For many of us the markers we usually use to note the passage of time are not available this year. Annual celebrations, monthly meetings, weekly get togethers just aren’t happening. For me, I’m missing the art fairs that usually occur on the same week every year. Now I find myself either thinking time is going too fast or the opposite: “I can’t believe it’s already the beginning of July.”
What are you using, in your own life, to mark the passage of time during this pandemic? Now that I am spending so much time in my garden I find myself using our plants (including our pear tree) to measure time as well as “how long can we manage to last between grocery trips?”
Another measure of time that I’ve relied on over many years is the accumulation of my canes that I’ve made. I usually make my canes during art fairs. I love making them so much I don’t let myself do them any other time so I don’t end up with too many to use. Plus it’s really fun to show people the process and to watch their jaws drop. If someone visits my booth over the course of a festival weekend, they will see a pile of various clay colors morph into long tubes of clay with pictures inside every slice.
Canes I’ve made in the last few years. Most become parts of my sculptures the rest I sell as Silly Millies at www.claysquared.com/layl
For years people have been asking to see this process in a time lapse video. So now, due to the time I’m spending in one location, in my studio, I am finally able to make that video! I set the camera up to capture each step of the cane-making process, allowing viewers to experience the action without having to make repeated visits back to my festival booth.
The process usually starts with several days of mixing colors. I get the general palette ready to go ahead of time, but I find I often need to mix additional colors. In my video I start with a photo of all the clay ready to be turned into a cane. I also show a drawing of the design I made. Usually it is just black and white but for this one I did a color drawing because the customer wanted a work of art done with the drawing I used to make the cane. This drawing is then set under a piece of plexiglass so I can work right on top of it. Then it's all about building the image, piece by piece, like an elongated puzzle. Finally, when the picture is complete and I've rounded it out with background designs, I start to squeeze and stretch the chunk of clay out. This process is called reduction. On the video I skipped filming most of this process because it is literally hours and hours of slowly working the clay around and around until it softens enough to start to stretch evenly.
It’s fascinating to see this cane (which actually took about 25 hours to create) appear in less than ten minutes! But honestly when I watch the video the timing looks about right to me. I love making canes so much it feels like time goes that fast! Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/vrktEUVWzvk