Rhonda Gushee work involoves combining the old and the new taking Raku clay and sewn onto old pieces of doll, animal pieces, fur or fabric. What make this digital is that some of the dolls make nosie when you push pull or squeeze a button. I find her work to be erie, dark and lovely.
Balistreri's aircraft sculptures are usually tall as a man, solidly handbuilt and glazed with strong surface texture, pattern and coloring. Researching for new work, he found computer 3D modeling useful as a means of tooling contemporary design solutions. The photos below, from 'The Recursion Collision,' reference a wing sculpture, one of Balistreri's frequent flyers. The 3D image is manipulated to demonstrate another configuration, but the new pieces still reflect a connection with the original concept and certainly to the visual intent. The artist now has entirely different, contemporary possibilities (molds for multiples, for example) for products from the new screen shots and possibly a successful line of pieces piggybacking from the older series. johnbalistreriartist.com
Eugene Hon is a ceramic artist with a passion for drawing from South Africa. He received his MFA from the University of Cape Town in 1986. The piece ...and the ship sails on, is a digital hybrid because it straddles multiple medias, such as animation, ceramics, sculpture, drawing, and video and digital projection. Traditional Japanese motifs are incorporated from historical vessels and combined with an animation of ball point drawings over slip cast decoy ducks.
The act of concealing and revealing of the form speaks to me about issues of identity and cultural tableau. The forms, are of decoy ducks, which can be interpreted as speaking of artifice and subservience. They are also a very phallic shape, which makes me think of sexuality and identity issues. The projections encapsulate the form, conceal it from view, and leave it barren, All while attempting to take the viewer on a journey through drawings of water and fields of flowers, but also of space and time.
Christa Assad has collaborated with illustrator Jessica Hess, in this work called Grey Girls, which is the work I selected as an example of digital hybrid. Assad is a contemporary potter whose work is
primarily utilitarian and this is her recent sculptural work. GreyGirls
is a grouping of spray cans and house-paint cans (all are painted black, white and
gray) with images of nude women sporting rooster heads with graffiti tagging in
the background.Assad and Hess combine lowbrow graffiti tagging art with porcelain ‘pedestal’ art. The stylized rooster heads are reminiscent
of cartoons or comic books, which are digitized images. The simplified
line drawings of the women’s bodies, which look like the images used on truck
mud flaps along with the graffiti tagging floating on the background of these cans is a
form of low-tech digital art. I
found their work satirical in nature, while making a social
commentary on modern society.
Carrie Reichardt has started the art revolution. With her art activism calling for patrons to become part of the fight. Once one of her spray can pieces is purchased, she enlists you to become an activist by apply a ceramic tile as well, provided with the spray can. She uses digital image collages to make the ceramic transfers for the front of these cans. These wonderfully hand crafted cans carry the theme, "work, consume, die".
Peter Biddulph
Peter is an artist who has discovered a technique using a special kind of clay called Southern Ice Porcelain. He uses a combination of thinly made pieces and fiber optic lights to create a digital hybrid. One of Peter’s most famous sets is an award winning sake set. He was presented the award at the International Ceramics Festival in 2011 It is slip caste and the interior is glazed while the exterior is unglazed and polished by hand. He also has an installation made from thrown porcelain and fiber optics. The lighting in this installation gives more of a quality of a modern lamp or nightlight. Peter is teaching aspiring artists at Brisbane.
Based in Alice Springs, Australia, Pip McManus has expressed a need to incorporate her traditional medium, ceramics, with other media in order to communicate to a wider audience. She is primarily concentrating on our relationship as social beings within our environment- both on a personal and universal level. In her piece Ichor shown here, McManus is interested in the way new media and technologies reshape our viewpoints. This work is meant to collect the rhythms of natural systems, pushed to the verge of collapse. The 55 minute video suggests an acceptance of life's natural processes, reminding us of our mortality and fragility. Her work is considered a digital hybrid because McManus uses this projected video of unfired earthenware set in water to disintegrate as a backdrop for a similar earthenware "offering" figure. Combing ceramics with water, the work directly encourages the viewers to slow down and be alone with their thoughts as the work slowly falls apart. The artist not only combines stages of clay sculpture and video, but also the rich and haunting sounds of a cello, creating a setting for contemplation and mellow atmosphere. Another projected video, Watershed, uses glazed earthenware figures, sand, oxide, clay and water to again emphasize the natural flow of an organic setting.
