This shrine was inspired by a trip to Texas I did last year with my family. It’s a long, brutal drive from Phoenix to Dallas, so I bought a lot of snacks for my kids, the kind of snacks they don’t usually get. I bought candy and chips and cheetoes and juice boxes and basically filled the car with  processed HFCS-filled junk food in brightly colored packages. Good times, good times.

As I raided the grocery store for all this horrid, un-nutritious, delicious food, I was reminded of trips we took as children, driving across the west to various national parks my father wanted to visit. I don’t remember Yosemite, but I do remember a package  of plain M&Ms that we fought over like starving dogs. (We never got as much candy as we wanted.) I was also reminded of Egyptian tombs, which included jars full of oil and grain and other foodstuffs. When going on a long, difficult journey, it’s best to have snacks.

I did this whimsical combination of the two. I made the gilded trim and the food out of polymer clay. It took me two years to finish it, since I prefer to work on polymer clay in the summer months (84 degrees room temperature makes polymer clay easier to work with.) I made the head and hands out of paperclay, and I made the body out of foamcore board and tea-stained gauze. The hair is embossing floss.

These shrines I make are some of the best-received pieces of 3-D art I make, second only to the smiley balls and the altered books. I would say they take the least in terms of traditional art skill, that is, craftsmanship and technique, but they take more creativity than almost anything else I do.

I had a bunch of clay and wanted to make something easy, so I decided to make fake rocks. I started by thumping the lump of clay against a tree in a random pattern. After that, I put it on the wheel and carved out a little hole. I thought if I let it dry really, really slowly, I could fire it solid, but Bridget disagreed, so I ended up hollowing it out by cutting a flap and bending it back. You can sort of see the lines where I cut it, but only if you know where to look. Underneath, it looks like there ought to be a flap to hide a key, except that there isn’t.

I’ve had this terra cotta pot under my studio table for just about a year, waiting for the project I wanted to do with it.  Finally, I decided that I needed a pot for some succulents, so now was the time.

I started by coming up with a short phrase to put around the lip. This is really hard for me, despite being a writer, because nothing seems good enough to immortalize in ceramic.  The phrase reads “Let the sun shine, the Earth bursts forth with life!”  I got the letter spacing better this time, because I drew out the length of the circumference of the pot lid on scrap newsprint, and therefore had a rough estimate of the space requirements for each word. I used the french liner raised slip to outline each letter and then began to apply the low fire glaze.

Why do I always forget how *($^%# time consuming those %^$#$%! low fired glazes are?  It probably took me four hours just to glaze the rim, and it’s not even as even as I wanted it.  At least listening to “This American Life” while I paint makes the time pass swiftly.

After I fired the pot, I started to design the tile mosiac.  I used a stencil of art deco  flower designs from a book I’ve had forever and enlarged it for the flower design.  I cut the petals out of clear glass and used acrylic medium to paste some really cool art paper onto the back. After the acrylic dried, I applied more on the back. Then I cut out around the glass with a razor blade.

I laid the flowers down on my sketch of the surface area, and went through the stained glass I had to decide on colors. I have a nice collection of stained glass, but becuase I got them in a bulk purchase from a non-standard location, they’re all opaque hand-made art glass. Ridiculously expensive when you buy it most of the time, but I got an incredible discount. Ironically, I don’t like it much. I prefer cathedral glass.  Still, the blue was nice, and I had several different colors of it that resembled one another, so I cut out chunks. The chunks are about half an inch square.  I cut the stems out of a light green glass.  When I was done, I realized that I needed more to fill the middle area, so I cut out the leaves from dark green glass.

For the bottom, I went through the tiles I’d made earlier. You can see some of them on this site.  I wanted to use the leaf tiles on the flower stems, but they didn’t look right. I have a lot of the circle tiles, not because they work well in the design (I think they’re hard to use) but because they’re easy to make.  I think that looked okay.

I probably spent about eight to ten hours on this project, including mastic and grouting. (It took at least an hour just to clean the grout off the tiles.)  Am I happy with it? No.  It doesn’t look as colorful as I wanted it to.  I think that black grout would have helped. I should have used an opaque glaze on the rim.  The blue squares are too big, and I couldn’t fit them as tightly as I wanted to.  Also, the succulents I bought are in tiny containers, so I put a different plant (a piece of columnular cactus) in there instead.

Still, it holds a plant, so it’s not a complete loss.

This looks a lot like a smiley ball without a face, doesn’t it?  I wanted to do something as close to a sphere as I could manage, just because it’s pretty easy and it’s sometimes nice to have a heavy ball to roll around in your hands. I coated it with red iron oxide (as I did for the freaky rabbit sculpture) too.

In the pottery studio, there used to be a postcard with a photo of this really cool freaky hare sculpture.  Naturally, when I went looking for it to use as a reference, it had mysteriously vanished.  I did this anyway, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I wanted that weird blobby texture (and I think I got it) and I wanted it to look a little like the rabbit would happily devour your brains if it could. As a bonus, it even stands up, and it didn’t crack. I call this a win.