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#73 Creating Prehistoric Sculptures w/ Ariel Bowman
29 Plays3 years ago
On this episode of Shaping Your Pottery I got to interview Ariel Bowman. Ariel makes some incredible prehistoric animals with a little bit of a twist.
Top 3 value Bombs!:
How sculpt prehistoric animals
Adding Humor to your pottery and how this helps with developing your voice
How to get into Gallery's without having any connections
and so much more
You can follow Ariel on Instagram Here @ariel.bowman
or you check out her Website here http://www.arielbowman.com/
You can also join Ariels patreon to learn all about how she sculpts her pottery by clicking here
If you have questions about Discovering your unique pottery voice send them my way here https://www.shapingyourpottery.com/contact/
Learn more about discovering your voice by Subscribing to The Shaping Your Pottery Newsletter
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres where we help you discover your own unique voice so you can stand out from the crowd and have more fun making pottery so you make pottery that is truly amazing. What is up everybody and welcome to Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres.
Introducing Ariel Bowman
00:00:17
Speaker
In this episode of Shaping Your Pottery I got to interview Ariel Bowman. Ariel makes some wonderful prehistoric sculptures that are really really incredible.
00:00:27
Speaker
In this episode, you will learn how Ariel makes her prehistoric sculptures, getting into galleries, and adding personality to your work. Ariel, welcome to Shaping Your Pottery.
Ariel's Passion for Animals and Art
00:00:39
Speaker
And share with me what is one thing you love besides working with clay? One thing I love besides working with clay is animals in general. I've always loved animals since I was a kid. I wanted to be a zoologist when I was a kid for a really long time.
00:00:55
Speaker
love natural history for a really long time, dioramas, science in general. I've always been kind of really interested in science, and it found its way into my art when I started making art. We're going to have a really great show today. We're going to talk about how you make your sculptures and a lot of other things.
Armory Art Center Residency Journey
00:01:13
Speaker
So with that in mind, so can you tell me the story on about why you became a resident at the Armory Art Center? Yeah, so I was actually at an NCCA conference
00:01:25
Speaker
And I ran into a friend of mine from undergrad to Stillwell and she had just completed a residency at the Armory and she walked me over and introduced me to the person running the residency at the time was Chris Ricardo. So I got to meet him and he told me great things about the residency program and it sounded like they had really good stipend and I was looking for a residency that I could do.
00:01:49
Speaker
that wouldn't be too long term. It was about eight months at the Armory, so that sounded good to me. And then I applied after that and I applied to a couple of other places as well, but ended up choosing the Armory because of their really generous stipend and it being in West Palm Beach, Florida, and somewhere warm and fun.
The Teapot Challenge and New Inspirations
00:02:06
Speaker
What would you say was the number one thing you learned from there that you still use today? Number one thing I learned that I still use today would be making teapots.
00:02:18
Speaker
And this is kind of a weird thing because I always made teapots when I was in undergrad and when I first learned to do ceramics, everybody makes a teapot. But when I was a resident, I was a sculpture resident. And because I was making ceramic sculpture and the animals, everybody at the residency still had to make a teapot for a silent auction that was meant to fund the next year's residence. So I got this challenge to make a teapot as a sculptor. And so I started making these sculptural teapots.
00:02:45
Speaker
for that auction. And I'd never done that before, but it was really fun to hide a teapot within a sculpture. And it freed me up. I wasn't thinking about my work or my artist statement or how I needed my work to be necessarily. It was like a fun challenge that didn't have any strings attached to it. So I made these really funky, fun teapots. And one of them was circus themed. And it led me to one of my favorite series that I did, which was the Prehistoric Circus.
00:03:14
Speaker
So every once in a while now in my studio, I randomly make a sculptural teapot that doesn't have any strings attached to it that is just for fun to just sort of get my creative juices flowing again and do something that is a little more free and doesn't have any concept behind it necessarily. But it's just a fun challenge. How would you say this kind of helps your work develop? Every once in a while I work in series. So every once in a while I feel like a series is like petering
00:03:41
Speaker
So whenever I feel that way, I start making sculptural teapots for fun now. And it gives me some new ideas sometimes. So can you tell me, how did being at the Armory Art Center help with developing your voice with your work?
Humor and Personality in Art
00:03:56
Speaker
The biggest thing there, I think, was working with lots of different artists at different stages in their career and who made very different work. So there were two other ceramic residents while I was there, a painter, a jewelry artist, and I shared a studio with another sculptor.