Stephen Bird is a ceramic artist and painter that works in Australia and the United Kingdom. Most of Stephens work revolves around using his painting abilities on ceramics with subject matter that is usually religious, sexual, or a combination of the two. This particular piece is one that is a part of one of his shows titles "What are you laughing at?" It is a digital hybrid in that Bird has made a short film that shows various pieces of clay such as doll heads, thrown, and sculptural pieces as the main focus of the film. Through advanced editing, Birds greenware assembles itself into two figures, one that represents Adam and one Eve to tell Birds rendition of the creation story and the eventual collapse of the human story. The video is entertaining, and could only have been effective as a video.
I have chosen the digital-hybrid art work, "Illuminated Markers" created by Holly Hanessian. This work consists of porcelain, mirrors, and petri-dishes combined with lighting. Her fascination with neuroscience, as well as genetic and molecular biology inspired her to create this piece. She has used ceramic porcelain to create human DNA (XX/XY) chromosome signs that refer to positive and negative genetic markers. The porcelain DNA chromosome combinations reveal physical and personality characteristics that are expressed in phrases. The genetic markers are illuminated via laser cut mirrors and become distorted as they are filtered through the petri-dish. A person must focus and concentrate on the phrases to decipher them. I find Hanessian's hybrid art work an intriguing way to highlight the varied human genetic possibilities, both in personality and physicality. She has successfully expressed her fascination with "genetic happen-chance" in molecular biology by combining these hybrid materials and lighting.
(Both photos from Artist Website where photos of her other work can be found)
What makes this piece a digital hybrid is the element of the multiple sculpted clay forms (which are adorned with horse hair and other mixed media) combined with the digital projection in the background. The projection appears to be of a woman who is eating a mouse and then shows her remorse/pain on the right and then her satisfaction in the middle. In her artist statement on her webpage (which there is a link to above) she says that the multiples in her pieces represent the many facets of the individual and when combined also speak on the collectivity of human consciousness. She uses the image of eating as a symbol of everything we ingest as in emotionally, physically, etc. So this piece is speaking on consumption, the value of life, as well as what it is to be human including the emotions (or lack thereof) that are associated with eating animals. She was raised on a farm so the brutality of the life cycle is something that impacted her greatly.
Amanda Small received her MFA from Kansas State University
and has appeared in Ceramic Magazine, Ceramic Quarterly as well as being
featured in 500 Sculptures. This particular piece is a digital hybrid because she adds video to create depth. Her influences come from geometry, radials, and lattice patterns to reference architecture
found within living forms. (Source: amandasmall.com/artist
statement) Through
the use of technology (she states) we are allowed to see ‘intimate
views of otherwise invisible worlds’. By adding the dimension of
digital patterns alludes to an unseen world we may be familiar with but seen only
through a microscope. There is a fragility in her pieces using unfired fibrous
material but by the use of multiples, gives it strength. The digital patterns
make her piece come alive – literally. I remember taking botany in high school
and witnessing the cell flow through the stems of plants – it was mesmerizing
to watch how something inanimate can be so alive perhaps that is her tendency
in an abstract way.
Much of Brendan's work fits all the main areas of hybridity we are using in this class. In this series, non-clay materials are used along with the clay. There is at least a suggestion of functional technology, and there is a fusion of traditional styles with stylistic aspects that seem meant to suggest futurism, or an amalgam of contemporary plastic "blobject" type forms from mass-produced design. This is a hybridity akin to "mashups" or sampling in music. In the past, Brendan has shown work that incorporated buttons meant to be pushed by the viewer, which activated microcontrollers to cause something to happen.
This page (above) is where I want you to post examples of Digital Hybrids. That is, sculpture involving ceramics, but also incorporating some aspect that is generated digitally. All examples should have some significant quality of digital hybridity, not just a minor aspect.
Write a critique of at least 150 words that explains what it is about your example that makes it seem digital to you, and that offers an interpretation of what the work could mean. Include the name of the
artist, 1 - 4 images of the work, and at least one link to a site with that artist's work.
Start the text of the post (not the title) with the name of the Artist large and bold.
Carrie Reichardt has started the art revolution. With her art activism calling for patrons to become part of the fight. Once one of her spray can pieces is purchased, she enlists you to become an activist by apply a ceramic tile as well, provided with the spray can. She uses digital image collages to make the ceramic transfers for the front of these cans. These wonderfully hand crafted cans carry the theme, "work, consume, die".
Much of Brendan's work fits all the main areas of hybridity we are using in this class. In this series, non-clay materials are used along with the clay. There is at least a suggestion of functional technology, and there is a fusion of traditional styles with stylistic aspects that seem meant to suggest futurism, or an amalgam of contemporary plastic "blobject" type forms from mass-produced design. This is a hybridity akin to "mashups" or sampling in music. In the past, Brendan has shown work that incorporated buttons meant to be pushed by the viewer, which activated microcontrollers to cause something to happen.
