Avenues Open Studios
September 20, 2025
11a—7p

288 J Street. Download the map.

IG @AvenuesOpenStudios

FB Facebook.com/AvenuesOpenStudios

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September 2025, Thursday 1:30 PM or Friday 6:30 PM

If you are interested or planning to attend this class, please fill out this form. It will help me prepare.

Relief is a sculptural method where sculpted pieces are bonded to a solid background of the same material. The technique gives the impression that the sculpted subject sits above the background plane. When rendered in solid materials such as stone or wood the maker lowers the background material to elevate the subject above the ground. Accomplishing this effect in clay, often called relief modeling, is much easier. The clay artist can adds clay to the surface in addition to removing it from the background. Relief sculpture appears in different degrees ranging from bas (low) to high. In bas relief, the subject projects less than half of its depth from the surface. In high-relief, the figures are deeply undercut to distinguish or pull them away from the background.

I’ve created a Pinterest collection showcasing all kinds of relief carving examples of different complexities and depths. I also recommend that you take a look at Victoria Ellis’s mesmerizing video showing her process and this instructional video outlining how to create a carving plan. Relief sits somewhere between drawing and sculpting but it does not use line to create imagery. Instead it relies on the manipulation of light and shadow playing on contour and form.

Recommended Clays available from Petersen Art Center: In general, you will want a smooth, grit-free clay for this process. For smooth surfaces, B-Mix, Porcelain, or for a slightly coarse but still workable clay choose Long Beach White or even Death Valley. Bear in mind that dark clay may obscure shadows and hence interfere with the modeling process.

Optimal clay temperature is hard leather hard.

Recommended Tools: you will need

• a sketchbook and pencil
• water soluble marker
• waterproof board with a smooth surface slightly larger than your piece
• ruler
• scoring tools (serrated rib, wire brush etc)
• round paint brushes, and
• whatever sculpting tools you prefer such as: carvers, loop carvers, finishing/wipe outs, spatulas, wood knives, ribbon tools, wire tools, dental picks, ball stylus, wood sculpting knives, metal bristle brush, and an x-acto blade. Any and all combinations of these tools can be handy, but by no means are all of them necessary. These are the tools I rely on the most:

Week 1: 6 x 6 Ceramic Tile

Bring your tools, your sketchbook, a pencil, and several physical (not on your phone) images at least 6×6 inches.

• Create a 6 x 6 x 1/2 inch slab for your tile
• How to develop imagery for relief carving
• How to create a modeling plan based on your selected image
• Transfer your image to your tile and begin working.

Downloads: 6×6 Tile Worksheet | Simple Line Drawings

Week 2: Finish your tile, prep slab for an 8 x 10 Wall Hanging

Bring your tools, your sketchbook, a pencil, and several physical (not on your phone) images at least 8 x 10 inches.

• Create 8 x 10 x 1 inch slab for your wall hanging
• Develop your imagery for your wall hanging and create a carving plan
• Finish your tile from Week 1.

Downloads

Week 3: 8 x 10 Wall Hanging

• Carve out the back of your 8×10 slab and create hanging mechanism
• Transfer your image to your slab
• Begin modeling your relief sculpture.
• Pitfalls and perils: the art of moisture management and concerning variations in clay thickness.

Week 4: 8 x 10 Wall Hanging

• Finish modeling your wall hanging
• Drying considerations

The post Relief Sculpture Syllabus appeared first on Brandi Chase | Maker.

Before beginning this project for yourself I recommend you familiarize yourself with this short list of necessary materials and tools:

• A board for the wedging surface whatever size you like, preferably 1″ thick.
• A strip of wood for the brace, the length of the wedging surface x 2″ x 1″ thick.
• Sufficient canvas to stretch over the wedging board and the strip.
• Staple gun and staples
• Drill and 8 1 1/4″ wood screws.

While this post is not a detailed tutorial, it will give you the basic idea about how to proceed.

