Nature's Tower was created in the earlier half of 2009. It was one of two pieces I had to do for my ceramics I class at the college. This project required two pieces to be made; one that was a hard slab piece using a minimum of 6 clay slabs and a soft slab piece with the same rules and restrictions as the hard slab piece. Nature's Tower is the soft slab piece. The overall piece for that I made was something I was freely allowed to come up with. The whole "Nature's Tower" concept developed after a significant amount of progress was made and was not thought of from the very beginning. The whole idea comes from of what I see in this piece. To me, I saw something that looked like it was a great tower of a monument of man's creation that over time, after neglect and abandonment has been taken over by nature. I visited the Man vs. Nature concept before in a photograph and have since done it with other ceramic pieces.

Like I was saying, Nature's Tower started out as a class assignment to create a soft slab ceramic piece that had at least a minimum of 6 slabs (this had more than that however). The basic form was based off a small clay model I built and was made from clay (can't remember the brand our class used. I have to find out and edit this later) which was flattened on a slab roller (a machine I accidentally put out of commission for a few days). Since I was working with soft slabs, I was able to easily bend and shape the piece however I wanted, yet the clay on the bottom had to dry to an extent before I was able to build it up. I added additional line designs to this by simply making slice marks with a wooden knife. I had to do this when the form was built, but when the clay was still fairly soft. Since the piece a a slab used at the very bottom, I had to place the air holes I needed to prevent the piece from exploding in the kiln, so I placed them in between the scratch marks to make them harder to notice. After the clay form was fired in the kiln shed, I implied several different glazes and gently painted them on there with only one coat for each color. So, instead of having one dominant color, I had light coats of green colors, yellow, crimson, metallic black, and I believe I may have use bronze and Ocean Blue, but I can't quite remember. As a result, when the piece was fired again (it was gas fired the second time), the colors blended into what you see now, which is a distinct style for a lot of the ceramic work I've done up to this point.

Although I have done quite a bit of sculpting work in the past, I really didn't start doing more ceramic based work until 2009. I also haven't worked with clay in a while since much of my sculptural work was done with material like plaster and chicken wire. Building the pieces was still easy for me. However, since I had never used any of the glazes prior to that ceramics class, I really didn't know what to expect and I just experimented. I really wanted to avoid making things that looked traditional or in the same way many other people in the class would make their work. I think my attitude was "Why should I make pots and vases all the time? Most people will use them as decorations and not actually use them for anything else and there's already so many of them, so a non-pot or bowl shaped piece will serve that same purpose, but with a sense of originality". With this particular piece, I just imagined the shape, built a small model of it, made a bigger slab piece of it, then came up with a theme for it as it progressed. Other people in the class commented on my work, saying they liked the sense of originality they got out of it. There was someone sitting next to me who said they actually liked watching me work and do the things I do. So, like I said, even though I could build things easily, I didn't know what the hell I was doing for the most part and I just experimented with different ideas and in the end, I was satisfied with what I had and everyone else in the class was amazed by what I had created, Nature's Tower being one of their favorites. It was a lot of fun.