Birds Nest

I came across this little pile of feathers by our front gate the other day. Some little bird has been trying very very hard to make a nest out of my hens feathers. I found a clump earlier in the day and thought the worst then later found this little half formed nest. Poor little bird, its efforts kept getting blown away by the wind. But what a lovely silky bundle it is.

Harpies

Some of the little harpies I have been working on fresh out of the pit this morning. Not a successful firing, I say there were some air bubbles and I say the weather was against me. The pieces should have still been hot when I opened the pit but with all the rain last night, the water got in and the ash was damp. A nuisance; anyway in my usual frugal fashion I just glued what needed to be glued and polished them up with beeswax. I like how the breaks and cracks make them look like ancient fertility relics, like the Venus de Willendorf. I will probably make more of these at some point. I would like to step back from sculpture and do more print and drawing again but that seems an impossible feat, climbing a mountain would be an easier task, and seems less overwhelming. 

Hive Mind

'Hive Mind,' mixed-media
(Pit-fired clay sculpture, with bees wax comb, faux pearls and paint.)

A difficult piece to photograph, I do not think the photographs do the piece any justice. The pit-fired clay is likened to almost to bronze. A friend of mine said it reminded her of an ossuary, a container or room where the bones of the dead are kept. She was most certainly on the right track. I suppose I was melting the bee hive and the human mind together. There similarities in growth, life, decay, illness and death. This piece was quit labour intensive and took a while to complete. I got a bit sick of it in the end before it was fired but am not happy with the result. Again the computer just doesn't do it justice. I used my cone shape as a base and built on from there, pasting everything together the way a wasp chews and spits out the material it needs to build its paper hives.

I am rambling. The song by the pixies below came afterward but seemed appropriate.

Top View

Cosmic Eggs (for lack of a better title)

 Two new sculptures made simply from eggs laid by my own ducks and polymer clay faces and a bit of gold leaf to represent that something sacred. Which came first the woman or the egg? These are not political pieces, I'm sure they could be as that was the question that came to mind after I made them. A lot has been going on in Ireland at the moment, artists have been busy trying to pull ireland out of the dark ages, fighting to give women a choice over their own bodies and to repeal the eight amendment. I don't do political art, its just not my bag, to angry, and there is enough of that anyway.
But it is a good question, who comes first?
On another thought eggs are pretty amazing, I have a large flock of hens at hand, have hatched my own chicks and  regulary partake in the eating of eggs. I don't have a rooster, they are not fertile, there is no life there. But on occasion I do have a fertile egg, and it is an amazing thing to observe. This small delicate vessel growing a little life outside of the mother, everything it needs packed into a small shell of calcium, grown for 21 days. A little circle of life in one form.
  There is so much mysticism around eggs from all across the globe, it is even believed that the earth itself was cracked from an egg, 'The Cosmic Egg.' The egg appears in many works of art including my own. It is a fascinating form, an amazing creation of evolution.
Enough rambling! I hope to make more of these with any extra eggs I may have. They are filled with ash to add weight and balance to them. I hope the one with gold leaf will have a chemical reaction to the glue used where the gold will turn green. This has happened before but only time will tell.
It is a fiddle process making the hole, only done on fresh eggs and not older brittle eggs, careful surgical precision when cutting and filing down the hole without cracking the whole shell.

'Untitled,' mixed-media, (duck egg, gold leaf and polymer clay)

'Untitled,' Mixed-media (Duck egg, polymer clay)