Welcome! 
It's an effortful and uncertain journey from the clay dig to the dining table or ceramic exhibit. A 30,000-year-old human endeavor transforming the essential formlessness of clay into artful, usable and meaningful vessels and sculpture.
And profoundly, the most common ceramic form on earth is the shard.
An ironic metaphor for everything -- Creation Myth and Creative Process -- clay both fascinates and daunts. If it were too easily explicable, we'd be on to something more mysterious, right?
There are others out there with my name -- and maha blessings to them!-- but I'm the Liz Crain who's a ceramic artist, sharing my individual version of ceramic art's saga with you.
To reveal this ever-unfolding tale, I use images and writing of not only my work and whatever/ whoever else in the world affects it, but hold conversations with my readers as well. Together we'll explore as much as we can, stretching from formlessness to the ultimate shardy end.
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Here’s an odd little blue guy–seems more like a guy than a gal, right, even though he is Ken-doll smooth? You can locate him on the fourth corner/knee area of the Five Senses Bench, between Hearing and Smell.
Some of you may recognize the odd little blue guy as a sensorimotor homunculus, a [...]
Naughty or nice? Buddhists might contend E, All of the Above, conflating dilemma horns into the whole animal. The Five Senses Bench, too, includes some tiles that are beauteous and uplifting, some funny, some rather crude, and some, like this Tibetan Wrathful Offering to the Five Senses tile, that function as wake-up calls [...]
As a kid did you ever take a nip from the bottle of Vanilla Extract, quickly finding out that its alcoholic bitterness in no way resonates with its unbelievably enticing aroma? Well, I did, anyhow. Decades later I got a similar vanilla shock: vanilla beans actually come from an orchid??? Wild. Wacky. I [...]
It’s Thanksgiving Day with lots of family and food to enjoy, so here’s a short and sweet post about one of the most unusual tiles on the Five Senses Bench at Cabrillo College. Its source is an old drawing of a Native American horseback rider just about to shoot a wide-eyed and galloping [...]
The octopus is a highly intelligent eight-armed bag, capable of taking just about any shape it needs to. What a great choice it was for the rounded corner of the Five Senses Bench in the Touch area. I call these four places the “knees” of the bench and if you go to the [...]
There are really two tiles to explore today. The one above is on the back of Touch area of the Five Senses Bench. While it looks like those old-fashioned candy dots you would peel off of some paper, it is actually Braille, meant to be touched to be understood! And it spells out, [...]
This intriguing array, one of the oldest intentional groupings of tiles on the Five Senses Bench, was not only a fantastic attempt to cover a lot of square footage, but also a fun way to play with word shapes enough to evoke their meaning visually. (A new kind of font, I guess.) Even [...]
This week’s tile remains a permanent testament to the era of its making. It’s located on the vertical back right of the Taste area of the Five Senses Bench, next to the long tongue licking the fire, which is another interesting story to be told another time.
Do you remember “Freedom Fries” from [...]
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