00:04:11
Speaker
And then Chris Ricardo who ran the program and Clay were there as well. So there were just some really great artists there that I was working with and I was really influenced by the way they approached their work. Like for instance, Chris uses a lot of humor in his work and was really free in the way he worked. And that really inspired me to put a little bit of my own sense of humor back into my work, which I hadn't ever done before. I like thought that if you made serious art, it had to be serious. And I've always had a sense of humor about everything.
00:04:41
Speaker
friends always considered me the funny one and that never really came across in my work until I did my residency at the Armory and saw other people putting more of their own personalities into their work and then I started doing that as well and it really helped my work a lot I think. So how do you go about adding more personality to your work? It's a little bit tricky but I think for me a lot of it was just letting go of
00:05:04
Speaker
The fact, I think when I did that residency right after I got out of undergrad, and I think in undergrad there was all of this emphasis on your work being serious and taken seriously. And I think taking yourself seriously as an artist and learning to do that in school is very different than when you get out of school and you're on your own. You can sort of make whatever you want. All of a sudden everything is limitless and you can put anything into your work.
00:05:33
Speaker
I think that freed me up a little bit at the residency to start putting some of my own personality into my work and considering like, oh, I think this is funny, so I'm going to do it instead of I'm worried about how this is going to be received in critique. So I liked that freedom of being able to decide for myself what I wanted my work to be and not worry about the project or a deadline or some kind of prompt, but instead being able to decide. I just want to do this because I think it's funny.
00:06:03
Speaker
For those that are listening, it's okay to just add something that you think is really cool or really funny. It makes your work that much better. So can you tell me the story, how you started making the sculptures that you make today?
Creating Prehistoric Sculptures
00:06:17
Speaker
Yeah, I came to the prehistoric animals while I was an undergrad at Kansas City Art Institute. My professor, Carrie Esser, had assigned us to do a project that all the juniors in the ceramics program there do, where we go to the Nelson Atkins Museum
00:06:33
Speaker
and we have to choose a piece in the museum to make a work based on. So it's a very loose project prompt. It can be, you know, as remotely or directly influenced by the piece in the museum as you want. So in the museum, I found a lion sculpture, and I was always sculpting animals, so I wanted it to be something animal-related. And there's a big marble lion at the Nelson-Atkins. And when I read the panel about it, it was made by a Greek artist who'd never seen a lion before.
00:07:01
Speaker
So they said that the artist had used the ribcage of a horse and like hindquarters of a goat and things that he knew to piece together from descriptions a lion. And that really interested me. So I started coming up, the idea for my piece was that I would make an animal that no one had ever seen before based on research and whatever I could figure out. And I started researching prehistoric animals because no one's seen those before.
00:07:28
Speaker
And there were a lot of mammals that I realized I didn't even know about. A lot of people know about saber-toothed cats and mammoths, but there's all these other animals that came between those ice age mammals and dinosaurs that evolved. So there's like really weird elephants with multiple tusks and tusks that go backwards. And once I started researching it, it was like when I was a kid and I first was going through animal encyclopedias and learning about animals from distant countries.
00:07:55
Speaker
strange looking. It was like that all over again, but there were just hundreds of them that people either haven't ever seen reconstructed or haven't heard of very much. So that was exciting to me just to be able to sculpt something that people hadn't seen before, to do the research, to figure out. Like the first prehistoric animal I sculpted at Kansas City was a horse ancestor, but it looked a lot like a gorilla in the body and had upturned claws like a sloth.
00:08:24
Speaker
So I started just researching all these modern day animals that kind of seemed like they had pieces together that made that prehistoric animal. And it wasn't until much later that I realized what I was doing was paleo art and that it's an entire genre of art that's been around since we first discovered prehistoric animals. So it took kind of a roundabout way. I figured out that I was doing something that artists had been doing for a really long time, but I was doing it in a different way because I was doing it conceptually and in ceramics
Sculpture Making Process
00:08:51
Speaker
and
00:08:51
Speaker
Sort of adding my own tape to the prehistoric animals as well So now can you walk me through how you create one of your sculptures? I work in solid clay on an armature. I use steel pipe armatures. What's an armature? It's like a structure of some kind that will hold up the weight of solid clay so you can use a
00:09:17
Speaker
variety of different materials as armature, dowel rods, and things like that. And you can even use just solid clay itself to hold itself up. Once it gets leather hard enough, it holds itself up pretty well. And sometimes when I work small, I just work from a solid block of clay. But if I work larger, I use pipes put together in a configuration to hold the weight of the clay up. And I learned that technique from Beth Kavaner.
