Marxhuasen is known in part here in Nebraska for a mural in the Nebraska State Capital building. You can read a little bit more about this explorative sculptor on the Seward Concordia Neighborhood blog.

“Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance… thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste… if a man could undertake to make use of all the things in his dustbin, he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare.”

— G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World, Chapter IV

The jar is full of pottery shards my dad picked up near a rest area round about 1966. He was traveling with friends in the Pueblo, Colorado area.

Pieces range from about 3/16 to 3/8 of an inch in thickness. The black and red shards are very smooth, probably terra sigged and burnished to a shine while the lighter colored ones with decoration bear a quite dry surface.

Entropy and restoration are two recurring themes in my process, and thus my sculptures. When I use the word entropy I’m referring to the inevitable deterioration of both the physical and social world around us. I most often observe this phenomenon in the built environment. Buildings crumble, mailboxes rust, roadways buckle and gape with potholes.

Restoration, conversely, implies the ability to rectify or reverse impending decay. In my sculptures this usually takes the form of found objects, repurposed as a canvas (as with Rust, restore) or sculpture. Some of the time these salvaged items serve as raw materials, sometime as accessories so to speak.

Rust, restore comments directly on both entropy and restoration. Whlie the use of text seems, at first, very blunt, symbolism remains. My hope is for the viewer to begin considering both the inevitability of decay and hope with the possibility of restoration.

She also has an older post that talks a little more about smoke firing titled Smoke Firing. I talk about my process in this post from last July. The following is one of her recent works titled The Abduction, after a Swedish fairy tale. I quite like the coloring on the piece, and give her props for the use of salvaged materials in the base and post.

I think I’m going to have to find myself a barrel and try this smoking method out. It looks much more fun and is probably cheaper than running the kiln to smoke. The only trick to barrel smoking for me could be locally enforced burn bans we suffer from in Northwest Arkansas on a fairly regular basis.

They came out a bit soft and quite crumbly, not surprising, but they more or less turned into Arkansas rocks. They look very similar to the stones found on a lot that’s just been graded for construction.

George Ohr, the Mad Potter of Biloxi, dug a lot of his clay locally in Mississippi. My father told me recently that Ohr sometimes took dirt out of the middle of the road. He’s one of a few historical characters I’d like to meet (another off the top of my head being G.K. Chesterton). The bisqued, scroddled Orh pot below shows off some of his raw materials.

Image from Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art.

“We don’t want merely to see beauty . . . We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

— C.S. Lewis

The sentiment Lewis expresses in the above quote, a burning but enigmatic desire to become a part of what is beautiful, could spawn a thousand interpretations. If I were to elaborate on the quote, I might suggest that — whether we’re aware of it or not as humans — we innately pursue a Divine aesthetic.

This pursuit of a Divine aesthetic underpins my own artistic endeavors. Carving from a block of wood, modeling a lump of clay or assembling found objects I reflect on the original beauty of the materials in my hand. My hope, however futile, is to create something that speaks towards an unfettered beauty, beauty with a capital B.

Beauty with a capital B isn’t always what we expect. Something I pick up in the road — a rusted piece of sheet metal, a tangle of wire flattened by so many cars, half a shake shingle — generally elicits eyes and groans of disgust. A menacing thunderstorm on the edge of a prairie, with it’s potential to ruin a crop with hail or drop a tornado that aims to flatten a community, can levy fear upon a crowd.

However, there is also incredible beauty in a billowing storm. There is incredible beauty in the patina of crumpled, rusted steel lying in a roadway. Meditative poetry and contemplative metaphor hide in such entropy. I hope to extract just a little of this poetry and metaphor from my own intentional observations, infuse it into my work and share it with a viewer.

So there is hope.

The FSNUA aims to re-inspire creative thinking and action in everyday people by removing a small barrier and providing encouragement. We give small, unsecured grants in the form of $10-$60 for creative projects thought up on the spot by everyday people. In the past this has included a merchant marine, two 10 year old girls, a US soldier on leave from Iraq, an accordion player from Alaska, and around 40 others. We funded their new paintings, drawings, knitting, and photojournalism projects, and the repair of one accordion. Projects that may not have happened had they not come across 10 people in the park to support and inspire the thought.

Beyond the small amount of money, the project encourages people to see themselves as something other than workers or consumers even if it just for the length of time required to apply for the FSNUA grant. We also hope to re-inspire dormant desires to create while presenting an example of generosity without an ulterior motive.

I’m pretty fond of the idea, especially the last paragraph’s hope that they are encouraging people to “see themselves as something other than workers or consumers.” Here-here!

A friend forwarded me a link to photographer Magdalena Bors’ website. As much as a photographer she appears to be an installation artist, turning common household objects into miniature landscapes. The following image from her photo-installations is for my knitting wife.

She was born in Antwerp and has a photography degree from Melbourne, but there isn’t much other information about the artist on the website.