Pikaia

Pikaia is a worm-like marine creature from the Burgess Shale. It has a notochord, so it was placed in our very own phylum Chordada(sic). Since pikaia is the earliest known chordate, it could our hallowed ancestor. Thus I present this entry as a form of ancestor worship. Let us get down on our knees and pray to our Great Grandmother Pikaia.

It's really hard to get upset over a crack in my windshield when it's as beautiful as this one.

Eva Walsko, my great grandmother. My attempts to start a cult based on her worship have been poorly received.

Megasquid and Snakebite

The outdoor, defective Megasquid is almost buried by this year's monsoons. I went outside to take pictures of it just after the sun went down. I was standing near it when I heard a buzzing sound under my flimsy Target sandal. I thought it was a large insect, but I had stepped on a small rattlesnake. I quickly moved away as soon as I noticed what it was. The snake retreated to a skeletal creosote bush, obviously very upset. I laughed at my brush with danger, although I don't think the small, scared reptile could have killed me. Going to work tomorrow at the Wretched Institution is much scarier to me than stepping on a snake. I was thinking that maybe it did bite me but I didn't feel it and now the poison is slowly working its way up my legs and torso to my brain. Any moment now I'll be dead. I see tiny fang marks on my foot, but I might be hallucinating them.


Megasquid buried up to its eyes

Caterpillar Pipes

Earlier this year I thought making clay paraphernalia might be my ticket out of my hated profession. Bongs are difficult because it's hard to make the size of the holes to come out right. Pipes are slightly easier, but they smoke very hot and there is also a problem with the airways sealing up during the glazing process. These two seem to have come out right, although I haven't tried them yet.



Here are some strange, insignia-like marks which appeared mysteriously on my skin. Do you think I might have cancer? Do you think I might be a little obsessed with my body? Consider the restraint I'm showing considering that I was naked in a shallow pool of transparent liquid.

And, by the way, I haven't made it out of my present line of work yet. Tuesday was the first day of school and I remain an elementary school teacher. Oh the horror.

Hallucigenia

The Burgess Shale is a famous fossil site in the Canadian Rockies. About 505 million years ago, unusual geological conditions caused many soft-bodied Cambrian creatures to remain well preserved up to the early twentieth century when they were discovered by paleontologist Charles Walcott.

The organisms were remarkable in that many seemed to defy classification. One of these was a worm-like creature which was given the name of Hallucigenia, meaning dreamlike. There was an initial confusion over the animal's spatial orientation. Did the strange spikes point up for protection or did it walk on them like stilts? Later finds showed that it walked on the soft tentacles with the rigid spikes pointing up, but it has proved difficult to sculpt that way. There was also a controversy about Hallucigenia's relationship to modern animals. It has been placed in the phylum Onchyphora, in which it joins obscure modern creatures called velvet worms.

Remains of lunch: White Bean and Roasted Garlic Soup and three upside down Hallucigenia.

Hallucigenia as a stilt walker. Not true-to-life, but easier to express in clay.
Hallucigenia as it probably lived. Unfortunately it collapsed every time I tried to render it that way.

Hallucigenia smiling.

Fossil of Hallucigenia.

Nyarlathotep

It rained all night in my corner of the Sonoran Desert and the road to civilization is too flooded for me to go to massage therapy school today. The desert turns into a swamp. The toads are singing. Dragonflies hunt smaller insects in the air.

These sculptures are based on an illustration of Nyarlathotep from S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters. In Lovecraft's stories, Nyarlathotep serves as an intermediary between the Outer Gods and lesser beings. This particular avatar of Nyarlathotep is called The Howler in Darkness. The Field Guide is meant to be used in a Cthulhu-themed RPG.

The sculpture on the right has the head of a Burgess Shale organism called Sanctacaris, or "Santa Claws."

Chiqui checks out the unspeakable alien gods emerging from the muck.

Cthulhu Figures

Cthulhu is the evil alien sex god from H.P. Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu." These are some small, crude clay Cthulhus, a crude piano that used to belong to Tucson Unified School District, and sheet music to "Feed the Birds" from Mary Poppins.

This is a large, winged Cthulhu perched on my ribcage.

The are my two crudest and earliest Cthulhu statues. Also starring my nipples.

This is a more recent Cthulhu idol with two Tubolaras from Parallel Botany on top of my microwave. None of my body parts is included. It's completely safe for work.

Megasquid

These two sculptures are inspired by The Future is Wild by Dougal Dixon and John Adams. It's an illustration of what life on Earth might be like 5 million, 100 million, and 200 million years in the future. Humankind is doomed to extinction of course. 200 million years from now, all but a few bizarrely specialized vertebrates are extinct and squid-like creatures have colonized the land. There are intelligent, primate-like creatures called squibbons. There are also lumbering, elephant-like creatures called megasquid.

This is the first megasquid I made. Its mantle was placed incorrectly when it was fired, so I banished it to the arroyos behind my house. My neighbor tried to steal it, so I put it in hole in the ground closer to the house. It's slowly being filled with what passes for soil around here. I want archeologists to dig these things up and speculate about a Cthulhu cult in the Sonoran Desert.

Giralunas

The Giraluna is an imaginary plant-like entity from Leo Lionni's Parallel Botany. Leo Leonni is best known for psychedelic children's books with whimsical animal characters portrayed in cartoonish water colors on a background of organic prints. He also wrote a psychedelic fake botany book about anomalous undead plant-like creatures.

"This elusive and capricious plant is the Dream Queen of parallel botany."

"In its natural environment it can be preceived only as a nebulous interplay of glimmerings and empty spaces which alternate in the darkness and vaguely suggest where its outlines might be."

"But what could possibly be the function of abstract seeds, quite clearly incapable of generating new plants?"

Group of Giralunas in my kitchen

Giant Giraluna at Dinnerware Arts

Giant Giraluna at home in the desert