Stunning snakes

Snakes form the main theme on Jon Anderson's latest sculpture on PolymerClayDaily.com

Snakes for Monday? But these snakes from Bali’s Jon Stuart Anderson are not your garden variety.

This sculptural shrine crawling with snakes and topped with a glass ball is the most densely ornamented item I’ve ever seen from Jon. He collaborated with Luke Brown and Sudida to get the imagery just right. You’ll find frogs, masks, and many more caned images hidden throughout the highly decorated piece.

Some of his in-progress shots on Facebook show how the insides and hidden parts of his works are created with the same care and attention as the main elements. Here are a top view, a closeup of patterns, an early photo without wildlife.

If you haven’t visited Jon’s site for a while, you’ll be surprised by all the new products. Jon recently had joint surgery and I thought he’d be sidelined for a while but his creativity is more apparent and he’s more prolific than ever!

Barb Alexander’s spring 2019 tour of Bali is full so she’s added a second one if Bali’s wonders (including polymer) have been on your bucket list.

Modern artifacts

Luann Udell moved from Vermont to California, switched her workspace from a barn to a small studio and added woodworking and box-making skills to her mix of media.

Now her polymer artifacts from lost cultures and imagined prehistories are sometimes housed in refinished antique boxes as in this Shrine: Red Deer Clan.

Her story’s a good one and you can read it and see an overview of her work on ArtsyShark.com.

Follow her on Facebook and Etsy. Thanks to Lyn Tremblay for sending the link along to PCDaily.

Luann adds that she’s having an Open Studio in Santa Rosa this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, August 6 & 7, from 10-5.

Scrap clay possibilities

In a rich and rambling post Laurie Mika fills us in on her rich and rambling art adventures. She’s been both a teacher and a student over the summer. And she’s been getting ready for fall shaows and a workshop in Mexico.

On her blog she shows how she used bright scrap clay as the base for this piece. Her photos are large and if you click on them you can take a close look at the recycled jewels, milagros, mirrors, beads and baubles buried in her polymer.

Her nichos and altars are full of scavenged items and bric-a-brac. Monarch butterflies inspired one piece in which she embedded butterfly wings.

“In Mexico, it was believed that the monarchs represented the souls of the departed,” she explains. “All along the forest path leading up to where the millions of butterflies cluster in the trees, one can see butterfly wings lining the paths like orange and black jewels.”

“The world is one gigantic panorama of possibility. Really taking the time to look and to grab onto that which speaks to your core and fills you with wonder is at the heart of inspiration,” she concludes. Track Laurie’s schedule on her site and keep up with her on Facebook.

Ipolymer winners

Georg Dinkel’s I-reliquaries and shrines captured the hearts of the EuroSynergy audience in Malta. A long time photographer, Georg’s first shrine housed his daughter’s ipod.

The shrines grew bigger and more complex. His latest elaborate creations won best of show honors in the IPCA Awards challenge.

Georg grew up surrounded by both religion and architecture in Germany. Using polymer, salvaged materials and wood he began building ancient-looking constructions that pay homage to today’s important icons – namely Apple products.

Georg’s presentation at Malta was stunning, amusing and inspirational. He makes his own tools from what must be an amazing basement full of odds and sods. His extruder was fashioned from an outdoor spigot handle, a length of pipe, a long screw, and a metal washer. His iphone shrine was built over the skeleton of a lamp salvaged from the trash.

He plans to edit his Malta presentation into an online video that he’ll upload to his site in the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can see his winning entry here. In this silly photo Donna Greenberg crowns the ever-irreverant Dinkel with her polymer tiara.

The other top winners include Fran Abrams, Laurie Mika, Angela Garrod, Cornelia Brockstedt, Annie Pennington, Penne Mobley, Claire Fairweather, Joyce Cloutman and Emily Squires Levine. The winning works are posted here.

Polymer shrine for gamers

Inspired by scenes from the video game, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, this mostly polymer sculpture from Tucson’s Camille Young stands 5″ x 15″.

