as a stilt walker. Not true-to-life, but easier to express in clay.
Hallucigenia as it probably lived. Unfortunately it collapsed every time I tried to render it that way.

Hallucigenia smiling.

Fossil of Hallucigenia.