Stars Fell On Alabamy…

One of my favorite Ella and Satchmo songs…

My buddy Sebastian and I traveled down to Birmingham this last weekend to attend the Alabama Clay Conference. It was a whirlwind weekend filled with ceramics, fantastic demonstrations, shows, museums and a great deal of pain. It’s 3 weeks and counting and my ankle is not better yet with the hematomata still hanging on. But I met some very nice people who tolerated my limping and hobbling around wherever we happened to be heading. The joke became that so many things were in walking distance… but one man’s walking distance is another man’s marathon on bleeding stubs. Of course, since no one knew me most people probably just figured I was a permanent hobbler. So anyway, the presenters at the conference were Lorna Meaden, Christopher Gryder and Sergei Isupov. It was a great combination of diverse artists whose work really looked good together in the exhibit of the presenters. Here’s an example of each starting with Lorna, then Chris, then Sergei…

All three presenters had compelling demonstrations and wonderful “slide” talks about their work. Lorna throws about every type of clay object known and had a wonderful facility with the material. Chris showed a unique and innovative process that is all his own and is successfully employing 3D modeling software in his work and of course, probably everyone is already aware of Sergei’s work. Here are some not-so-great pics of the presentation that I took from my seat with a zoom and they are all a bit blurry. There aren’t any of Chris as he was all the way on the other side of the stage from where I sat plus the cool stuff to look at of his would require someone to shoot pictures down into the molds he was creating. My main purpose was to try to get pics of Sergei’s piece in progress…

There were many funny exchanges between Sergei and Lorna as she would ask him a question and he would be so focused that he was oblivious that anyone was even speaking to him. I was amazed at how quickly Sergei’s piece came together and how quickly he painted it. He is a very funny person with lots of silly stories. My favorite was when he moved to this country, he said he only knew one word in english… really. <– no that's the word. Anyway, he said he would be places and people would talk to him for long periods of time and he would simply nod and occasionally say "really" or "really?" or "REALLY!" with different inflections (of course not knowing a word they were saying to him.) I also enjoyed the fact that he was very much a person who de-mystified the process and explanations of things. For example, he said that he was making dogs in his imagery because he didn't want to be held to the anatomical correctness required to do humans but people kept asking him what kind of dogs they were. So his solution was to make monkeys instead. He said no one ever asked what kind of a monkey it was. Anyway, it was a maelstrom of clay related activity and we had a very good time. I created a photo album on Facebook with most of the pieces that were at the "Heated Exchange" exhibit which was the show of the presenters' work. Click here to see the other pieces. This was my favorite piece by Chris Gryder (each tile is 12″x12″)…

Tags: ceramics, clay, porcelain, pottery