After nosing around for free, suitable wood for the wedging surface and finding none, I shelled out $20 for 4′ x 8′ x 1″ plywood sheathing from Home Depot. They cut the sheet into two 24″ x 22″ rectangles and two 2″ x 24″strips to brace against the table. I already had on hand ample canvas from the Green Gypsy Thrift Shop for the wedging board. I set aside some luscious upholstery fabric from Mom’s stash for the brace.

First, I pulled the upholstery fabric taut over the short edge of each brace and secured the ends with a staple gun. Then I wrapped the the long edge around the length of the board. The corners were a little tricky. Since there was no need for perfection, I cut away a square, and tucked in the edges of the short side under the board. I then wrapped the flap of the long side over the short side.

The same basic approach worked for the wedging board. I stretched the canvas over the short edges first, the long edges second, then cut away a square of fabric to wrap each corner.

Next, I flipped over the board to examine the stretch. Like a hack plastic surgeon, I gave the canvas a tug and a staple wherever it sagged. Even though I had ironed the old canvas before I started a pucker remained. I let it be.

Lastly, I attached the brace to the wedging board. I used clamps to hold the brace in position on the back, predrilled the holes in four places, then finished the attachment with inch-and-a-quarter wood screws. By the way, if you torque the screws so much that they loose their grooves do not touch the screw head immediately after. I’ve heard you can get a nasty burn that way (ouch!).

When I flip the board over, the brace rests against the edge of the tabletop. The brace protects the table from scratches while preventing the board from slipping forward as I knead the clay. Why two boards? I use one for stoneware and reserve the other for porcelain to avoid introducing iron into that clay body.

There you have it: a DIY Clay wedging board that even a novice can assemble. My first project will be a couple Sacred Heart wall hangings, along the lines of this one.

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Trudging those depths was a test of fortitude.
No parent to rescue you
To fetch you from school
Or in any way interfere with the challenge
Of growing up Utahn in the 70s.

It wasn’t thought wrong 
Back then
To let children suffer the cold
Navigate dangers alone and return after dark
Light-headed and woozy 
From the home fires licking their frost nipped fingers
Their wind-bruised cheeks.

Nowadays 
I don’t expect more than a skiff in the valley 
Or, out my window to see
A lone child deciding for itself whether or not 
to race home. 

Oh nostalgia— 
Liar, sugared preserver! 

Changing climate aside look again—
That swollen self-image
Tough and sovereign
Developed within the sureness of having a home

Warm

Open-doored

Always waiting to welcome you back.

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I pulled the 1960s Golden Library of Knowledge on Mathematics off a shelf at the Green Gypsy Thrift Shop because I wanted a bird’s-eye view of the subject. Surely, a survey written for 8-year-olds would present an uncluttered picture. And it did—until I came upon its conclusion. 

According to the pronoun allocations appearing here and nowhere else in the book, “shes” use math in the service of the household. While shopping, “shes” may compare prices, reconcile bills, and count change. They might even engage in the apparent gender-neutral service of bookkeeping. Conversely, “hes” use math to further their individualistic ambitions as machinists, navigators, pilots, astronomers, or physicists.

The sudden gender imposition was so jarring I inverted the “hes” and “shes” to see how the conclusion read when only the vagina’d used math outside of service. The result recalled this question often posed to RGB: “When will there be enough women on the Supreme Court?” To which she responded, “when there are nine…there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.” Her riposte, like my exercise, stirs a wry smile but it does not satisfy. 

No, the solution to the potential-inhibiting power of pronouns is not in its opposite. It is possible—and frankly produces better writing—to bypass gender pronouns altogether when writing about capabilities. In exercising this kindness, writers leave all possibilities related to a skill open to whoever wants or needs to use it regardless of their plumbing. 

I might rework the same conclusion to read something like this :

Mathematics is a part of our daily lives. For example, everyone uses it to purchase things. They compare prices, figure out their bills, and count their change. 

Bookkeepers use many of these same mathematical skills to keep track of a company’s income and expenses. 

Machinists use mathematics when they plan their work. They must measure and figure to know how to set their tool so it will cut parts with the right size and shape.

