Good morning! It’s a glorious morning in North Dakota.

Shush. Some of the residents are still asleep…

But Sage is ready for work. And by “work” I mean, watching me hollow out a sculpture while I try to keep Sage from eating the clay.

Speaking of clay. Buckets of clay. Buckets of clay to be reclaimed.

A week ago these were buckets of dried out, spent clay. A bit of water – hauled from the house since the studio has no plumbing – and we’re in business. Normally this would mean scooping off the remaining water, spreading the sloppy wet clay over plaster then kneading, wedging, and essentially slapping this clay into workable clay again.

But now I have a pug mill! Yippee! Quite an extravagance for a small studio like mine. Both in $$ and space. But I went for it mostly due to the amount of scrap clay I pull out of the sculpture when hollowing.

Sculptures like “Frank” and “The Runner.” Both were sculpted solid, then cut apart, hollowed and reassembled.

“Save me! Save me!”

Now totally hollowed and reassembled. Still needing work, but getting there…

But this is the clay that was inside the Runner piece. The “Frank” sitting greyhound piece generated 3x this much clay. The pug mill will help deal with this excess. I’ll talk more about the pug mill in another blog post.

So good stuff happening in the studio. I feel pleased with the results so far.