On the Couch

I've spent a lot of time on my couch the last few days due to illness and have been contemplating directions for students working in clay this term at the school where I teach. That's involved playing with ideas and forms and researching old websites and ideas that could be relevant. So although some of the images may not be pertinent nor appropriate for 13 year old girls, they are provocative and creatively challenging for me personally.

Here are some images of the American ceramicist David Furman, whose whimsical images play with ideas of narrative from the mundane to the intimate. Furman's work does get a little racier than this, and his earlier illusionist works with coffee cups are quite entertaining.

His current work is derived from the wooden mannequins that are used in art classes to teach figure drawing. Furman explores human interaction by creating various scenes using these neutral-gray, mannequin-like figures. The viewer, when seeing these anonymous figures is forced to explore these poses/encounters through such basic tools as gesture and posture.

So this ends my sculpture cycle for a while.


Burn brightly, Pete.