Julia Galloway Workshop

My birthday was on Sunday, and, as a present to myself, I got my shift covered at work so that I was able to assist and attend a workshop with Julia Galloway at The Clay Studio last weekend.

Although the title of the workshop was "Porcelain Surfaces", to me, it seemed more a presentation of ways to reconceptualize pots. Through hands-on exercises, slides, and discussion she offered a variety of entry points with which to think and re-think pots.

For example, early on, she had everyone take a lump of clay and form it into a pear. Then the pears were literally deconstructed when she said to take a wire and make one cut into the pear, then rearrange the pieces. From this single action, she had us see the creation of a line and a plane, and start to gather information from these. She also looked at the rearrangements and read narratives from them, which in turn suggested the functionality of the piece (like maybe you could say two parts are cradling each other, and could lead to a cup and saucer set).

She often uses metaphor to talk about form and functional. She looks at a sugarbowl as something to "hold sweetness" and perhaps this is why she created some sugar/creamer sets that look like little beds. The sugar is stored underneath the pillow and it is nice to think of the sweetness being held by your pillow, and evokes the phrase "sweet dreams".

We looked at slides of historical pots and she pointed out how culture and values of a region can be expressed thoroughly through a pot. Different cultures even seem to have specific vectors in their pots. European pots seem to be headed Up and Islamic pots seem to be headed Out, while Chinese pots are "inhaling, and settling".

Later in the day she addressed surface decoration more directly, in a rather declarative moment that had us all scrambling for our notebooks for the truthbomb she was about to drop: all surface decoration resolves to just 4 things: dots. lines. flora. representation. We did a hands-on exercise playing with these four simple modes on porcelain tiles.

She said that you could see the form of a pot as its emotional content, while its surface provides its intellect. That made sense to me. But I wonder what it means that I find surface decoration so challenging. Usually my attempts at it seem so cheesy, or cutesy, or overly earnest. Can the same be said of my intellectual expression?

We heard a story about how she got clues on how to glaze by taking notes on the daily outfits of one of her better-dressed professors. As she says it on her website, "We put all kinds of colors and textures together when we get dressed every morning, and when it comes to glazing, I think this is a good place to start."

Even her midday lecture was not only a description of her work, but again, an offering of entry points into how she sees ceramics, art, artists. I think she might say an artist's work is ultimately a way to explore and celebrate her world. In Julia's case, she explores and celebrates beauty she sees, passion and obsessiveness, sense of place.

The show that she had spent the week installing in The Clay Studio's gallery, Quiescent, is a kind of homage to John James Audubon and his watercolor paintings of “The Birds of North America”, and is a reflection of these three things. She celebrates the beauty of his paintings, but she also really relates to his passion for his work. She pointed out that later in his life, when he realized he would not live long enough to document every bird, he started working with BOTH hands, and that level of obsession resonated with her. The installation itself suggests an enclosed garden, a quiet space. The walls are covered with bird cups, one for every bird that Audubon identified and painted. Some sit on shelves that emit birdsongs when you walk by. I think she's trying to recreate those moments outdoors where you feel totally present in the powerful stillness in between the birds calling.

She also showed other students' work in her lecture. She obviously loves seeing how these developing artists are also exploring and celebrating their worlds.

In her lecture she mentioned that she began teaching workshops in art centers in a conscious effort to offer something to community artists- the "weekend warriors"- recognizing that when your time in the studio is limited, you tend to focus on technique. Workshops are a way to bring the conceptualizing, the metaphor, the theorizing, to the work.

I realized when she said this that I had taken it for granted that this kind of knowledge would always be accessible. But in fact, I rely on artists like her being generous and enthusiastic enough to share, and I thank her for spending the day with us, lending her experience and insight.

The Meaning of Lights

I would like to genuinely thank my neighbors, many of whom went to great lengths to decorate their houses and porches with holiday string lights and variants thereof. I like to think that it is a creative and caring, if arguably excessive, behavior. Even though I myself have difficulty being excessive- and probably because of this- I quite admire excess.

My across-the-street neighbors approached their display traditionally but with a dose of glamour! On the one hand they trimmed the house neatly with evergreen and featured Nutcrackers in the window. But those dolls stand before a glimmery tinsel backdrop that reminds me of something you stood in front of for your prom photo (in a good way!) And you can't tell in this picture, but the front door was swathed in extremely glossy metallic blue wrap. It took me a moment to realize there wasn't a blue lightbulb behind the storm door. All in all, I liked how they set off Christmas motifs with an 'American Idol' theatricality.






From around the corner, another impressive display. I think my dad, who likes things to be symmetrical, would appreciate the time and effort that probably went into hanging this. The rows of lights in the windows are striking, but a bit regimented for my tastes; if I were re-doing this for them I would make them follow the pretty scallop pattern that the garland made around the porch.












I don't need everything to be symmetrical, but I do like it when neighbors in connected houses seem to be trying to make their lights match. It is a time of year to cooperate with one another, after all.












Like I said, I don't need everything to be symmetrical. I think these neighbors did something interesting, just creating noodley lines with their lights. It's like abstract art.





Meanwhile, up the street, I thought this house did a good job of signifying "snow" with their lights. So, right, the string up top where the lights are actually shaped like snowflakes allows us to read the fluttery single dots of light below as a snowscape. I guess that's Santa's head in the middle, so maybe this house was actually depicting the North Pole. Neat!








In a twist on the "icicle" style string light, this house created "frost" windows, or maybe "snow accumulating in pane corners" windows, sort of like the spray snow that often shows up in the office windows of insurance agencies and banks. But I this think this is way better.











On the next block, these guys opted for alternative lighting formats in their colorful orbs and paper stars with which they created a bold composition using both their porch and the room behind the front window. It's still festive, but perhaps asking us to contemplate the planetary, more cosmic dimensions of the holidays.











But there is also something to be said for keeping things simple.







Thanks again! Happy holidays and happy new year.

Taste of Possibilities

I found the recent "Food" issue of The New Yorker to be kind of inspiring.

Like the story by Jane Kramer about Jeff Alford and Naomi Duguin, who met in Tibet, restless and wanting to see every corner of the world, and finding a life partner in each other, and raising children while backpacking through Asia and writing articles about food, traveling and immersing themselves. But like food was just the vehicle that allowed them to do it, that structured the travels. Otherwise they live in a house in Toronto, or sometimes on the family farm in the country. It was a story about how people fashion a way of living for themselves that is on their own terms, and diverges from convention, but being comfortable in that, normalizing that, and not worrying about impossibilities.

Another thing that intrigued me about them is the fact that when they go, they stay for a while, like months at a time (they used to pack a semester's worth of homework with them so they could travel with the kids) and also they keep going back, all the time, over and over. Like Alford became enthralled by Thailand early on and has managed to get back there about once a year. I think travel feels precious to me right now, and so I would feel pressure that any trip I take be well planned and executed, so as to get the full benefit from the trip. But to go back again and again would allow you to just Absorb, and not worry about it, because you know you'll have another chance.

And the fact that they were comfortable taking their sons with them everywhere; I thought about this because Bill had recently said he'd like us to take several trips a year, and not feel like we can't go just because we have a house now, or the dog for that matter. I don't have the same wanderlust that I felt right after I'd graduated from college. I think the few months of backpacking around the Mediterranean that I did made me crave a feeling of being settled, having a neighborhood and a routine. I guess Alford and Duguin, by completely immersing themselves in foreign places, are able to get that settled, connected feeling everywhere they have gone. I don't know that I want to live a life like that right now, but I want to remember to be open to it, to see the value in that. So it doesn't one day become an impossibility.