Ben McCarthy//Benjamin Ceramix :: Canyons of the Ancients Artist in Residence 2013

 I wholeheartedly give thanks to everyone involved with my artist residency at the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in Colorado, USA. The entire experience was informative, inspirational, and motivating for my artwork. During my time in the Southwest, I worked with several biologists, archaeologists and curators of the Bureau of Land Management Anasazi Heritage Center. We conducted many field observations, which entailed hiking and camping throughout the mountains and valleys of the Monument—giving the artists a clear understanding of the land once inhabited by the ancient people, known as the Ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi.
 The landscape that was home to the Ancient Ones (Anasazi) is shaped with majestic mountains and canyons made up of astonishing geological formations. The sky constantly reveals a story of vivid color, cloud patterns, and bright stars. On a clear night, one can see far to distant galaxies—deep blue spills behind the constellations. I imagine the life of these people, building sandstone structures into the valley walls and surviving entirely from what Earth has offered them. The architecture truly commanded my attention as an artist, embracing the thought that generations of people can live off of only the earth and its resources, still while developing a strong, resilient, and creative community who have left their traces to be discovered thousands of years later. The bold, angled and curved construction of the cliff dwellings built into the canyons were designed carefully by expert masons of sandstone. Mesa Verde, as well as many other places nearby the Canyons of the Ancients, contains these archaelogical sites that unfold ancient stories through sprawling artwork carved into rock faces, artifacts, and towering pueblos balanced on islands of stone.
 The geometrically painted ceramic vessels made by the Ancestral Puebloans are another essential component to understanding their sense of creation. Not only is the precision and sense of design visually compelling, but one must also take into consideration the daily ritual crafted into the hand built pottery that was being produced by the communities. The process was utilitarian and selfless—no artist signed his or her pieces; however, their fingerprints are embedded into each coil. One can find several shards of black-on-white painted pottery in the piles of midden throughout the canyons—detritus from ancient Native American life: pieces of vessels, dippers, and sharpened arrowheads embedded into the land that have slept for over a thousand years.
 I created several different types of artwork during my residency. I began by making a large piece with a clay I brought from Kansas City, which is called MesaMan, resembling an architectural figure influenced by Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. When it was raw clay, it acquired the name RainChild. It has now been fired once again and treated with a chrome glaze finish, giving it the final title of PuebloPerson—a sculptural manifestation of an ancient architectural idea. After finding a source of quality clay in the McPhee Reservoir (a prominent archaeological excavation site), I decided to make a few small sculptures with the grey malleable clay from under the ground. They are simple beings—spirits and animals. The clay, once fired at a low temperature, turns to a bright, brilliant orange. If it is fired too high, it melts to a foamy, green goop. I plan attempt more, larger structures using this peculiar clay.
 With countless photographs of the places I visited, I also began to experiment with digitally altering my photos on the computer. My sculptures became able to enter the landscapes and archaeological sites of the Canyons of the Ancients, and the LED pictures started to unfold an exciting story. Using tiles of geological samples, I arranged natural colors and patterns within the rocks and skies into my own tessellations and mandalas. They are sketches and paintings using a new technique and a sense of humor to illustrate future ideas. My artwork continues to be translated into digital media, which has given insight to new possibilities of things to create.
 I was also granted the great privilege of working with Vince MacMillan, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management and the Anasazi Heritage Center. He is currently working on a new method to document and archive artifacts, rock art sites, and Ancestral Puebloan towers with a process called photogrammetry. The technology includes taking hundreds of photos of an object or place from all perspectives of the piece. The photos are then entered into a computer program that renders all of the images together to create a 3D model of the artifact. Photogrammetry is being used to catalogue the museum's collection into a gallery of the art pieces and archaeological sites to be preserved and studied in the future without being affected by weather and decay. I have included a sample video, one of Lightning Tree Tower, and one of my sculptures, called the Volcano Vessel, which have been processed with photogrammetry. I believe this is a new platform for sculptural work, letting the viewer move the object as if it were weightless, zoom into high-definition detail, and experience the sculpture from all angles. Soon, the 3D model of my piece will be available in a downloadable PDF format. I plan to continue applying this technique to my artwork, and am currently incorporating photogrammetry into a computer animation that will be finished by the new year.
 Thank you for your time and the phenomenal opportunity. I hope you enjoy my latest artwork. There is already more in the making, and I will continue to post updates to the Aldo & Leonardo blog!

*Photogrammetry_BAM/BC2013

Ben McCarthy
(www.benjaminceramix.com)
Colorado Art Ranch
Aldo & Leopold: art + science
Artist in Residence: BLM
 Canyons of the Ancients
September 2013

Benjamin Ceramix: Clay From The Mountains (Canyons of the Ancients National Monument)