00:09:41
Speaker
She's one of my base influences. So when I first got into ceramics, I wanted to make work like her. So I researched her process a lot. And I apprenticed with her as well, which was a big influence on me to learn so much from her about how to work in solid clay to sculpt animals. And I use a lot of her same techniques to do that. So I work in solid clay and then cut the pieces apart with their leather hard, hollow them out and reassemble them.
00:10:07
Speaker
And it's a really direct way to work. It's really fast initially, but the hollowing process is kind of time consuming and slow and gives you time to think. And then you can put the pieces back together in a leather hard state and then fire them after that. So what advice would you give for people looking to get started with making sculptures?
00:10:29
Speaker
I think in general practice is important just as much as if you're throwing on the wheel. And I don't think this gets talked about enough in sculpture, but most of the ceramic sculptors that I know spend a lot of time making small marquettes, studies like sketches and clay. And that was something that I was encouraged to do by Carrie Esser when I was an undergrad.
00:10:50
Speaker
She just kept telling, I wanted to work large and make huge sculptures like Beth, who was my hero. And I wasn't really ready to do that. And some of my larger pieces at that time were just really big mistakes, which is okay. But when you use a thousand pounds of clay, it's kind of a lot of work to put in on something that you weren't really ready to work that big yet. And so what Carrie had to do was take a step back and start making these very small
00:11:18
Speaker
and set a timer for myself. And I would crank out these tiny sculptures over and over again of the same animal in different gestures like gesture drawing or sketching, but in clay. Set a little egg timer for like five, 10 minutes and try and make them as fast as possible and practice the proportions and the gesture and the anatomy of that animal over and over again. And then slowly increase in size two times, two times and increase how long I was working on the piece until I was making these 12 or 14 inch marquettes that were pretty detailed.
00:11:48
Speaker
The animals were so much better. All of a sudden, my understanding of anatomy in the animals themselves and the way I was capturing their gesture and their movement got so much better from doing those clay sketches. By the time I was making the large one, I'd made that animal 10 or 15 times, maybe 20 times. And at that point, you start to think like every time you do something, it gets easier and it looks better, right? This is true of most kinds of art. And it's true of throwing in other things we do in ceramics.
00:12:18
Speaker
But applying that sculpture I think was really important for me to get my work to the next level in terms of how realistic I wanted it to look and the accuracy in it. So it's just practice. It's my best advice. For those that are listening, it's important to start small and work your way up so that way you build the skills necessary to make something that you actually want to make. Whether you're sculpting or wheel throwing, it doesn't matter.
00:12:44
Speaker
So, your parents are both artists. What impact did they have on you becoming an artist yourself? Well, a huge one. So I grew up with them both being artists and I never actually considered being an artist myself until I was a senior in high school.
00:13:02
Speaker
Keep in mind that even though I grew up with two artist parents who were doing art as their careers, it didn't occur to me that I could do art as a career until I was in high school or in college even. And then that sort of opened my eyes to look more closely at what they had been doing with their lives and how they had been making it work. And I realized that I had examples right in front of me my whole life of how to make living as an artist. And they also inspired me as a little kid. They took me to every museum in Dallas, Fort Worth.
00:13:32
Speaker
time as a kid and sometimes it was kind of annoying but as a kid you don't really appreciate what you're being exposed to all the time but I really think that had a big impact on me just being exposed to so much art as a young kid all the time. And then too my dad restores antique furniture out of a home business at our house. So I spent a lot of time in his studio and his focus is 18th century Rococo French furniture and that's what he restores a lot for museums
00:14:00
Speaker
And so really I got exposed to a lot of that as well, which ended up coming back into my work in an interesting way in the last few years. What would you say has been the biggest lesson you learned from them that has helped you as an artist? Definitely being persistent and exploring things fully from my mom. She's been a potter and a ceramic sculptor and a bronze sculptor and sort of a jack of all trades for many years. And I've kind of followed along the lines of
00:14:29
Speaker
her teaching in terms of try everything and learn everything that you can because it might come in handy. And that's sort of how she's always taught. And she does use all different techniques to make her work and just has been really persistent over the years in pursuing the arts as a career through teaching and any other way that she can find to make money from her work. She has been able to support her family
00:14:58
Speaker
and three kids to college and do all of these things while still making her work. So being really persistent, I think is a huge part of it. And when I told her I wanted to major in ceramics, she said, are you sure? It's really hard. And she didn't want me to have a hard life. And she wanted me to know that choosing to this as a career and persisting with it is very difficult and that you do have to really stick with it no matter what happens.
