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Darrin Bark: Cherokee Artist and Potter

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  • Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 1 START OF DARRIN BARK INTERVIEW Tonya Carroll: Today is Wednesday March the 3rd, 2010 we’re at Qualla Arts and Crafts in Cherokee, NC with Darin Bark. What traditional Cherokee crafts do you make? Throughout interview Darrin is sketching in a sketchbook. Darrin Bark: Traditional Cherokee crafts probably would be sculpting, I just picked that up here recently, stone work, smaller pieces mainly. But as far as traditional that would probably be about it. I have done pottery, but it’s more contemporary. Could you hold on a second. Yeah, I haven’t done traditional work I don’t think. I don’t think drawing is considered traditional either, traditional drawing. TC: Are you ready? David Brewin: Yeah, TC: Can you talk a little bit about your contemporary artwork? DB: Yeah, I use a lot of ancient patterns from the Mississippi period. A lot of symbols or even [swift creek] designs I use them with blackware with the high polish and mainly miniature pieces. I have been trying to work larger. It’s contemporary style but with you know ancient patterns, ancient designs. TC: Can you describe to me how you make a piece of pottery from the start to the finish? DB: Well I’ll take just a ball of clay and just round it out in what you would call pinch style where you just take your thumb and pinch it. Just build up the walls and pull, push and pull. And then eventually you have a small vessel and then you would go back and shave it down after it’s leather dry. Use a dry wash grasp and shave it down and then you would, after it dries further, probably to completely dry you would take sandpaper and sand it a little bit more and make it more round. After that is done you would take a cloth and wipe it off, wipe it down. And from there you can polish it using hematite or just any kind of polish stone and we’ll take those and polish it. I think the traditional style was river rocks. Our ancestors would pass down their polishing stones to the younger potters and they would pick it up as sort of a relic. TC: Where do you get the clay that you use? DB: Right now the clay that I use it’s a contemporary, not contemporary… the contemporary work that I do we use the commercial clay. But the traditional style we have… it comes out of Georgia, somewhere in Georgia, but we buy it though rather than dig it. But in our class, our ceramics class we’re being taught to go out and dig our own clay and how to process it and refine it. You have to screen it and get out all the little Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 2 pebbles out of it and grit and sand. It’s just you know different formulas that you can make. You can use mussel shells or there’s even mica, put mica in it, or sand. There’s a whole different process. I’m just now learning about it. But my contemporary work, our clay we get our own mix and we have people make it for us. TC: When you use designs in your pottery, how do you put the designs on? DB: What I do is I use a couple books, [Hero Hawks] and Open Hands is a good source and Sun Circle and Human Hands I think that’s what it’s called. What I do is I take a few of those pictures and sort of make them my own rearrange them somehow. Sometimes I’ll use the original pictures and just create my own designery on it. Sort of you know a lot of those symbols mean things so I really wouldn’t want to change them, but you know just changing the shape and using it with different designs. Sometimes I’ll make up my own, but I’ll still want to use what those patterns, I want to represent those patterns somehow. I know they represent something that’s a language, it’s sort of a… there’s a science behind it too, the language TC: When you put the designs on do you put them on before you fire the pot or after you fire, DB: Oh I do it after so what I do is I take just a Venice pick and after it’s fired we would take this and just draw it on there with a pencil and just take a Venice pick and go over it that. Or if you want you could do it before, but you would want to use a little carving tools and carve it out before you fire it. Which I haven’t really worked on, Joel Queen has, he’s our instructor so I’m going to learn a little bit more on that. TC: Do you ever use paddles to put designs on? DB: Right now I’ve been, not really, mostly right now I’ve been learning how to throw on a wheel, but I think by the end of the semester we’ll probably pick up some of the traditional work using paddles and using Lizella Clay from Georgia. TC: Since you’re learning how to go out and get your own clay, can you talk a little bit about how you find where good place to do that is? DB: Oh a lot of times you want to look around river banks, there’s usually a vein, what we call a vein, and it would run along side the river and it’s we have a blue clay here. And there’s different types, I don’t know all of them. There’s a white clay that lives around my mother’s house. We tried to dig it up a long time ago, but there was so much of it you know it would have dug out the whole bank on her road so we didn’t want to that. It’s a lot of work. Um, mostly around river banks I think is where you could find it. I think a lot of the older people that they have their own little vein that they probably keep secret. They don’t want people just coming and taking their clay. Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 3 TC: If you need a break any time. I would say that we could try to open these doors because I know under those lights it gets really hot, but I think the alarm goes off, do you want me to see if they can turn the heat off in here. DB: Yeah, that would work. I’m dying under this heat. TC: That’s how Geraldine was, she was getting real hot too. David Brewin: They just turned the heat off, so here’s new white sound. TC: Can you explain to me how you fire your pottery? DB: Yeah, a lot of times I’ll use soup cans, just regular soup cans. First we’d fire them first, burn all of the coating whatever it is, just the… we put it in the ground, just our cans, six cans or four to hold up a piece of steel. I used to make my own boxes out of roofing material, you know the steel roofs or the metal roofs off of old buildings. We use old tin and make a box out of them. We put those old soup cans we make a lid for it, we’d fire underneath it, all the way around it and what that will do, it kept the flame from touching our pots. And we use horse manure to turn it black. What was funny about that, if the horse eats more grass, the blacker the pots will get. So it was good to have a horse that you know ate mostly grass instead of hay. So we would try to find a horse that was mostly eating grass. That was pretty funny about it. But it added a lot to our pieces and sometimes you would get a silver look, like almost like a mirror finish. That’s what I strive for. It had a lot to do with the air, how dry the air is. So that has a lot to do with how your pots turn out. As far as firing today I use, I still use soup cans once in awhile, but I have been using barbeque grills, I’ve used those. And I use old iron skillets and I haven’t got completely used, I haven’t completely got rid of using the cans. I still use them with the smaller stuff, the bigger stuff I’ll use like a barbeque grill, a big 50 gallon barbeque grill, and pine wood, we use a lot of pine and horse manure. TC: Do you just rub horse manure on the pot? DB: No, what we do is see we’ll dry it out first, it’s got to be real dry. What I do is I’ll store it in big metal containers, trash cans or something and we’ll just shovel it out and put it in with the pots put it on a big blower or on top of it and as the fire gets hot enough it causes some kind of chain reaction, what it is is carbon, you’re burning carbon so it absorbs all the smoke into the pots. I don’t the science behind it, but once it’s finished and everything is into ashes you can pull out the pieces and they’re real black. Sometimes they get jet black like this and it’s a process I’ve been learning, I’m still learning, I’ve noticed that it is good to fire like around here probably in September, October, early fall, because the air is real dry. That helps out a lot. I’ll do a lot of my firing then, my best pieces come out of late fall. Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 4 TC: How long does the whole process take, the firing, the actually making the pottery, and letting it dry out? DB: From beginning to end it’s probably a two week process. We start from either pinching the pots or coiling the pots and then actually sanding ‘em polishing them that right there takes hours. So what I do is I like it’s kind of like factory work, I’ll do a whole set at one time, 15, 20 pieces. And once I have those finished and ready to fire I put them in the oven and while they’re in the oven heating, I’ll have some more that I’ll be working on over here, so it’s a continuous process, but from start to finish it’s probably about two weeks for me, but I can do it in half that time, if I push it, but I like to work on 15, 20 at a time. TC: Do you know how the burning process worked traditionally, how they did that a long time ago. DB: Yeah, I think they would have built they would stack their wood up, the pine wood and make a little fort around it, a house around it you know and they would make like seven sides, this is just one type of firing. And once it burned down, those coils, you’d already have a bed of coils on the ground, and you’d set your pots on top of that then you would build your seven sided little house around it out of pine wood and it’ll fall. The thing about that was, whenever I tried it, those pieces would fall in on the pottery and break it, like chip the pieces, the rims or something so that was an issue. But I have heard of people that would put them in the ground and fire them. And I met a man somewhere in Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia, some old hippy guy, his name is Michael. But he’d actually was firing them in the ground, he was putting them in the ground and firing on top. He had like a whole set up of some that had broke, different types, different types of firing. It was just odd to meet someone, somebody that was doing it the old Cherokee style. TC: So how did you learn to make pottery? DB: Hold on, can I take a break now. David Brewin: Camera’s rolling. TC: How did you learn how to make your pottery? DB: Well I was self taught basically. Well Joel Queen he was the one that sort of put me in that direction. He taught me how to pinch them and polish them. But as far as the style that I picked up on it was just from reading books. I read a lot of books. [Marina Martinez] book and a lot of just contemporary pottery from you know the library. Just trial and error. Same way with firing, just trying different things. TC: Are you related to Joel? DB: Yeah, he’s my first cousin. Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 5 TC: Do you know why you became interested in making pottery? DB: Well, I’ll just go ahead and say it was because of money that was the biggest issue. Because of my drawings I couldn’t sell them and I had I started a family and I was, I didn’t want to be a bum, so I just thought well I didn’t want to be a bum so I just thought well I need to make some money, so I started pottery. And I did a show here with Joel one day and I was doing paintings and drawings, everybody liked them, they loved them, they loved how I did them, but nobody bought anything and I looked over at Joel and he was selling left and right and I thought well I’m in the wrong business. So I thought well I’ll try it out and see if I can sell them. Sure enough, as soon as I made little small ones they were just 5 or 10 dollars, they sold fast. So I thought, well I might as well, you know I want to be an artist, I don’t want to be a broke artist, I’m already a starving artist but as far as making money that was the way to go. A lot of people don’t like to hear that, but it’s just the simple truth. TC: Did you ask Joel to teach you, or did he [inaudible] DB: I never did ask him, well I asked him but before he would always tell me you need to start doing other things, branching off, do other things. So I was stubborn then I figured, well I’ll just see what he’s talking about. It took me a few years to get to where I was… start where I could sell them a lot faster. Instead of taking them to places and trying to push them on people, people actually now they are starting to look for me after 8 years, I think it's been about 8 years. TC: Did you learn how to make any of the Cherokee crafts in school? DB: Yeah, Eileen Stemper was our teacher in one of my classes, so I took her class I learned beadwork. Then we actually had a pottery class in there and I remember I really liked it. But people was always stealing, when we put our work in the kiln somebody was always stealing it, so I must have been pretty good at it if somebody was stealing it. But she was a big inspiration on me as far as beadwork and pottery. I would still take her class if she would offer it outside of high school, I would still take her class. TC: Can you tell me just a little bit about, you mentioned that you made drawings, can you talk about that? DB: Yeah, drawing was my first love, I’ve always been drawing since I can remember. Whenever I was in high school, I did a drawing for my teacher, Reba Elders and she sent it to I forget where she sent it off to, but this was it, this was the drawing I did, 20:24 it won first place I was a junior in high school David Brewin: Hold it right there, let me get a close up of that. DB: But his is Maggie [Witchacha], she was an interpreter for a tribe in I think it was I forget the name of the art show, but Charles Taylor was the governor at the time, he was sponsoring the art show and it got first place. And I was surprised, it was the only Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 6 drawing, the rest of them are paintings and everything else, but I got to represent Cherokee high school. And they sent it to Washington D.C. it was in the white house for a whole year in 96 to ’97. After we got it back my teacher made prints, made copies of it and they started selling and that kind of turned me onto drawing as being professional with it, the business side of it. I learned a lot just from this one drawing. TC: And how old were you? DB: I was 17. TC: After high school, did you go anywhere else to school for art? DB: I went to Santa Fe, IAIA for a semester. And then I got into some tax trouble so I never did go back and by the time I got out of my tax issue with the IRS I had family. So I had to work so I did drawings on the side. But like I said before it was hard it was hard to sell them. Unless they were… unless they were like something on commission. I did one for the hotel when they first put the first hotel tower in I did a drawing of the chief. Most of my work is from commission, so they’re in private collections and probably they’re all over. I think [Doraid] has one, they’re several the tribe homes, just from all over probably different living rooms. What I was known for is when somebody passed away they would want me to do the drawing of that person that recently passed away. So a lot of my work was doing people that were dead. So that’s what I was known for. TC: Are you passing on any of the crafts to younger generations? DB: Yeah, I have several nieces and my son and daughter, they’re very interested. I do a lot, I teach them a lot. Everything I know I’ll teach them. If anybody’s interested I’ll teach them. I’ll just help them along. I try to encourage them to create their own style. What I do is I try to help them along, doing their own style of work. That way they’re more, instead of doing what everybody else’s doing be more distinct, be more of an individual. TC: So where do you get the idea that the inspiration for things that you make? DB: From history, from emotions, just feelings, I hear a lot of stories from people that I meet. Even traveling, just reading a lot of history. Probably from our people, a lot of our history from our people. There are certain things that people are known for and I’ll try to… I’ll try to understand their perspective on things. Mostly inspiration, emotions. TC: Can you tell me how you felt the first time you finished your first piece of pottery? DB: It’s been so long ago. It’s been awhile, probably since, you mean pottery? TC: Well anything the first time you finished your first drawing, how you felt about it, or even particularly one that stands out in your mind. Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 7 DB: Well there are a lot of drawings, I’ve done cartoon drawings you know I’ll try to capture humor in it and people will see it and if somebody will laugh by looking at it they understand the point I was trying to get across. And just that, that inspires me to keep doing it. But no it’s just a good feeling. It’s like even though when a drawings finished, the work isn’t done necessarily you still got to sell it and all that stuff. A lot of times, even if it don’t sell, if I just get a reaction from a person, somebody walks along they’ll actually take them in and look at it. Just their reaction, even if it makes them mad, or sappy, sappy [laugh] happy, happy or sad, you know either way, it’s just, either way, that’s where I draw my inspiration is from what people think of my work. Can I take another break? TC: Can you describe how you felt the first time someone paid you for your artwork? DB: Joy probably, that’s probably yeah, because I would have done it for free, somebody’s paying me that just made it even better. TC: Can you recognize your own work if you see it? DB: Yeah, yeah, there’s mostly I do the blackware. There has been times though whenever I’ve asked somebody, who’s work that is and they’ll say that’s yours. And I’m like. Look of disbelief and shaking head. When it was just plain black. But yeah, I can recognize it now. TC: Do you have a certain signature you use every time? DB: Mostly I do what you call incising, etching. Mostly like these small ones like this they’re incised, or etched with Venice picks or something. But as far as a distinct pattern I like the [coffin] pattern, it’s basket design I use it a lot on my pottery. I don’t think there’s one here. That’s my favorite pattern, it’s been with me since I started. TC: Can you just kind of tell me what you think the importance of your artwork, what the meaning behind if for yourself and maybe even the tribe? DB: Well I incorporate a lot of history in my work so it’s something from the past and the present. I’m hoping in the future people will look back and draw inspiration from what I’ve done while I was here. So hopefully I’ll be remembered I hope. Hopefully I’ll have something to offer the next generation. Just the same way I see is ancient works is you know generations past they’re still speaking to us. Just like how do you talk to a dead person, you go to a library, there’s all kinds of dead people talking to you, you just got to pick a book up and read it. It’s the same way I feel about art. It’s your legacy, it’s all you got whenever you’re gone, is your name. TC: Do you consider yourself a Cherokee tradition bearer? DB: Cherokee tradition what? Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 8 TC: Bearer or holder DB: Cherokee tradition yeah. I hold these a lot of what is Cherokee, our stories, our cultures, I hold that sacred. It means a lot to me, and hopefully it comes out in my work. People will be able to understand it and at least draw something from it. So yeah, I would think so. TC: How does it make you feel that people within the tribe consider you the tradition bearer? DB: It makes me feel, it gives me a sense of belonging, actually a part of something bigger than myself. Even my children, I want them to be proud of what I was even after I’m gone. I’d rather we know of artists that are dead and gone, we still consider them Cherokee and I’d want to be remembered the same way. TC: Are you worried about the Cherokee crafts and artwork dying out? DB: No, I don’t think they will. I think, I think, I’d like to see I’d like to see a renaissance with Cherokee art. I’d like to see it flourish like it should. But we’re not going anywhere I think. We’re not going no where, we’ve always been here. Art it’s… reflects life and as long as we’re here, our arts going to be here to stay too. TC: Can you tell me a few ways that you know of that people are trying to carry on the art work. I know you mentioned taking a ceramics class? DB: What do you mean different ways to? TC: The classes, can you talk about the Art Institute a little. DB: The Art Institute. We’re just now getting off the ground a little bit. Hopefully we’ll get more students we’ve jumped100% of our students. We only had 15, I don’t even think we had… I think we had like 10 last semester. I think now it’s up to 18, 18 or 20 so hopefully, we’re teaching people their own, their history. We have a cultural anthropology class taught by Mrs. Abrahms. She’s came down, she’s taught, we learned a lot from her class. Hopefully we’ll have… it will just keep growing. Like our ceramics class, we’re learning contemporary style and the Cherokee traditionally style, the stamp pottery. We’re learning stone work, there’s a lot of history behind a lot of the work we’re doing right now. And we’re actually going to have a letter press here in the next, in the fall semester. We’ll be doing what the Cherokee phoenix was doing the same style, with each little letter creating our own books, so I’m kind of excited to see where that will go. So it has a lot of potential. It’s defiantly going to go somewhere, it’s the only other Native American art school beside AIAI. TC: You’ve talked a lot about how you like to read history and you mentioned in your classes you’re learning about Cherokee history and making your artwork, can you explain why that is important to know? Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 9 DB: Well I think it is important to teach, in order to teach you gotta have that background, you gotta know what you’re talking about. A lot of times when I do these shows, people don’t understand what I’m about so I teach them. They don’t understand that at one time we were… there were cities here at one time. All up and down the Mississippi river people don’t understand that. And when I mention that they look at me sideways like I’m crazy. But yeah we had contact with Meso America. So we were more advanced than people realize or give us credit for. So it’s good to know that, it’s good to know how rich our culture is. Or was. It still is, just teaching the public that is very important that they know. TC: Okay, can you just tell me a little bit about your stone work that you’ve recently started in? DB: So far it’s beat my hands up real good. My hands are beat up all time, but it’s addictive, you know it’s a [learned] process. And our students are doing real well, everybody works, everybody turns they’ll finish something, get started on something new, we just continue learning. Yeah, it’s fun. It’s almost like the stone speaks to you, tells you what it is, so you just it’s that interaction. It’s almost therapeutic in a way. TC: I know personally I’ve seen you in the paper a few times and seen all your ribbons at the fair, can you talk a little bit about the awards that you’ve won with your artwork? DB: Always get third place in my work, unless it’s pottery, I’ll get first. But I don’t like to I don’t like to enter the fair every year and take first I’ll enter once and then I’ll lay off a year and then I’ll start, every other year I’ll enter, but I always like to have different things. To be able to… each shows I want to have different pieces for each show. But as far as winning awards, it’s it brings in the jealousy factor when you do that. Whenever you try to get all the awards and things like that, it’s just, it almost poisons the creativity, because it’s not about creating anymore, it’s about competition, it’s more about I’m better than you, or they’re better than me so I’m going to get better, I’m gunna win next year. It’s all about that blue ribbon. It’s just, I don’t know, it’s plastic, it’s fake. I’d rather it be pure, to be able to create, not just for… it’s like, there’s a need to create, but then there’s also a need to you have these people that look up to you and if you become all about competition, I don’t know, it’s not worth it. TC: So why do you continue to create your artwork? DB: Um, well I feel like there’s reasons for we all have our own reasons to being here so we’re all part of this society, we all have our own place in the world, I was born into it. My grandmother made baskets, my mother made baskets and I was always around that creative spirit of working, working with your hands. And I feel that’s, it’s my responsibility to keep that going even if I don’t work with baskets, I appreciate it, I’d rather be drawing or sculpting or just making pottery, anything like that, anything in the arts. Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 10 TC: Do you have any stories or other information that you’d like to add? DB: Well, yeah, probably can I take a break a second? DVD starts to skip here and through the portion of the video where he is showing his pieces. Hard to tell when I am missing something. TC: Okay. You mention traveling a lot and going to different places and setting up to show your artwork. Can you tell one of the most memorable stories form those times? DB: Well let’s see, one that sticks out was actually this year. One day and I just started doing little small pieces. I was sitting there talking and somebody come up and ask me about the civil war, whose side did you take, north or south whatever. [inaudible] I answered his question I told him basically what I knew and when I looked up there was a whole crowd of people standing like 15, 20 people there. I didn’t expect that. I just had all these people, I had their attention and I could stay what I wanted, so I started telling them a little bit of history and telling them about Emily Copper [inaudible] somebody [inaudible] and said where did they get the copper, like we were supposed to trade it with Europeans I said well there’s mines, there’s a mine in Copper Hill, Tennessee. Just by doing that I was actually teaching the public a little bit of history. Right there is a little inspiration for me to keep doing what I’ve by doing art work it opens other avenues. There’s other things, it doesn’t always be about artwork, it can open up different venues of talk. So travel, meeting different people. TC: So do you think if you’re Cherokee that you need to be able to discuss history and different parts of the culture? DB: Not necessarily, a lot of [inaudible] are real shy. One of the issues I’ve had to overcome, I haven’t overcome it it’s always been an issue, overly shy. After while there’s a [need] for Cherokees out