The piece, entitled Cross Section, was created for the Fangamer X Attract Mode show in Seattle. Video gamers love seeing their 2D characters brought to life in 3D by Camille and her sculpture represents a kind of modern shrine.

The Animal Crossing game allows players to build their own happy places and make the decisions that shape their lives.

These concepts may be completely foreign to us non-gamers but the audience for this artwork is huge and growing. Read about Camille in Polymer Clay Global Perspectives to get a glimpse of how and why this art is so important. She offers a 3D project for you to try.

Camille’s been sidetracked by her 6-month old daughter and it’s great to see her working (after Iris is in bed) again. Sample more of her work on Flickr and Facebook.

Upcycled triptych

Wendy Moore’s triptych is made from an discarded dart board upcycled with papier mache and polymer. It’s entitled Chautara which means resting place in Nepali. “This is a resting place for me; a place to reflect, meditate and reground,” says Wendy. See more of Wendy’s works on Flickr.

The shrine is part of her month-long show at the Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery in Australia. Her works highlight the contrasts of living in the Outback and her frequent travels to Nepal where Wendy teaches women to create jewellery and objects to sell, enabling them to escape lives of poverty, trafficking and abuse.

Donations from the polymer community have helped the Samunnat project begin construction on a permanent home. Here’s their Etsy shop and their U.S. outlet on Kazuri West.

This week’s shrines show what potent places triptychs can be. Are you beginning to plan yours?

Polymer enshrined


Sing in me, muse, and through me tell a story. – The Odyssey	Mari O’Dell and Barb Harper enshrine their skills	Let yourself become living poetry.

Maryland’s Mari O’Dell, teacher, and Colorado’s Barb Harper, airplane mechanic, combined talents for this portable personal shrine. As you might expect, Barb engineered the hinges, the rod for the prayer wheel and other structural parts. Mari concentrated on the poetry and the imagery.

Neither would have accomplished such a complex and powerful polymer piece on her own and their success has prompted them to continue their collaboration. Two heads are often better than one.

Polymer I-Reliquary

If you love your electronic devices as much as I do, you’ll totally understand Georg Dinkel’s newest polymer I-Reliquary, a comfortable throne for your iphone.

This elaborate mixed media housing for an iphone is a shrine to technology (though Georg doesn’t own an iphone). He admits that his family uses ipads and Macs.

PCD featured his first shrine some time ago. He’s added more and more complexity to his pieces and skillfully documents how he builds the gilded fretwork out of polymer.

Georg was a photographer for Staedtler Products (the maker of Fimo) for years before he ever opened a package of polymer. You’ll also sense that he’s long been a student of architecture.

Georg’s work-in-process shots are fascinating even if you don’t know German. A 3-minute video shows his creations. Here’s one on YouTube. The in-process shots are on his website.

Polymer shrine 2.0

Germany’s Georg Dinkel has rolled out version 2.0 of his TonSchrein. This shrine measures four feet tall (120 x 45 cm) and houses an Ipad. See several closeup views here.

“The shrine grew up to 120 cm – you, know, the gothic architects and their early skyscrapers! It holds an ipad, LEDs and a sound system,” Georg reports.

He embellished the polymer and wood structure with metal powders, leaf and acrylic stone. Here’s edition 1.0 which PCDaily featured in 2011.

Georg looked at polymer for many years in his job as a photographer for Fimo manufacturer, Staedtler. A couple years ago he started playing with Fimo to build a housing for his daughter’s ipod nano.

Shrines in polymer

Some of you have been asking what happened to PCDaily coverage of sculpture, dolls, miniatures and other non-jewelry art. It’s time you had a turn! Let’s start with Laurie Mika for the first entry in an entire week of 3D.

Laurie continues to raise the bar on color with her latest works. Her inks, foils, paints, and powders layered over stamped and textured polymer achieve amazingly luminous results. Look at some closeups here and here.

Laurie mixes her media, integrating recycled bling and found icons into her assemblages. A few choice words make each piece a jewel-like shrine.

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