Halla's Polymer Clay Room

When my good friend Holly, an Army doctor, transferred to Bosnia, she wanted a special touch of home for her cramped quarters and office. For her that meant having a mezuzzah on the door post. She wanted me to do them in polymer clay. Knowing she collects hedgehog figurines and reads a lot of science fiction, my choices were obvious: a hedgehog for her home away from home and a Hugo Award style rocket for the office(not pictured). Each one has a little acrylic test tube inside to hold the scroll.

This is one of my tiny chotchkes. I usually display 17 of them at a time in a case no bigger than a sheet of copy paper, but rather deeper, of course. On my monitor, this thumbnail image is nearly life size, but you can see it bigger than life by clicking on the picture. It's made of several types of polymer clay and the sea foam glows in the dark. Sold.

Looking at these with the ruler for scale may give you a better idea about the size of my tiny friends. The concept for these comes from the typical reaction of any polymer clay artist when she/he sees a new art form. We instantly want to interpret it in clay. In this case, I saw a blurry picture of stylized Japanese dolls made from looping a single piece of flat braid. True to form, I shrunk the idea and played with it for a while, later adding things like hands and beastly heads. Their names, clockwise from upper left, are Peace, Certainty, Mantra, and Focus. They are primarily Promat clay. Peace and Certainty have been sold.

My youngest cat, Gilda, helped so much with this sculpture I just had to name it after her. She doesn't have wings, but she does resemble it in other ways. I experimented with several techniques in this, including the composition gold leaf on the wings. Over all height is about 7 inches. Worked in Super Sculpey polymer clay.

They say the gaze of a basilisk is deadly. They also say its breath can split rocks. That could make it somewhat hard to make friends. Basil can't do much about his glowing eyes, but he means to cool his breath a bit. The mint tin is real, I'm addicted to them myself, but the mint is pure polymer clay. Basil is about 8 or 9 inches tall and was tough to fit in the oven.

I hope you will have the chance to see some of my work in person at one of the shows listed in "Where's Halla?" on my Home World Page.