Ceramics and Metal Sculpture Workshop

Adventures from Tuesday and Wednesday. A little change in pace from all the big, posh buildings located around campus...

Metal Fabrication Shop, Foundry, Exterior Work Area, Exterior Installation Yard, & Faculty Studio
– College of Arts and Sciences

a clock I found on the wall with a little bit of artwork

I couldn't find an exact date, but through some research, we were able to find that the building for the metal shop and ceramic foundry was built between 1967 and 1970. This workshop was originally a testing facility for the Alabama Bureau of Mines. When the Bureau was disbanded by federal decree, the facilities were given to the College of Arts and Sciences to be used in their visual art department. Today, the shops are used by the sculpture department and the College of Engineering to do ceramic and metal sculptures, molds, and more.

The rooms in this hallway are allegedly "explosion-proof"
designed to blow up and inward

a photography studio upstairs for projects

The shop is an L-shaped, three chambered building with two chambers on the long body of the L connected by a one and a half story section of offices and small workrooms. The toe of the L belongs to the College of Engineering and reportedly receives little daytime use. However, the sculpture department's section is a constant bustle of activity and rush to get projects completed.

A friend of mine named Cody inspired me to investigate this building, and I'll show you why later, but I have to first say that it was much more difficult to find public information about this particular facility. Unlike Smith Hall or Reese Phifer, the shop is little more than a shed with some big toys inside, so there isn't exactly a lot of written public information about it and it's not exactly a stop on your typical campus tour. When I was talking with the construction department on campus - chasing down every lead I could come up with - they found the guy who was in charge of building in the time when it was put it. He admitted that there really wasn't even much of a written plan for it.
So what is so interesting about a cinder block barn?

Well, the toys of course!

When I walked into the studio, some of the students hard at work there looked up to acknowledge me then turned back to their work. For the first few minutes as I was looking around for someone to talk to I was largely regarded as another student. Luckily, in one of the little rooms in the middle, I found a group of people who looked moderately in charge and they directed me straight to Daniel Livingston.

Last year I took a 3D design art course that fit with my engineering curriculum and met a lot of the people in the art department. Working in the wood shop and knowing my teacher and everyone else on a first name basis was a big change of pace from the "Dr. Professor" classrooms that make up the rest of my normal schedule. In short, I hope that you won't mind if I refer to the teachers and faculty mentioned here by their first names.

work in progress...

wheels for pottery

student work ready to bisque in an annexed shed

all-new kilns they are quite excited to have

some artwork around one of the doors

Daniel, to my best knowledge, is the art director of the ceramic sculpture department and he was my primary informant during my visit. While he showed me all over the building and told me about some of its history and showed off some of the sculpture department's equipment, I got to see some really neat student and faculty artwork. True to form, the building has been quite decorated at the hands of university artists young and old alike, including this little piece outside...

This was the work of a student of Craig Wedderspoon, one of the more prominent instructors in the department. The assignment was to relate the human form to architecture, and one Richard Peak asked Craig if he could build this man into the side of the shop's southern wall. Craig told the student that as long as he did so during class time, it was alright with him.That was about eight years ago or so.
At his debut, this little guy was welcomed with warm laughter and approval by the maintenance and construction staff on campus. Since he doesn't obstruct anything, he's been allowed to stay and there he stands. I had seen him before in my commutes around campus, but one day Cody asked me if I knew anything about him and I admitted I didn't. He's kind of a cute surprise to those who find him, so if you're on campus and have some time, see if you can find him. Like the X in a treasure hunt.

While I was there, Craig told me I could come back the next day to watch them pour aluminum into the molds. I had never seen anything like it done before, so I agreed to drop by to watch.

Safety First! The students have to wear leathers, goggles, and masks for pouring.

First, they make the sculpture in wax and make a mold around the wax.
Molds are heated in this furnace to melt the wax out.

heating the oven (in the floor)

preparing the molds

The final pouring. Liquid aluminum is extremely viscous and easy to pour.
It's almost like they are pouring water! 

If you have any interest in seeing it for yourself, just drop by some time, ask for Craig, and ask him when they are pouring. He told me that anybody could come watch if they were interested. Most of the people there are sculpture artists who would probably love to talk about their work. Just be prepared to stay back a fair distance, because the liquid aluminum can get HOT!





Stats:
Cools – full of a lot of really good student and faculty artwork
Not So’s – dirty, old, dangerous equipment
Close to – Science and Engineering Complex, Gorgas Library, Biology department
Far From – almost nothing, it is located almost at the very center of campus
Beauty – 1.5
Temperature – depends
Overall – 4.3



I’m Jonathon, and this is my life.






Sources:
http://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/counties/tuscaloosa/tuscaloosa.html
local faculty and staff
personal observation

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Only a Little Dysfunctional

Hello All!

This week has been a particularly good one, but also unbelievably full and stressful =P
I don't know who is the one who first told me this (probably my own dear mother) but I am very good at not being bored because I can consistently come up with something new and time-consuming to do. However, I'm also very good at being in that position where I am doing about three or four things that require 100% of my attention and energy...at the same time.

Us working together on boxes!

The first and best of this week is Operation Christmas Child. For those of you who don't know, OCC is something that Samaritan's Purse does every year right around this time. What they do is encourage people to make 'shoe box' gifts of shoe boxes filled with toys, school supplies, clothes, hygiene items, et cetera for a boy or girl between the ages of 1 and 14 (actual age is specified on box) and they deliver them en masse to children in third world and needy countries all over the world. I am in a student group called Project Hope on campus and I encouraged them to help me put together the effort to do the project on campus as well.
This past Wednesday, I talked my Blount family into going out with me and about $200 I have saved up over the past several months to shop for things and make boxes ourselves. Stretching that money, we made seven boxes together and are including pictures and a letter signed by everyone in each. Through PH with only about a week of PR, we collected some $100 in donations and five more boxes just from individual people.