00:15:27
Speaker
to make it work for you. And then my dad is an entrepreneur and has been running his own business for 40 years and really did that with very little experience in the field that he was working in. He went to school for painting and ended up restoring antique furniture for museums. And I think that just him as an example of running a business for a living and running your own business and being your own boss, that's always something that I've wanted for myself.
00:15:54
Speaker
Can you tell me how has a failure or a parent failure led you to future success? Yeah, I wasn't sure about this question. I wasn't sure if it met like in a particular in my work or as like a broader thing. But I will say in terms of pieces, I had a piece that a piece exploded next to another piece in the count. And it took out half of this lace collar that I had really painstakingly put around
00:16:23
Speaker
it was perfect. It was all unified and it took out a big chunk of it. And I tried to figure out a way to save the piece because this is a slip dipped lace. I can't really repair it very easily or fix what was missing. So what I ended up doing was slip dipping a large bow to fill the gap and that piece is called Tug. It's on my website and it was so much better with the large bow than it would have been with the lace going around.
00:16:50
Speaker
So that was definitely a recent piece that I remember a failure turning into something much better than it would have been otherwise. And you could always look at that like, oh, it's ruined now. But if you find some creative way to work around the problem, you can end up making things a lot better than they would have been otherwise just by that chance of things going wrong.
00:17:14
Speaker
Absolutely love it. So if you had no connections or experience what would you do to get your work into galleries or museums?
Building a Web Presence
00:17:24
Speaker
So this was very well for me because I went to school in Kansas City where I did make connections and have relationships but I wanted to move back to Dallas where
00:17:35
Speaker
was my hometown and where my parents and friends were. And I wanted to move back to that area. But when I moved back, I had absolutely zero connections to galleries in Dallas, Fort Worth, or anywhere really, or museums, or any idea of how to get my work out there. I would say one of the first things I did before I even left undergrad was make a website. And I think having a web presence is extremely important nowadays. If you don't have a web presence, no one can find you. And so that has been something that's helped me a lot.
00:18:05
Speaker
The next thing I did was when I first moved back to Dallas, I was getting involved with a lot of the local art organizations. So I found every local art organization I could find and I became a member. And then I started going to their meetings and or making connections that way. A lot of them had membership exhibits at galleries around town where you just you automatically got in because you were a member.
00:18:29
Speaker
And that was a great way to start showing my work. And then some of those shows offered solo shows at the gallery as a prize. So I won a couple of awards like that that then gave me solo exhibitions. And using that as a ladder and a means of creating community around me was really useful. So I would encourage anybody to find local arts organizations, not even just ceramics organizations, but art organizations. Because the people who are in those, they often meet up and do art fairs together
00:19:00
Speaker
have events that they put on and they can connect you with places where you can teach or do lectures or get your work out that way. And oftentimes they have relationships with galleries and do membership shows, which are useful for getting your foot in the door somewhere. And that helped me a lot with just branching out in the area and getting to know more of us as well. So that's something I would say for sure.
Importance of Social Media for Artists
00:19:24
Speaker
And then after I got out of grad school or while I was in grad school at University of Florida, I started an Instagram account
00:19:30
Speaker
And I'd never done Instagram before I got to grad school. And I didn't think it was for me. I never really liked social media myself personally, but I discovered that it's an excellent tool for getting your work out there. And when I started putting a little more of myself and my sense of humor into my Instagram posts, I got more and more followers. And that's been a really good way for me to connect with galleries and opportunities as well. I get direct messages all the time from
00:19:57
Speaker
organizations and galleries that might want me to do a workshop or have a show and that's because that's where they see my work. And so I think having a good social media presence as well is extremely important right now and on a platform that's visually based. I haven't really gotten into TikTok yet, but I know that's the new thing. Especially for videos of ceramic process, people love to watch that and it's just all in general a great way to get your work out there.
00:20:24
Speaker
That was some really, really excellent advice. Like that was like really great. So when you discovered your voice, how did this like help you just in general?
Discovering Artistic Voice
00:20:36
Speaker
I think for me, something I struggled with for a long time, even going back to undergrad was why I make animals. And I felt like because I loved them wasn't a good enough answer. Um, but in reality it is.
00:20:50
Speaker
because whatever you're really passionate about, whatever you really love, if you make your work all about that, people will see that in the work, that you really love that thing and you can make them love it too, which is a really powerful thing, I think. So putting myself, my sense of humor a little bit back into my work made me like my own work more, which I think is also important. You have to identify with your work and feel like it's not just your work out there, it's you.
