Installation mention

Art in 2011 | Hamptons Art Hub

Community Supports Arts CSArts

I made an edition of 50 clay cairns for the first Cambridge CSArts project. 9 artists, 50 shareholders. This is my contribution:

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Smooth and Smoky--Vessels Gallery--Boston

Left Bank Gallery Opening July 16

Slide show of pieces in the show at Left Bank Gallery

Dis/Appear

Appearances Green Art Festival this week put on by the Provincetown Conservation Trust includes my ceramic and mixed media scape installation: Dis/Appear. These are the early photos.

The site, at the end of the world, is the tidal area and beach below the kayak landing near Pilgrim Landing and the P'town Inn. It was created last week and has been subject to a huge wind and rain storm on the weekend, a full moon high tide, and the daily ebb and flow. Some parts are now gone, some buried in sand or straw.

 

photos: Phyllis Ewen, Laura Smith, Judy Motzkin all rights reserved

StoneFlow installation

So Big! at Cotuit Center for the Arts, Cotuit MA through Feb 12, 2011

A Thread, by Robert Manz. Shot at the opening.

Teapots

DD14 Kiln Door

Photos of the Olympic DD14 door I want to rebuild.

China and Back

I am working on writing themes from my recent time in China on a new blog.
MeiZhongHua, the opposite of Chinglish and the language I speak in China, an American form of Chinese, seems to be a language of friendship and cultural exchange. I will post here when I have more writings to publish. Meanwhile I have documented two works done while in Jingdezhen, the porcelain center of China. http://motzkinchina.blogspot.com

NYTimes No Knead Bread

Original NYT No Knead bread link



The video of Mark Bittman and Jim Lahey at Sullivan St Bakery



Judy's Rye Bread variation
2C white or bread flour
1C rye flour
1/2 t. yeast
1 t. salt
handful of caraway seed
1 1/2 C water
Use flour or corn meal or grits for dusting.

Day one: Mix ingredients in bowl cover and set aside to rise for 12-18 hours.
Day two: remove from bowl, let sit 10 minutes then fold dough into round loaf, cover and rise 2 hours. Preheat oven and covered pot at 500.
Dough in covered hot pot 3o minutes, then 15 with cover off.
Watch the video for technique.

The birth of my BreadPots

David Rossinow, whose lovely downdraft kiln I adopted, joined me for a stoneware firing. I was trying to make the perfect covered baking pot for the no-knead bread baking routine. I have been looking for the right size. I had some mugs and bowls at the kiln already. We glazed and loaded and fired the kiln on Saturday. I love the height of the fire so much I fail to turn it off before the most sensitive glaze runs off the pot. I don't do high fire much. I never glaze if I can help it. But this was fun, using David's glazes. I never remember them, we never have test tiles around. They are all classics.

Alaska panhandle

Rich and I snorkeled the 50ish waters of Ketchikan. Lots of sea stars, colorful and huge, didn't see the king salmon. I loved swimming in the kelp forest.
I went for a solo mountain bike ride in Sitka.
It was challenging and exhilarating. I walked a lot of it, forded a stream, meditated at a high lake. I ate salmon berries by the side of the road. I didn't see a bear.
We went as far as the Hubbard Glacier. Really puts understanding of change into perspective.
Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau. Kayaked and saw a sea lion, eagle, harbor seals.

Chinesepod

I have been listening to Chinese podcasts.
I am keeping my ear up if nothing else.

I listen at ChinesePod, a language learning site based in Shanghai. The company, Praxis Language, has newer parallel sites in Spanish, Italian and French.
The level of professionalism, linguistic interest, cultural insight, and pedagogy is quite high.
The lessons and discussions are free. There are membership levels up to someone calling you everyday to tutor you. I listen to the lessons, read some of the discussion, use my dictionaries to absorb character uses. I find myself absorbed in it for an hour or two each time.
The visual language was what first attracted me to study Chinese. Now I find myself wanting to get to the depth of the culture through the language. I want to study again. I would like to learn the language like a child is taught in school. Writing and reciting from classics while practicing the colloquial language every day.

