Dr. Tyrel (Tink) Moore

I was very sad to learn yesterday that UNCC lost a great professor in 2020. I had hoped to connect with him this year for my thesis but sadly I will be limited to his published research.

I first met Tink in 1994, fresh from home with my accent still so prominent that I was often misunderstood. I was enrolled in his undergraduate world geography class which was a large lecture hall style class. Tink was great at engaging such a large group of students and quickly learned faces and names regularly calling on individuals to answer, respond and engage with him.

He pointed at me sometime around the third week of class and turned to write on the board as I responded. I saw his hand stop moving, his elbow dropping as he tilted his head to listen. When I finished he spun completely around on the hill of his cowboy boot, pointed directly at me with his chalky finger and said, "See me after class!" I spent the rest of the class wondering if I had made some sort of misstep or blunder.

Instead, the first words out of his mouth were, "Where are you from?" I can still see his crooked grin and twinkling eyes. Turns out he was from KY and grew up in the same area that my grandmother did. He regularly spoke with me about my family and our story and was very interested in the fact that I was the first student from Graham county to attend UNCC - it was the last county represented. Toward the end of the semester he invited me to take one of his 4000 level classes focused specifically on Appalachia.

The first day of class he passed out a blank US map and simply said draw Appalachia. He knew exactly what he was doing and I think got a big kick out of what happened next. I took my pencil and drew a small circle around the western tip of NC and north GA crossing the border into TN and just barely nicking the bottom of KY and put my pencil down. Everyone was still working and I realized that these were Geography students and they were meticulously drawing the entire Appalachian mountain range.

Without a word Tink collected the pages and pinned them all up to the cork band above the board. Mine was front and center. He couldn't hide his smile though when he asked, "What just happened?" It was the beginning of a great class. Another entire portion of the class was focused on migration patterns (this was decades before Hillbilly Elegy) and I realized my family's story was a perfect example of alternating generational migration patterns.

I was young and not yet used to the kind of academic reading required in upper level classes. I wish I had a better recollection of some of the other things we read and discussed - or a copy of his syllabus to work from - but he left a nice collection of articles for me to read.

It's not the same though - I was really hoping to hear that laugh again.

Reflections on Mud Quilts

This body of work that I have begun is little more than a sort of scratching or mark making in the dirt not unlike that work we did as children. This native clay accepts my thoughts and intentions, my rhythm, my pattern making, my timidity and holds their form as a memory for a while. These are not stable works as they are susceptible to traffic, construction, and the elements just to name a few vulnerabilities.

I was able to revisit Impression 003 three days after it was made to document changes in the piece. The clay at the site had a drastic change in color becoming lighter as it dried. The shapes made by the compression of my stamp retained more moisture and were darker in appearance giving the piece a heightened contrast. My lettering which was hardly discernable at all when I created it could be clearly read.

You can see in the cracked and drying clay around the quilt that my work brought stability to the earth at this construction site. The piece survived for many days; even after several rains it was still partially visible.

Since this impression I have been working on a bisque stamp with which I hope to make larger and more quilt-like impressions. The prototype is in the kiln as I write. Below you can see a couple of photographs of the stamp in progress:

Thinking About Layers

I think that I have finished Goin’ Visitin’ (you can read the accompanying description on the projects page). I’m really trying to push my Ps skills in these pieces. I’m also trying to fully explore this idea of a geobiography. How can you represent it visually?

I pulled into this portrait many references that anyone who knew Virgie well as well as faint references to the Stecoah Township in the 1980s. Stecoah has always had such a strong community identity. I’ve been thinking about why that might have been and how I might express those in words. But it has something to do with layers. Stories and memories layered overtop of landmarks, trails and fields. Walking the same worn path from the back porch to the garden or down to the spring that had been used for years. Life was lived in layers.

Virgie was one of the brighter personalities and was known far and wide - you can see it in her expression, right?

You might also be able to tell if you look closely that I landed on included the book of Ruth as the text layer in this piece. I chose this portion because Virgie left home at the age of fifteen to marry a much older man. There were just echoes there that I wanted to capture.

Compositionally there were some challenges in the way the images were divided. The quilt square creates such a distinct line. Initially I brought in the grid of the screen porch scaled up to fill in that space and then a layer of the polka dotted shirt large over top of that. The blend layers created some interesting coloring choices in her shirt that I liked and decided to keep but they were isolated in the center of the canvas. I attempted to bring in those colors in the grid section to tie the two sections of the piece together and move the eye around a bit. I think it works - I’ll know better when I return to look at it again in a few days.

Be Frank

Today I visited Frank Liske Park after most of this weekends rains had subsided. I wanted to experiment with pressing designs into the ground. I took my quilt inspired watercolor palette from this summer’s Topics In Ceramics class and also some rubber letter stamps. I also played around with stamping with found rocks and sweetgum balls.

The sweetgum balls were too soft from the rain and gave way before making too much of an impression. The rocks did okay and with persistence perhaps you could find a rock with clearly defined edges that might work quite well. One thing that I noticed with the rocks is that it created a resistance/suction with the earth and sometimes a clump would stick to the rock and come away ruining the pattern. The rubber stamps did okay on some surfaces but are really too shallow to make much of an indention in the coarser grands of the surfaces I could find.