Next year, we're starting much earlier. A lot of people got really excited when they heard about it. I love Operation Christmas Child.

I have another art project on its way to being due. It will be my fourth and final for this semester, and I have a pretty good idea of what to do in mind. I just have to get my hands on the materials. I know that as much as I have loved the class and as inspiring as it has been, my budget will be a lot happier to see me put it behind me. I've had to put off building my bed loft indefinitely, start eating dining hall food exclusively, and don't think I've bought anything that I simply just wanted to in months. I'm not complaining though, because it's certainly good for you, understanding value and sacrificing what you need to.

And please, every need I've ever had is being cared for, so everything is good.

The show choir performance is only a week and a half away, and I am practicing when I can. There are still three dances that I really know almost not at all, and we just started learning the last song. I still have to go over all my music on the piano before fall break and then probably spend all break working on the dances on top of studying for chemistry and calculus. I'll be partially very glad to see the show over with, but I think I'll really enjoy show night.

And finally, the Blount Winter Formal is coming up soon. Blount is the name of the liberal arts program that I am in, and also the living-learning community dorm on campus. A lot of the dorm has been abuzz with the approaching date and all the great dramatous saga of who is asking who is unfolding. I've had it in mind to ask a friend of mine for the past while, but I have been spending the last week or two working on a 'treasure hunt' style adventure all over campus for her down memory lane. So today I gave her the first message and sent her off, letting her find the other clues and chase the whole thing all over her favorite memories and spots while I got ready. I've been sick for the past week with a cold or something and getting progressively less sleep, which wasn't helping the fact that I had a full-scale four hour course to plan out and execute perfectly across the entire university, but for all its dysfunctionalities on my part, it went perfect and she doesn't even know that it went wrong at all.
Last part, I was waiting outside her window for her to get all the way done and asked her balcony-scene style if she would go to the dance with me. She gladly said yes. Only regret? I've now made every other boy who has already asked look bad. I was very late in asking - which made me worry someone else might ask her - but at I put a lot into it.

I've slept from about four this afternoon till 10, and am only up because I had to eat something and thought to post. Heading to bed again now and off to church in the morning. Been a blessing of a week, if a really long one. Hey, God is good.

I'm Jonathon, and this is my life.

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A Few Adventures Later

Hello!

Well, so a part of me hoped to keep better consistency of this blog thing, but the other knows that no harm is done in my persistent procrastination just as long as the project completed by the due date is awesome and I am not dead.
Sigh...yes, I have the 'project' mindset right now: just got off of a few of them!

Quick input on Halloween: it was fun! No, neither spectacular nor candy-filled, but we enjoyed dressing up for classes. I was my classic Captain Jack Sparrow (much to the awe of a lot of my classmates!) by day and then changed that evening to partner costume with a friend of mine: she was Christine and I was the Phantom of the Opera. Nothing more than a lot of pictures and a little bit of running around like silly people on All Hallows Even; the most fun was putting together the costumes together!

Anyway, as I was saying about the projects, I just turned in an art and an engineering project. The first was a kind of 'reaction' to something else I had done, only I wanted it to be more destructive and more chaotic. Here's the picture of the first one and the second, so you can see what I mean...

This is the first project, a giant puzzle that in the viewer's eye slowly and controlledly comes together to form a solid cube structure.

And here's the second! The opposing response, chaotic, explosive outward, but with a similar theme of the shapes and colors to connect it back to the original.













Both of these were done with wood in my 3D design class.






That took a lot of time in it's own right, but also this past weekend, we completed a month-long project in my engineering class to design and construct a scale model of our football stadium out of cake. Yes, it was an independent and original project, and it actually turned out pretty well! We spent the month testing cake recipes, figuring out dimensions, doing PR to get the word out so we could sell pieces for charity, the whole nine yards, and then this weekend we actually baked and built the whole thing. Granted, not a one of us has ever decorated a cake before (and all but one or two of us had never baked anything at all ever before) but it turned out alright. It was a job that you look at and say "Wow, these guys are completely inept at cake decorating, but they put so much into this that I kind of like it!"

Anyway, pictures of that too!

This took almost 12 hours straight of sculpting and icing... We never got a total cake weight, but it took no less than two people to move.



We decided on an apple-cinnamon spice cake recipe (an invention of our own culmination!) as the best in taste, structural integrity, and sculptability.




We were expected to have 2-3 hours to try to sell pieces to fans coming for the football game, but it was so popular and tasted so good, our poor cake barely lasted more than an hour!

We raised $500 for the food drive!




And now, I hardly have an off-week! The show choir performance is coming up at the end of the month, so we're all practicing hard for that, and I'm working hard to make sure that my grades are all superb. And then, like a doofus, I decided that this was going to be the year I actually participate in National Novel Writing Month. Not to mention I'm still working on that cure for cancer...

Sigh, busy month I guess. They happen!
Hahahahahahahaha ANYway, that's all for now, everything is going pretty mostly a whole lot of well. Got a few tests this week, but all should be well there too. Still looking off into the nether future to finals, but...you can only take so many scares at once. Matthew 6:34, ya know? If not, you should =]

I'm Jonathon, and this is my life.





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