Navigators on airplanes use mathematics to help chart their course. They must figure distances and directions to know how to get from Hawaii to Tokyo.

Astronomers use mathematics to figure out how far away the stars are. They use equations to help explain how stars are formed, what makes them shine, and how they change as they grow older.

Physicists use mathematics to explore the mysteries of the atom. Their experiments give them facts. Their equations show how these facts are related and often lead to new facts that were never known before.

And so, in many different ways, mathematics has shaped civilization as we know it today.

The post Imagine Mathematics Without Pronouns appeared first on Brandi Chase | Maker.

But for all her outward accomplishments Alexandra’s internal estate, much like the interior of her house, is unfinished and unevenly furnished: empty in some rooms and cluttered with relics or knick-knacks in others. As Cather writes, “…Alexandra’s house is the big out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself best” all exterior no interior. One wonders how, with nothing inside, she expresses herself at all.

Why does this matter? Because Alexandra’s work and her supposed success in this work is the product of her programming. She executes the instructions her father laid down for her. Like any machine she performs the routines automatically—until she encounters a variable outside of their scope. When the unexpected occurs only creativity born from a well-nourished, well-tended interior—imagination—can adapt to the new scenario. This is simply not something Alexandra possesses:

“…her life had not been the kind to sharpen her vision. Her training had all been toward the end of making her proficient in what she had undertaken to do. Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence; like an underground river that came to the surface only here and there, at intervals months apart, and then sank again to flow on under her own fields.”

Even though Alexandra is unconscious, her subconscious is present. It is the bug in the machine that undermines her programming. She experiences in rare moments of idle reverie as a recurring vision of surrender and release:

an illusion of being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by some one very strong. It was a man, certainly, who carried her, but he was like no man she knew; he was much larger and stronger and swifter, and he carried her as easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat. She never saw him, but with eyes closed, she could feel that he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him. She could feel him approach, bend over her and lift her, and then she could feel herself being carried swiftly off across the fields.

When these visions occur Alexandra forces them down below the surface by angrily scrubbing her skin cold water and vigor. She fails to understand her desire for liberation is innate and cannot be washed away.

No matter. Her father’s daughter’s mind may run in furrows but her subconscious has a will of its own. What she will not allow in herself she sows in her youngest brother Emil,  “…He shall do whatever he wants to…He is going to have a chance, a whole chance; that’s what I’ve worked for.” Alexandra can not truly imagine “doing whatever one wants.” She cannot comprehend the implications of her gift. She learns the hard way.

The post Cather’s O Pioneers! (O Fathers’ Daughters!) appeared first on Brandi Chase | Maker.

How so? Patriarchy prefers naive, uninformed girls who become docile wives who understand sex as a duty paid in babies. She is visibly chaste before marriage and conspicuously pregnant afterward. Whereas women who seek pleasure in sex—even exhibit a little curiosity—are whores to be paid in cash or bruises. Yet Patriarch anticipates, indulges, and excuses male sexual appetites. Their bodies show no outward sign of the sexual act; hence, fidelity and accountability are, for them, always a matter of choice. By contrast, pregnancy betrays a woman’s sexual activity. Without a means to counterbalance this double standard—to circumvent or remove the evidence—she has no choice but to bear its responsibility, burden, and shame. 

As I read Stella Fortuna, I thought, “if only these women had open frank education about sex, including its pleasures and dangers. If they had access to private, unfettered birth control, they might have lived as whole human beings.” I also thought, “if we just raised men to see themselves as co-creators and held them accountable for every deposit of their sperm in a woman’s body.” 

Then I laughed and laughed until I cried. 

If you want to read this book on the cheap, I offer my copy for sale on Ebay.

The post A Reflection on Juliet Grames’s The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna appeared first on Brandi Chase | Maker.