I thought that sandy breaks along the creek bank might work well but they turned out to be a bit to coarse and granular to capture good details. In the end I good a good impression in a muddy road exiting a picnic area – this is the Impression that I chose to document:

I experimented documenting an Impression with my GoPro and also documented other things from the site– some videos of the storm water flowing over the rocks and waterfalls, some beautiful fungi and a bright chartreuse lichen. You can take a look at everything on Google Drive.

Goin' Visitn'

Here is this weekend’s progress on my next portrait:

The Bible page texture is a place holder from the internet until I can get a good scan of my own. I’m considering which book and chapter.

This is Virgie Crisp of Dry Creek which is located within the Stecoah Township. Virgie was known for being able to spit further than any man I ever knew and though her hair was silver turned a cartwheel at the drop of a hat.

Sundays growing up were often reserved for visitin’. After church services and dinner were over the older generation (many who were shut ins) would open their doors or sit out on the porch or even drag a bunch of chairs under the shade tree. The younger generation with children and the ramblers would drive up and down the creeks to visit. Sometimes you would pull up and hang yourself out of the truck window and jaw and sometimes you would get out and sit awhile and occasionally you were invited to stay for supper. We visited Virgie and her husband Bart many Sundays.

I’m not sure if this piece is finished or not - it seems that maybe there is room for something else thought I’m not sure what at the moment.

The Seed of An Idea

Today I began a project that I have named Mud Quilts which is my very first site specific project. I created an Instagram account to document each site and work. Visit MudQuilts if you are interested in following along as I’m not sure I’ll document every site in this journal or site.

This is my first Impression made with a hickory nut shell in the root ball of an old tree fall.

The main aim of this project is to bring awareness to and comment on the complicated way that we as humans shape and form landscapes and places as well as how landscapes and places shape and form our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual lives.

I have set up two very simple parameters for my project:

1. Neither to add anything to nor to take anything away from my sites but to only leave an impression once I’ve left.

2. Document each site on my Instagram account using photographs and the site’s geotag.

I plan to form a series of ceramic stamps in which to explore leaving impressions at each site location. One question that I’m asking myself right now regards water. Will I allow myself to moisten sites in order to achieve better impressions and if so can I bring my own water or limit myself to water sources at or near the site. I will post about those decisions here whenever I am forced to make them.

Interestingly, when I began this Instagram account and named the project by picking a hashtag I stumbled upon another artist , Terri Dowell-Dennis, who had used the hashtag #mudquilt a few times. I did not want to bomb her beautiful hashtag so I added an ‘s’ to mine. Her works involve playing around with symmetry of photographs of mud to create textile like effects. She has some other pieces which she calls ‘markings’ that are of a similar nature.

I am choosing not to follow anyone or add any hashtags to my posts at this time, nor am I posting about or linking to it from my larger personal Instagram account. I want to know what will happen if I allow this project to develop organically and fully free from the pressure of developing a social media presence. The project will be visible and can be located from this website and I will also be experimenting with signing and numbering each site with an impression. If anyone finds the site they will be able to locate the project by following the tag.

I think this has the potential to develop into a collaborative project by sharing ceramic stamps with others and receiving stamps from them in exchange. I could host an event and invite the public to participate in the making of a quilt, etc. This could add another layer of meaning not only to the process but also contribute to the understanding of the main premise.

Applying for BFA In Ceramics

In January I decided to return to university to complete my degree. The boys are older, we are planning a move back to the mountains, I really didn’t have that much course work left to complete, and I decided that if I was going to finish I should just do it.

Yeah, 2020 was the perfect year to turn my life and our homeschool upside down to try and finish my degree…

I eased myself in during Spring semester with only two classes - a Liberal Studies general ed requirement and a Digital Media Design class. Maybe I’ll share more about my coursework and experience with those classes some other time. Enter in the worldwide pandemic and all classes moved online. We had to rearrange the entire household to give my husband an office with the door and get everyone online for school, music lessons, etc. Turmoil…

I had hope that we would be back on campus for the summer. I had planned an independent study in Ceramics to help me get my bearings again with clay before beginning projects classes– it had been almost 20 years! Like most of our plans for this year they were just washed away. There was a smaller class offered remotely this summer called Topics in Ceramics. It was a lovely little class with several fun projects. Also during the summer the boys and I dug and processed clay from our creek and drove to Virginia to buy a kick wheel. I’ll tell you all about each of them in turn some other time.

This Fall Semester I have been attempting to carry out the Independent Study that I had planned for the summer. Enter a huge tree falling on our house knocking a hole in the boys bedroom during Jae Emerling’s lecture on Surrealism. Just when I was getting the insurance stuff sorted out with that disaster I was rear-ended on the way home from a photography workshop sponsored by Atkins Library. It totaled my car, gave me whiplash and gave me a second baptism of insurance paperwork, phone calls and emails. And of course this happened during the two weeks I had set aside to put together my portfolio slideshow for my BFA review. I pulled it together but just barely! You can take a look at the slideshow here:

BFA in Ceramics Presentation

I’m now digging deep and pressing forward to complete as much work as I can for my Independent Study. I set up a smorgasbord of things to play around with during this semester. In some ways it is very much akin to a sampler quilt. I’m gathering together as many techniques and ideas as I can to give me things to pull from in upcoming projects and thesis classes.