While working as an Artist in Residence at the Canyons of the Ancients, I often make trips to the McPhee Reservoir, a beautiful winding road that unveils clearings of snowy mountain ranges, several giant snakes of water, and green fields spotted with shadows of passing clouds. The site is characterized as the largest and most funded archaeological excavation site in the country's history. Hundreds of artifacts such as patterned pottery, yucca sandals, and effigies made by the Anasazi were found there and catalogued for the cultural preservation of our ancestors. One day I decided to venture into the shallow valleys of the reservoir a day after rain. I came across the remains of a stream, which sat like a silent mud road assembled with geometric, tightly-fit earth blocks. The tessellation of mud formations seemed to resemble the keyboard of a computer and sank with gravity as the trodden path of my feet created a sculptural novel. I lifted a dried panel the size of a laptop of mud to reveal a bottomless cauldron of clay—dark grey with tan fine grain grog, sticky, malleable, and cold. After shoveling a mass of substance from the ground with my hands into a large Ziploc bag, I walked back to my truck with the bag of clay on my head. I combined this clay with dry elements from other areas of the land (dried mud, sandstone, fine gravel, some bugs), collected near areas of sacred views and holy ancestral places. From this unique mix manifested several small, intuitive sculptural beings. The photos are below, and the pieces will be getting fired in a local artist's kiln this weekend (updates to come). The large piece is named RainChild until it emerges from the kiln, and will then maybe be given a new name. It is about 60 lbs, 2', and is made with a Cassius Basaltic clay that will fire to a dark brown or black. I made it during the first week of my residency after absorbing the ancient architectural beauty of Mesa Verde. It resembles the cultural spirit of the pueblo community long ago—the head and face reminiscent of a sandstone tower built into the cliffs. I plan to make several more pieces from the clay found in this area while I am here. At the moment, I am also creating an animation of my sculptures that features a digital technology project that was made via collaboration with Vince MacMillan, an excellent archaeologist of the Anasazi Heritage Center and BLM. I expect it to be done soon and am excited to share it with you all!! Cheers, Ben

Canyons of the Ancients National Monument 2013 Artist in Residence: Ben McCarthy//Benjamin Ceramix

Hello all!
I have been enjoying all of your updates and glimpses into the different biomes/residencies that Aldo & Leonardo have organized and what has come of it—looking forward to how it evolves. What a phenomenal opportunity!! I am truly thankful and honored to be a part of this project. My artist residency ended the final day of September, and I am still happily living and working in the area to where I was transferred. I plan to continue my creative study of this beautiful, hidden area that is home to the largest and most abundant archaeological site in the country. The experience of shadowing and camping with the other artists, biologists and archaeologists of the Anasazi Heritage Center and the Bureau of Land Management was unique, informative, inspiring, and motivating. It is as if to have been let in on an ancient secret that I will ponder for the rest of my life—given the gift of an eternal creative fuel, which I have continuously found within nature, the lives and artwork of ancient people, and modern-day habitation of the planet. The project's emphasis on working with the organizations that maintain the land today sparked ideas of the history of humans in wilderness, our mark, the current state of how nature is governed, and an urgency for conserving its ecosystem, culture, art, and resources.
Days of hiking through vibrant olfactory foliage (especially green due to monsoon season) of sage and juniper, standing next to sandstone and mud-masoned giant towers constructed by ancient human beings known as The Ancient Ones (or Anasazi), approaching a clearing to find a massive faceted triangle of carved stone with archaic doodles melted through the purple desert rock varnish to reveal glowing orange petroglyph stick figure gatherings amidst floating spiral symbols (that may actually resemble ancient semiotics for water). Migrating black and orange tarantulas crossing the road, each traversing its own journey to somewhere, silent geological patterns stacked to create a castle disguised as a cliff, from where points of erosion within the wind-sculpted stone walls emerge natural statues of heads and faces that speak with the skies and think for centuries. Then there are places where one can see where, long ago, Mother Earth opened her arms to the Ancestral Puebloans and gave them cathedral-like caves in the mountain canyons on either side of the valleys of Mesa Verde. The ancient people cooperated with the earth, survived off of its growth, and built small cities inside the cliffs. To see such natural, complex, ancient structures is simply phenomenal, and the view provides an Escher-style visual puzzle majestically camouflaged into Nature. I sat across from it for hours, deep in thought and admiration, while carving a chunk of red and orange sandstone into a 3-dimensional hieroglyph with a piece of obsidian I found near Yellowstone.
The artistic process of analyzing, distilling, and creatively articulating the substance absorbed from the Canyons of the Ancients takes time and an open mind, and I am only beginning to translate the miles of geological formations, ghostly cliff dwellings, and ancient geometric pottery patterns into pieces of my own artwork—sculptures, pictures, and poems that resemble my intuitive, cognitive response. I found myself particularly inspired by the surreal scenes and creatures within rock art, and the "T shaped" doorways/windows found often in Ancestral Puebloan architecture.
In addition to creating a number of sculptures from clay that I dug from the mountains (which are currently drying and will be fired soon! {updates to come}), I began to decode the things I was seeing each day through the countless digital photographs I took during our exploration of Wilderness. One thousand, high definition photos of a landscape still cannot begin to explain the sense one gets when entering the labyrinth of Nature. In an effort to encapsulate the time, spirit, and language of the Canyons of the Ancients, I developed many new techniques: one called geokaleidoscopics, with which I transform my photography into fractal mosaics that unfold into intricate meta-textured beings of nature and ancient architecture. Colorful visual patterns form from simple pieces of sky, plants, or rocks. The sculptural images provide a snapshot of an interactive story (enhanced by the "zoom" feature) with an intergalactic quality, while still giving the viewer a perspective of the terrain, colors, sites, and artifacts of the place. I have also included a photo of the completed Anubynx sculpture that I made before the residency, which I posted a photo of pre-fire a while ago. The Anubynx and several other of my handmade, large-scale clay sculptures experienced a material metamorphosis and teleported into a tour of the digital landscapes depicted within my pictures you'll see below. They had a blast and will definitely visit again!
A big, glowing "THANK YOU" to Grant and Peggy at the Colorado Art Ranch for all of your kindness and support, to everyone at the Anasazi Heritage Center and BLM for your welcoming hospitality, interest and great conversation, and to everyone involved with the Aldo & Leonardo Art + Science Collaboration who is contributing to make this something great!!

-Ben