The opportunity to work in a different medium and a chance to exhibit a sculpture alongside other artists in the U.S. Botanic Garden appeared in my inbox late May 2019. Needless to say, I was intrigued when I received the Chia sculpture call for proposal from Claire Huschle, founder and director of Scaffold. Scaffold is a nonprofit that supports visual artists and organizations, and Claire was my boss when we worked together at the Arlington Arts Center many years ago. 

The U.S. Botanic Garden is currently running an exhibition called It’s Hip to Be Square: The Mint Family.  For one of the programs within this larger exhibition, the U.S. Botanic Garden partnered with the NYC Urban Soils Institute and asked artists to create sculptures that could grow Chia. Native to Mexico and Guatemala, Chia is in the Mint family (who knew!). Fun facts about Chia, it was an important crop for the Aztecs, and, in Mexico, terra cotta forms were used to sprout Chia seeds on altars in religious ceremonies. 

Artistic inspiration can come from the most unexpected places. After reading the call for proposal, I had my idea. I would make a T. Rex sculpture to grow Chia. The Chia plant would represent the T. Rex’s feathers. 

This was the perfect opportunity to re-visit my childhood fascination with dinosaurs outside my recreational visits to Natural History Museums. I joined the NYC Museum of Natural History (we live in Arlington, VA)  to see T. Rex The Ultimate Predator opening weekend while visiting NYC for my middle daughter’s birthday. Luckily at six she is still impressionable, and my excitement over the exhibition became her excitement, temporarily. I was probably the only parent in that exhibition who was reluctantly ushered to the exit by their child. Before being hustled out of the exhibition by my six-year-old, I learned T. Rex was heavily feathered especially as a juvenile. Paleontologists came to this conclusion after the discovery of Dilong Paradoxus in northeastern China, which was the first tyrannosaur found with fossilized feathers. Baby T. Rex, looked like a lizard-chicken, and nothing like the ferocious carnivore it would grow into. 

I submitted my drawing and proposal for the sculpture naming it T. Rex Redux in honor of the latest research on the extinct apex predator of the Mesozoic era. In June of 2019, to my utter surprise and delight, my proposal was selected to move to the next round of the submission process, creating the sculpture. I had a good reason to be anxious proceeding to this next phase. I have experience drawing and painting but the extent of my sculpting experience is making neon colored playdough figurines with my kids. I had one month to make a vessel out of porous terra cotta clay no bigger than eight inches in any direction that could hold water and was striated to grow Chia. 

Like most artists tackling a new medium I purchased the materials and started to experiment.  I learned quickly that clay is a bit like Goldie Locks when it comes to moisture. Too dry and it cracks, too damp and it turns to mud.  My brother made pottery as a hobby a few years ago and I remembered him talking about slip (a creamy mixture of clay and water) which acts like a glue holding pieces of a sculpture together before it is fired in kiln, an oven for clay. In the first attempt, I could attach the pieces of the sculpture together, however the weight of the body and head crushed the legs of the T. Rex.  

The sculpture needed to be hollow to meet the vessel requirement to hold water for Chia hydration as well as the structural integrity of the sculpture itself. If the walls of a clay sculpture are too thick it will not dry properly. Uneven drying prior to firing can result in deep cracks in the sculpture which can cause a sculpture to break apart in the kiln.

I tried hollowing out the body of the T.Rex using two different techniques without much success. My T. Rex needed a skeleton to hold the weight of the clay and balance. 

I spoke with Anne Browne, owner of Art House 7 and an artist with a ceramics background. She suggested I build an armature out of newspaper and tape to support the weight of the wet clay. It worked! The newspaper provided enough stability to keep the T.Rex standing while the clay dried and in the kiln the newspaper and tape disintegrated leaving a hollow space in the sculpture. Structural integrity established, I moved onto glazing. 

Glazing is an exercise in patience. It requires many layers, time, and a bit of trial and error to achieve the intended color and finish. The glazing on T. Rex Redux did not turn out as I planned or anticipated. I used casein paint to adjust the most glaring color issues after firing the sculpture. The primary lesson I learned is next time I should use under glazing. Under glazing gives visual depth when layering colors. I layered different colored transparent glazes, once in the kiln the glazes turned to the color of mud because the clay is a warm red-brown the transparent colors on top were overpowered by the base color of the clay. The green I selected for the base turned sky blue, which I adjusted with transparent green and yellow casein paint. Since the color of T.Rex is still up for debate, a glossy mud color is equally likely as the golden yellow and coffee tones I intended. 

Like the unexpected transformation of a fluffy baby T.Rex to a terrifying carnivore, T-Rex Redux transformed from hunk of mud to a whimsical, quirky, and slightly ferocious Chia sculpture. I evolved from an artist who stayed in the 2-dimensional realm of art to one who found a new medium and dimension to love.