Anna Burke (left) and Kristin Grandy (right) with Kristin’s Ford Bronco.
Kristin Grandy, who was a student in the third session clay workshop taught by Linda Christianson, is a high school ceramics teacher in Neptune Beach, Florida. In addition to the usual pottery and sculpture, she likes to familiarize her students about other careers that use clay skills. One of these is industrial modeling, including automotive clay sculpting.
Kristin is also the owner of a beautiful, blue-gray, 2020 Ford Bronco.
Anna Burke was a student in David Wolske’s third session letterpress workshop. She has a BFA in ceramics and graphic design from Alfred University in New York. Since graduating in 2017, she has worked as an automotive clay sculptor at Ford in Detroit. The two women met during the session and discovered they had this shared interest in industrial modeling. It also turned out that on Anna’s first day as an intern at Ford she was put to work shaping the full-size clay model of the exact Bronco that Kristin drives.
That should be a good story for the kids.
If you are not familiar with automotive clay sculpting, here’s a nice video introduction. They work with an oil-based plasticine and move from scale to full-size models, which are then laser scanned.
Penland staff recently had a nice collaboration with Youth OutRight—an Asheville-based organization that supports LGBTQIA+ youth ages 11-20. The group has been having weekly video hangouts throughout the pandemic, and Penland studio operations manager Amanda N. Simons, and facilities maintenance technician Lindsay PB Jones attended one of these meetings to get to know the group a bit and find out if there were activities they were interested in that Penland could support.
The result was packages containing colored pencils, watercolor paints, art paper, Sculpey, embroidery and cross-stitch kits, pamphlet-making kits, and mug cake ingredients. Warren Wilson College donated tea grown on their campus for inclusion. And, best of all, a zinecreated by Amanda and Lindsay. The zine included tips for watercolor painting and sewing, ideas for self-care activities, and, of course, cool illustrations.
Penland provided the materials, Penland housekeepers Derek Freeman and Susie Pendley did the assembly, and Youth OutRight delivered the packages to twenty folks in their group. A good time was had by all.
Metalsmith Adam Whitney’s resident artist studio is a small building just behind the old dairy barn that houses five other resident studios. You can tell when he’s working by the ever-present sound of a hammer tapping on a metal sheet. “I think they put me back here so I wouldn’t drive everyone else crazy,” he laughed.
Although Adam joined the resident artist program last fall, he is no stranger to Penland. He has taught in the metals studio several times, he’s participated in every winter residency, and he was the school’s metals studio coordinator from 2007 to 2011.
He has experience in many kinds of metalsmithing, but his true love is raising: the craft of making hollow, three-dimensional forms from sheets of metal. His current projects are inspired by drinking vessels and the space program. He has made a series of cups that resemble a spacesuit helmet, and he is methodically developing a complex form based on the rhyton of the ancient Mediterranean. This is a horn-shaped vessel with a drinking hole at the bottom. The hole was often part of an animal head or torso fitted onto the end of the horn. Adam remembers seeing these forms in museums when he was first getting interested in metal work. “They were the metal shapes I was in awe of,” he said.
Adam’s current work. On the left are two prototype rhyton horns. On the top shelf are his series of space helmet cups. Below them are a clay model and several copper tests of the space suit form that will fit onto the end of the horn.
Adam’s rhyton will end with the torso of a spacesuit. While he is currently working on prototypes of the vessel and the suit in copper, the final piece will be silver. Raising the intricate form of the spacesuit is an admirable technical challenge, but that’s not the only thing that drew Adam to this image.
“I think the spacesuit is a phenomenal piece of technology,” he said. “It’s actually a vehicle. It’s the tiniest possible vehicle for a person, and it’s used in the harshest environment.
“Nobody really knows why the drinking horn with an animal on it exists, but it probably had to do with some kind of embodiment of the animal’s power through drinking. I wanted to put something on mine that would represent the culture I’m in now. For me, space exploration is the most fascinating thing that has happened in a long time. It’s a new frontier where we have just barely scratched the surface, and the space suit encapsulates that and puts it in human form.”