Notes from a coach

Take your idea seriously.
Follow it through.
Entertain all your far out ideas.
Make a venue.
Deep play, no mistakes. (even losing files?)
Think about where to be specific or loose.
Use your talents of discernment to judge, dismiss, appreciate.
Attend, let go.
Be at choice.
Notice your hands.

Big ideas and smaller ones

BIG
Erosion
Balance
Gravity
Entropy
Cycles
Zhongmei Youyi
Sino-American friendship


Find related exposure, castings, images of, pilgrimages to.
Opposite poles.
Drop merges into ocean, ocean merges into drop

It's not the letting go that is hard, it is the holding on.

Margins
Lift, Weight, Burden, Balance
Trajectories
Art Devil/Sand spirit
Even Gravity is a Construct --Einstein
Chrono-synclastic Infundibula --Vonnegut
Broken Shards, Sparks of Light
Clear Claire-voyant, audit, sentient, cognizant, scribant
Skeletons
Ice Melt
Sand Pile
Video Montage -- sand falls
Weight of Dreams -- interactive
Equanimity
Suspend Judgment
Experiments with Exhaling
Sand self, clinging, accepting

Fluvial Processes

Project:

Fluvial Processes

For more on this: Project::Erosion Blog
Sand flows from the dune cliff onto the growing pile at the foot. The banner above is the same...one grain at a time.
The undermined clay outcropping above will likely have fallen after the next storm.

For four+ years I have been documenting the changes in the Newcomb Hollow cliffs of Wellfleet. Clay, sand, water, weather, tides, and gravity in a choreography of change.
Last fall I cast moments of the geomorphology in plaster.
I will next work with these castings on the scanner.
So much to do.

In late January a 19th Century schooner freed itself from the bottom of the sea and rolled ashore just south of the cliffs that have been my studio. The shipwreck made the news. In April a man killed himself just north of these cliffs. This too made the news. These cliffs are a force. Steady as she goes.The sand and clay continues its journey. And I continue mine.

Perhaps our lives are not that different from the life of a grain of sand. We finally work ourselves to the surface and then we hang on until the winds of life loosen us. Gravity, water, or weather takes hold and we are off to the next landing. It doesn't feel like gravity when we are walking or careening through our days, but it is or we would all be flying, no doubt.
-"It's not the letting go that is hard, it's the holding on"- Buddhist wisdom

from Robert Genn

"Start anywhere.
Accept "nearly right" to get going.
Forgo early accuracy and precision.
Let early strokes determine later ones.
Assume a solution and try working backwards.
Of two solutions, choose the simplest.
Move forward on incomplete information.
Think smart rather than laborious.
Use intuition and go directly to the outcome.
Trust your instincts."

More:
"Curiosity as a way of thinking
Suspicion of authority and conventional wisdom
Respect for intelligently filtered history
Aspiration to higher levels of achievement
Vision for renewed potential in all things
Tendency to invent private systems
Reinvention and perfection of former skills
Accepting the challenge of the difficult"

To subscribe to Genn's newsletter

titles and ideas

In/fluence
Forbidden words
Tick of the Heart
Paper bridge
Hard stones of thought
Temporal Stillness
Like Eroding Dunes
Tumbling Righting Wandering & Stilling
Imaginal Disks
Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology
Like a Grain of Sand clings to the the cliff of time, life, motion
In Geologic time

A new start

I retitled this blog instead of making a new one and then took out posts thinking there was a place where I had preserved them, but no luck, they are lost. Oh well, I have lost sketchbooks before. Mom always said if the idea a forgot was important it would come back. Gotta trust that wisdom.
Anyway, the new blogspot in which I am working out a project about erosion is:
projecterosion.blogspot.com
I am going there now to work.