there. We’ve had out own language, we still have it. And a lot of tribes [inaudible] because they have their own [inaudible], but then at the same time [inaudible] far more advanced than most tribes. Rather than give us credit some tribes will actually put us down for it. So I think education is… they say education is the new buffalo. TC: Do you want to [inaudible] David Brewin: Get a few shots talk about your work. Where you want to start? DB: Okay, these are blackware pieces, it’s a white earthenware it’s a white. We have our [inaudible] that work, this is just plain black. Showing shiny, black wide mouth vase about 12 inches tall. A lot of it’s easy to get [confused with] Santa Clara because a lot of those Santa Clara pueblo they’re known for the blackware. This is one of my more [inaudible] this is probably one of the only ones that remain black. I’m known for small pieces [inaudible] what I’ll do is I’ll take a Venice pick and I’ll scratch designs in. Showing piece about 2 inches tall. It has a lighter bottom with a darker rim. In the lighter Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 11 area there are darker rectangular designs with a light center. This design is a water snake design, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a water snake, sometimes they’ll have that [on them]. This one I tried to etch as much as I could. It’s really light. That’s a water snake design. [inaudible] friendship pattern, Cherokee friendship. Showing small vessel about 1 inch tall with lid. It fits in his fingers and is dark in color with a band of triangles, right side up and upside down next to each other with lines through them. You see this design all over the world, I’m sure it has different meanings in different parts, but here in Cherokee it means it represents friendship. David Brewin: Hold it kind of like that for me. Hang on. Alright. That’s good. TC: [inaudible] oh [laugh] DB: This is more of a [inaudible] you have the two tone. Showing piece about 6 inches tall. Orange on one side and darker on the other. It is a rough feeling vessel with a lid. So the flame would have hit it and the flame [rubbed] the carbon off on this side. This is just what you do is take a piece of clay water it down and just paint, paint it on there. Just almost like the water snake design. David Brewin: Is that hand built? DB: Yeah, this is hand built. What I’ll do is have it in my hand holding pot and making pinching motions pulling up to the top of piece and pull up. And this is the lid for it. It’s a coil piece. Holding up a piece that is about 10 inches tall. It is darker with a band of light color along bottom and near top. In the center are two light colored designs repeating all the way around. One is a tree shape and the other circular. And this represents the light, showing the pine tree shaped design and this represents the earth showing the circular design. You can tell how it’s been fired some of the carbons been burned off. Patches of light inside the dark vessel. David Brewin: Hold it just a second. DB: Yeah I just recently started doing more of these bigger ones, these bigger pieces, before I was going for these little ones like this. Holding up a small piece. So hopefully I’ll be able to produce more bigger pieces like that. David Brewin: What do you enjoy the most? DB: Probably painting is probably my... drawing was my first love. I love to paint, but it’s hard, when you have a family you have to support your family you’ve gotta earn. So pottery though, I really enjoy doing pottery, I don’t see myself slowing down anytime soon. Hopefully we’ll be able to have more sculptures too, stone sculptures, even wood. I haven’t ever really started any wood, but stone is a good place to learn I guess. My teacher John Grant and he’s showed us a lot. David Brewin: What sizes are you working with in stone? Darrin Bark Transcript March, 2010 Mountain Heritage Center 12 DB: Well we started in January we did little pieces, holding up fingers about three inches apart. I did one little one and from there we did another piece about that big can’t see size, hand is off camera and here lately we’ve got one that’s about that big. So hopefully by the end of the semester we’ll even be working on bigger pieces. Four feet tall. Hopefully if we can get the stone. David Brewin: What kind of stone are you using? DB: Some type of soap stone, it’s real soft, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s brown and white. We started off with soapstone, haven’t really got into the heavier stones, not yet, but I’m sure we will though. We haven’t even got the exhaust system put in over there, so we can’t fire up our kilns yet, we’re having to take them to Joel’s shop burn our pottery there. But we’ll get there eventually. David Brewin: Is that where you do most of your work? DB: Half the time I do. I do half my work there, then I do, as soon as I leave there I’ll go home and work. So I do most of my bigger stuff there, my bigger pieces sculptures and at least there I can make a mess I don’t have to worry about anything. At home I got to worry about kids climbing on me and wanting to help me and get in the way. I let them work though, they can work as long as they’re learning. They may get better than me soon. TC: Do you have any thing else that you want to talk about? DB: Not really I think that’s about it. END OF DARIN BARK INTERVIEW
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