00:21:19
Speaker
So you're really putting yourself out there in addition to your work and people who look at it will get a sense of yourself in it as well. And I think when I started to do interviews like this too, I started to realize things about my work that I didn't realize before I did the interview. And I've noticed as well that when I look back on work that I made in the past, I can look at where I was in my life and see influences from that in the work.
00:21:48
Speaker
So, for example, in undergrad, I was very concerned about leaving school, and I think I was kind of stressed, and there was a lot of tension in my life deciding to major in ceramics, and all of my animals were tied up and restrained in some way in trying to break free. So, when I make these connections to what was going on in my life and looking at my work, I can see that there's a direct correlation to whatever's happening in my personal life and what's going on in my work. And my personality and the way things have developed over the years, it's all connected.
00:22:18
Speaker
What advice would you give to people looking to find their unique voice with their pottery? I would say that one of the best ways to put yourself into your work is to think a little bit about your personality and the things that you like. So sense of humor was a big thing for me, but also looking at my personal influences in life and what makes me unique. So growing up with Rococo furniture in my backyard,
00:22:45
Speaker
is pretty unique. I don't think a lot of people have that experience growing up and that came back into my work in a really strong way in the last few years and in graduate school I started making work cocoa furniture out of play and I loved every second of it. The detail, the ornament, all of that was a big influence on me and something I loved about the things in my dad's shop as a kid and
00:23:10
Speaker
putting it into my work made me, again, like my own work even more. And I think when you get to that point where you really like your own work, it feels like you, that that's really important. I also think it's important to have great influences and inspirations, but not to copy them too much. And when I started out sculpting, I was definitely just emulating Beth Kavener as much as I could because she was my hero and she made rabbits. So I made rabbits.
00:23:38
Speaker
And I thought, oh, make rabbits like she does, but no one can make rabbits like she does. And that's definitely a thing where you find your hero in play and you want to make work like them. You still have to find your own form and your own voice eventually. And something I realized is that rabbits weren't really my favorite thing to sculpt. It was elephants. I loved sculpting elephants. And when I figured that out, that was sort of my way of finding my own voice within animal sculpture, which I think
00:24:05
Speaker
was a whole other thing as well because there's a lot of artists who make animals and use animals in their work. But why do I make the animals that I make and why do I use the animals that I use became something that I had to figure out why am I attracted to certain animals. And for me it was like I was after animals with strange features that looked really interesting and made people curious. And so once I figured that out I could look for more of those animals to put in my work.
00:24:31
Speaker
and I sort of went away from the rabbit. So I think it's good to have a hero, to copy them, to sort of think about why you love their work, but then to find your own way to go forward with it is equally important and to not just keep copying that person because you love their work. I love it. For those that are listening, it's important to model your work after somebody, but don't keep on copying them. Try to find your own way of doing it. Now, as we're coming to a close here,
00:25:01
Speaker
What is one thing you want to hammer home with my audience today?
Advice on Following Passion for Success
00:25:05
Speaker
I think the main thing that I want to hammer home is that if you love what you do and if you love what you make, the money will come later. I think a lot of people in ceramics anyway can focus on, oh, this is selling, so I need to keep making this thing. And for me, as a sculptor, I never really fell into that so much because sculpture is a little bit different than pottery.
00:25:30
Speaker
Um, but you know, you'll have galleries and other people tell you like, Oh, this is selling really well. You should make this form. Um, or you should keep doing this thing because it's what selling, but it can, it can hold you back from making the work you want to make. Uh, so I think it's important to just make whatever you want because you love it. And other people, like I said, will love it too. If you really put all of yourself into it. Uh, and from there you can get a lot of financial support and people buying your work just because they can tell how much you love
00:26:00
Speaker
what you're making and they love it too, so they'll buy it. So I think a lot of people sometimes get stuck in trying to make work that is saleable or that is appealing to other people instead of making work that's appealing to them. So I think that's my biggest thing is make what you love and the money will come later. I
Where to Find Ariel's Work
00:26:20
Speaker
love it. Ariel, it was really great chatting with you today. Where can my arms go and check out your work?
00:26:26
Speaker
You can find my work at ariellebowman.com and also on Instagram at arielle.bowman. Thanks for listening to this episode of Shaping Your Pottery. If you have questions about developing your voice or just pottery questions in general, send them to me my way. Go to shapingyourpottery.com forward slash contact to send me your questions.