This next artist really helped contribute to the wonderful variety of pieces at Campbell Pottery’s Stonewall Gallery in their recent Recycle, Renew, Reuse Show. She called herself a Gourd Artist.
Jody Neugebauer is from Sandy Lake and often shows at Campbell’s. Her love of nature & animals really shows in her pieces. Current work seems African inspired especially the pieces in this show.
Jody works in many mediums. In addition to these more sculptural pieces she also does watercolor and acrylic. Just look at this piece! Its obvious she is a painter. She used a gourd as her canvas.
So with such an interesting canvas I wanted to know more. Jody has grown her own gourds but apparently with our short humid growing season they aren’t as good for carving. So she orders her gourds from California where the shells are thicker and they are dried in the sun.
But how can you use a whole gourd for carving?
They come whole from California, seeds and all, dried out. Jody then uses a attachment for a drill to clean out the gourds. She does have hand tools for carving but because the shells are so hard she often uses a Dremel to carve. Its hard to tell from the photograph above but the light brown area has alternating groups of vertical and horizontal lines.
And don’t you just love the colors. The blue string is from a bale of hay. When she saw it she knew she had to keep it for something. The Recycled Art Show was the perfect opportunity!
Now check out this next piece. She’s called “The Keeper of the Gourds.” This lady has so much personality. The gourd is banana shaped so it doesn’t stand up on its own. Jody used a soda bottle as a stand. She even used an iron to soften the edges of some ring pieces from the soda bottle. Those are the colorful additions around her waist.
Great color and expression from this ‘Keeper.” Let’s take a closer look at some surprise elements. The feet, head, and hands are made out of Apoxie sculpt. This was a first for Jody but judging by the look on her face when she was telling me about it, I think she enjoyed it.
Another surprise is that Jody even snuck in one her great loves. The hair is from her horses which happily occupy much of her time. Take a close up look at the details of the face.
Jody shows her work in several places. Including this Southwest Gourd Fine Art Show at Kerr Arts & Cultural Center. Jody recently won “best newcomer.” If you want to read more about that show, visit this site.
You can also find Jody all over the internet but here’s her website. Or I also found this site I like.
If you haven’t yet checked out the other artists in this series go ahead…
Or take the virtual field trip to the Recycled Art show with this link.
Though there were many artists in the show we only have one more in this series. I’ll introduce her next week.
Now I have a question for you… Have you ever added hair to a project?
This post contains affiliated links. Though these links aren’t for the specific tools Jody used, I thought it would be helpful to see something similar. If you purchase something after clicking on one of the links I receive a small commission. It doesn’t effect your price at all and it helps me offset some of the cost of doing this thing I enjoy.
