Notes on the June Glue Babies
a sorrowful snake, rainbow clouds, and pastel skies
I particularly love the June 2024 Glue Baby collection and thought it would be fun to post some notes on the pieces. A separate breakdown of Tiny Terra Series 14 will be out in a few weeks.
For this experimental embellished piece I wanted to take the Cotton Candy Clouds Skylmelt series colors (pastel pink, yellow, and blue) and try out an embellished look. There is also a shimmer background to this piece which has not been the case for many embellished pieces so far. This idea is one that I am still playing with, so I am not sure where it will go next.
PS: There is an unlisted video on my YouTube with the whole embellishing timelapse for this piece. Since I don’t have to make an algorithm happy for unlisted videos I got to use a really fun song that I love but that isn’t trending.
Snakes have been a recurring motif in my Glue Baby pieces for a while, but this month I wanted to make a large heavily embellished piece. The name is from a song, "So Easy," by Royksopp. It takes a sample from an old song that goes, "blue on blue, heartache on heartache." It's a song about a broken heart, but I used it for this piece that's actually about my parents. Within the course of four months, both of my parents were disabled by stokes. It's something I am only just now, years later, starting to process. Sometimes we are given heartache on heartache. Sometimes we don't get to recover before we are knocked down again.
This month I wanted to make a bigger piece in the Marshmallow Twilight series which has only had smaller pieces in it so far. I am enjoying these colors that are bold while still feeling soft. The purple shimmer on this piece is so bright in person it feels almost electric.
The third piece in my Milagro series, inspired by the milagros that my dad kept around the house when I was growing up. Red is always a color I associate with him and the first red Glue Baby that I ever made (and I have only made 5 predominantly red pieces in 4 years) is hanging in his place. I am just about done experimenting with this idea and want to do one more variation before seeing if I want to make them larger.
When I was planning the June collection I knew that I wanted a 10” x 8” traditional Glue Baby and chose to make another piece in the Starlight series. This pastel pink, lavender, and yellow color scheme never fails to make me happy. There is something so wonderfully soothing about it and I personally enjoy looking at them in my own studio space. I still have the very first piece in this series, a mini from 2023, hanging next to my desk.
I am obsessed with Terraform 8, a piece that uses the same colors as the mini La Mer that I made last month. I wanted to see how it looked on a sculpture, and, with the addition of the flowers, it ended up looking like a series of islands to me. This is a bit of a departure from my normal pastels, and this piece uses colors that I almost never use, but they look so vibrant here, especially contrasted against the white flowers. I am planning on making another, larger piece like La Mer in July.
A closeup because I cannot get enough of this piece.
This trio of Glue Baby clouds was originally made as one large cloud (right) and a pair (left and middle), but the pair didn’t look quite right together so I separated them. Once I had them all on the wall together they actually looked really lovely as a trio, but, since the goal of the Glue Baby wall clouds is for people to be able to make their own installations over time, they went home separately. It does make me happy to know that even seemingly disparate cloud pieces can still look like they belong together.
Thank you all for reading and if you enjoy this type of closer look at monthly collections please let me know! I would be happy to keep posting them.