The first time I read Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game I was eight years old. Let’s see—that would put us around 1981. This murder mystery features an ensemble of characters, everyone with a part to play, but what I remembered then and enjoyed most this time (older and wiser) were the two sisters:

The eldest beautiful one who, when she realized people only spoke of her as a bride to be and a future wife of and that she herself could not name any other kind of self, decided to postpone marriage and study medicine first. And the younger, pugnacious, pig-tailed, one with a proclivity for kicking shins who makes a fortune and becomes the CEO of a large firm and who recognizing she has a perfectly fulfilling life choses not to become a mother. 

Big deal eh? Women increasingly do these things, right? Not so much in the 80s when the ERA—strangled by women from the Christian Right with an assist from the otherwise despised by them Latter Day Saint women—was in its death spiral and advertisers were selling cigarettes made just for us cause we’d “come a long way baby” and perfume assured us we could bring home the bacon and still have time to satisfy a man. No, a young Utah girl didn’t have many examples of self-determination back then, not in her community, not in the media. 

These sisters didn’t teach me to expect “more.” Their choices and outcomes described in this book as simply normal things women might do invited me to think about all life’s possibilities and imagine a way to become myself rather than a fall into a role in someone else’s play.

The post Normal possibilities: Remembering Raskin’s The Westing Game appeared first on Brandi Chase | Maker.

There is a passage in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees that set my hair on end. She describes a town, like any 1950’s town in South Carolina. A town that, with a few contemporary substitutions could describe many towns across the US today. Those comfortable with the prevailing power structure of the time probably felt right at home. In this story, the symbols menaced the runaways: a white girl and a black woman. Reading, I felt as uneasy as they did, in the same way I feel uneasy entering some towns in my home state. 

“Tiburon was a place like Sylvan, minus the peaches. In front of the domed courthouse someone had stuck a Confederate flag in the mouth of their public cannon. South Carolina was Dixie first, America second. You could not get the pride of Fort Sumpter out of us if you tried. ❡Strolling down Main Street, we moved through long blue shadows cast from the two-story buildings that ran the length of the street. At a drugstore, I peered through the plate glass at the soda fountain with chrome trim, where they sold cherry Cokes and banana splits, thinking that soon it would not be just for white people anymore. ❡We walk past Worth Insurance Agency, Tiburon County Rural Electric office, and the Amen Dollar Store which had Hula Hoops, swim goggles, and boxes of sparklers in the window with SUMMER FUN spray-painted across the glass. A few places, like the Farmers Trust Bank, had GOLDWATER FOR PRESIDENT signs in the windows, sometimes with a bumper sticker across the bottom saying AFFIRMATION VIETNAM” (65).

Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. Penguin Books. 2003.

Recently, someone I love posed a hypothetical: “Say you were in prison. Being white, who would you align with for protection? Wouldn’t you align with the white supremacists, I mean, to survive?” I haven’t been able to get the conundrum out of my head since—the problem extends well beyond the prison walls. And, because I value honesty, I didn’t have a plain answer. 

To manifest, Power must overwhelm some Other, must render them powerless and dependent. Thereafter, in exchange for privileges and protection, the disempowered modify their behavior to please their masters. They align to survive. The closer they are to power in appearance and persuasion the more natural the accommodations seem.

I am a white woman programmed from birth in the art and craft of appearing pleasing to white men. Trained for survival. I know to sublimate parts of myself so I can pass by a hostile group unmolested or through unfriendly territory. For self-preservation—but more often expediency—I keep my mouth shut, head down. 

It feels like instinct, but it’s programming. 

My view of the human condition is Hobbesian—a war of all against all. We humans find temporary and illusory reprieve within our tribes and under the protection of kings both organized against some Other to create cohesion. Absent these shelters an individual’s life is nasty, brutish and short. 

This is why I couldn’t answer the hypothetical with an unequivocal “No! Never!” In doing and saying nothing I preserve myself but maintain the status quo I disdain. I’m not proud to admit that unless pressed I’m not as brave as I’d aspire to be.  No, I wouldn’t align but I might hide.

If you’d like a copy of this story on the cheap, my copy is for sale on Ebay.

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