Totems

Totems

A totem is traditionally a tall, carved or painted family or clan representation or emblem with identifiable common and meaningful objects and signifiers.
A shame totem is designed to elicit public thought, including embarrassment and changing of one's mind or routines. A good example of a shame totem was made by Alaska Native carver Mike Webber of Cordova. Mike erected this totem to shame Exxon Mobil on the anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill…. 

My evolving technique for totems is a cross between (quasi) traditional and something new. My
primary material is clay, a material that offers both creativity and constraint. For example, the proposed size of the finished piece is a constraint: most readily available and affordable kilns are too small to fire tall pieces.

To meet this challenge I design and engineer my totems as modules sized to fire separately depending on kiln size.

Final location is also a constraint. Many of my pieces are designed for the outdoors or semi-outdoors (gardens, patios, verandahs, fish ponds). This means I must engineer them to that ensure the pieces are stable in and hardy enough to endure charactistics of their final location.

Fitting pieces together so they appear seamless is another constraint: clay shrinks as it dries and shrinks more during firing. The amount of shrinkage depends on the clay body - as well as the piece's wall thickness. Each degree of shrinkage can affect the "join" - where one module fits another module.

I'm getting better at conceptualizing totems to tell the story I want to tell and better at engineering modules so that the narrative is consistent with the material, the tools (kiln, studio) etc.