Penland instructor and former resident Eileen Wallace and Penland programs director Leslie Noell spent the second week of winter residencies hard at work in the letterpress studio. The two were continuing a collaborative series of prints that explore transparency, composition, and the graphic potential of wood type. There was a lot of play involved, too.
This is Decarlo Logan, studio assistant in the fall drawing and painting Concentration. In this picture he’s in the textiles studio wielding a rug tufting machine, which is a bit like a hand-held sewing machine that makes U-shaped loops of yarn (tufts) rather than stitches. Tim Eads, who taught the fall textiles Concentration, has been promoting these machines as way to create innovative, dimensional textiles. He brought a few of them along for his workshop (which covered many aspects of surface design) but generously invited everyone on campus to play around making tufted rug samples.
This is what the front side of the tufting looks like. Lots of people tried it out, but nobody was more obsessed than Decarlo, who spent so much time messing around with the machine that he dubbed himself King Tufter.
When he’s not tufting, Decarlo is a painter. Here is a pair of encaustic pieces he made in the fall workshop, which was taught by Tonya D. Lee.
And thanks again to Tim Eads for the excellent workshop and for personifying Penland generosity.
When you get to the last week of an eight-week clay Concentration, it’s all about loading, firing, and unloading, and a lot of it is about carefully finding room in the kilns for all the pots. This is student Eva Leach finding room in the salt/soda kiln.
