My interests in ancestry, specifically the women of my paternal side, and new technologies in art and ceramics have become the major influences in my current work.
Misplaced comes from testimony of my third great grandmother, Mary Ann Bennington, trying to prove her marriage to civil war veteran Stephen O. Lockman after his death so she could receive the widow’s pension owed her. When she misplaced her marriage certificate, she inadvertently misplaced her identify. Misplaced is an excerpt from her pension file housed in the National Archives, which has been laser cut from wood.
To show the complexity of our ancestries when we include the maternal lines, I’m creating a series of generational ceramic murals - each one represents one generation of women in just the paternal line. So far, I have completed Agatha, Elisabeth and Rosina. Brigetta is under construction in my studio.
Agatha is named for one of my eighth great grandmothers on my father’s side. She is known only by her first name through the recorded birth of her son, George Bauer, on 7 February 1669, in Zuttlingen, Heilbronn, Baden-Wurttemberg, now Germany. Agatha was the first of three women I’ve been able to name of the 256 grandmothers in that generation – most of the rest are “lost” at this time. All are represented by a thrown ceramic “link” - 256 links compose the mural.
The imagery for Agatha originated from vessel designs made in Maya modeling software intended to be 3-D printed in ceramic. I positioned the three dimensional virtual object so that it was viewed from above or below which flattened the form into a two dimensional pattern. Those patterns were used to create ceramic decals in three different processes: screen-printed enamel glazes, iron oxide decals, and laser printed decals. The decals were applied to top surface of hollow wheel-thrown forms.
Elisabetha is named for one of my seventh great grandmothers. She is one of 128 grandmothers in that generation on my paternal side. Of the 128, I have identified seven names. I used the decal files created for Agatha to raster wooden press molds on a laser in order to achieve the pattern in relief on the clay surface of Elisabetha.
Rosina represents the group of sixth great grandmothers. She is constructed of black clay pressed into raster molds and glazed with the same white glaze fired at varying temperatures to alter its appearance. While Agatha and Elisabeth have been installed in grid and off-set grids, Rosina is installed as two concentric circles.
There is a direct line between the current mural project and the vessels I constructed from nearly two decades. It was those earlier vessels which had inspired the designs I created in the 3D modeling program with the intent to 3D print. For nearly two decades, I had created sculptural vessels loosely influenced by ancient Chinese bronze forms, specifically, the bronze vessels of the Chinese Shang (1700 - 1000BCE) and Zhou (1045 - 221BCE) dynasties.
Some of the pieces were centered on the boss motif – small rounded protruding bumps used during th Shang Dynasty that grew into forbidding spikes during the warring Zhou Dynasty. However, more common were the flanged vessels inspired by an early Chinese solution to the problem of flashing, which occurred during bronze casting. As the vessels were cast into ceramic piece molds, the molten metal flowed into the joints between the mold pieces and created flat vertical projections. Instead of removing the unwanted material, ancient artists incorporated the bronze flanges into the design.
A future project is to deconstruct the image of a vessel I designed in the Maya. There are 829 slices (layers) to 3D print the vessel; I am taking the image of each slice and creating a small tile with that specific image. A composition of 829 sequential images will compose a mural that will visually depict the printing process.