I took a course with Shawn Spangler recently, called Throw and Alter. Here is a progression I went through in the early weeks of the class. Apologies in advance some of these photos are dim.
Following my teacher's demonstration, I threw a bowl with a hollow lip--a neat way to add some volume to your piece without adding a lot of extra weight. Then, I altered it by pressing a rib into the lip in four places. This had a way of making it look slightly puffy.
I made another bowl and did this again but tried to exaggerate the effect, this time pressing the the rib in further, so the four puffy parts even look like lobes, which you can see from the top. I also pushed out from inside the bowl a bit, thinking I was squaring out the piece but I don't know that achieved the desired effect. But anyway, you have to show the clay who's boss sometimes.
I then tried to get more extreme, and threw a bowl with an even larger hollow lip. When pressing down with the rib, I actually cut through the rim, which really emphasized the fat, puffy form. It is starting to look like an inflated raft or link sausages or something. On a larger scale, this could be a very impressive centerpiece bowl, or could have a handle across the top and be a quirky ceramic basket.
I really like this idea of making hollow components to my work, giving it a fun chunkiness but without heaviness.
Since taking the course at WBDC (see the post from November) I have been working on setting up a shop on Etsy.com. My profound thanks to my friends for their feedback and advice. I feel ready to start telling people about it. Introducing Snowday Ceramics!
Several people had suggested names for the shop, and I need to give credit to Lindsay Berman for coming up with this one. It evokes what I want my pottery to be about: comfort, being at home, delight and a little surprise. A bundle of marshmallows in a mug of cocoa. You are the marshmallow.
Etsy is a website that is a marketplace for handmade goods. In addition to pottery and ceramics you can find an astounding number of other items such as jewelry, paintings, photography, dolls, soap, purses, aprons, greeting cards, neckties, magnets, candles, amigurumi, furniture, beads, hats, needlepoint, stickers, dog treats, yarn... all made by hand.
What else is next? This year I'd like to show work in another consignment shop in addition to VIX Emporium, and also participate in the craft fairs I did last summer (see posts from June and May) as well as one or two new ones, perhaps in a different city. And overall to stay productive and focused, build upon what I've started, try new things, be happy that I'm doing something I like to do.
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.
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.
We bought our first house and have been having new floors installed.
That sentence doesn't even begin to explain what a time-consuming process each of these things has been. Not to mention the World Series and Election Day; so while I had good intentions of more blog posts this fall, it just didn't happen.
I did, however, start taking a course through an organization called the Women's Business Development Center. It's called JumpStart, a series of classes that goes over stuff you'd want to know to start your own business. I do sell my pottery casually through word of mouth, and at the two craft fairs earlier this year, but I would like to have more focus as I go about it, I'd like to get myself together to create a store on etsy.com, get my work into some more galleries and shops (p.s. I do have ware at VIX Emporium now), and eventually turn this into a livelihood and leave my part time job. I thought taking this class would help me devise my exit plan by helping me clarify my thoughts about what I am doing, and give me more confidence as well.
One of the most applicable things I've gotten from this class has been to write a mission statement. Probably for the last year I have been trying to understand what my work is about, and have attempted to write a satisfying artist's statement. I think going over the mission statement in class helped me understand what the point of an artist's statement is (or could be): as a way to articulate your values while describing what you do. I think in the case of art, you tend to figure it out in conjunction with the making of the work. But that in turn means sometimes you need to stop making, and pause to reflect upon what you have made. I need to reflect more.
In class we did an exercise where we broke into groups and wrote a sample mission statement. Our group just made up a business (a holistic spa) and wrote the mission statement on that. It was helpful to do, and it came together rather easily. One thing we noticed was that once we had written the statement, the made-up name for the spa didn't really fit anymore, an example of how the mission statement ends up guiding the business.
I went home and tried to write one for myself. I wanted to convey that I make ceramics for casual use in people's homes, not precious or fragile, and that there is something uncommon about it, a little odd, or off, and perhaps humorous, but still well-made. I also like to think that many of my pieces have specific identities and I know sometimes I feel like I have a relationship with my mugs and bowls. People always have a favorite mug.
So far I've got: "Carol Han Ceramics produces handmade ceramic items that are made with care and attention to craft, but also live comfortably with you in your home, bringing an upbeat and offbeat attitude to your life."
I sort of want to call the business something other than Carol Han Ceramics, which sounds a little formal and doesn't really say anything about the work other than someone named Carol Han probably made it. I've already spent plenty of time working on it, but although I have some ideas, don't think I've nailed it just yet.
I went to Peters Valley Craft Center for a 2-day workshop with Ayumi Horie, who is a ceramic artist whose work I like very much. She makes functional stuff, cups, bowls, plates, out of red clay that she covers in white slip (sometimes other colors too) and scratches through to make drawings of animals. The bunnies, monkeys, whales, and birds are charming. Often small spots of bright colored glaze are added.
I've always been drawn to how loose, soft, and unworried her work is, there's sort of a bold imperfection to it. Her pot construction looks a little sloppy, like for example she doesn't erase burrs and crumbs from the surface of the clay, but maybe just pushes them down a little so they won't be sharp, or like how the place where the handle meets a cup has a seam, not trying too hard to smooth it to perfection. When she dips her pots in slip you can tell she didn't fuss with tongs, there are finger marks that show she just held it with her own hand and dunked.
At the same time, I once helped unpack a shipment of her work at The Clay Studio, and it was PERFECTLY well packed, the boxes were filled really nice and tight, careful attention to teapot spouts and handles, and this was the first time I witnessed the brilliant use of narrow film wrap to secure the bubble wrap.
So I really wanted to meet this artist who seems to run a very professional studio and effective website(where she sells most of her work- and it sells out, people), but at the same time, makes work that is playful, loose, and fun. It seems like a great combination to have.
Because clay is fun, and while I know there is a part of me that is very serious, and perfectionist, and gets stressed out, I seem to remember that there was a time when I was a more whimsical and joyful person, and I think part of what I am trying to do with clay is reconnect to that old part of me, before she got beaten down by school, and office jobs, and loss of love, and credit card debt, and lack of health insurance. The good news is these things are no longer active parts of my life right now, but the bad news is I got kind of dried out in the meantime.
Clay is moist. There was a studio tech at Peters Valley, who, every time he opened a new bag of clay for us would breathe it in deeply and say, "Aahhh". The smell is like being on a dewy mountain at dawn.
Ayumi demoed her "dry throwing" technique, where in fact the clay is moist, fresh, and soft, but the idea is to make pots on a wheel without adding water. It's like trimming away and scooping out everything that is not part of the pot, and also some stretching and pushing it out with ribs. She said she originally started doing it in order to deal with tendonitis in her wrists, but also likes it because there are marks you can make this way that you'd be unlikely to achieve through wet throwing. For example, she'll use the edge of a credit card to press a line into the outside of the her clay cylinder; then later when pushing the wall out, that hard line will soften, warp, and open up.
I played around with this technique the first night, it sort of lends itself to making chunky pots, which is fun. (chunky is fun!) But it's a little distressing to have so much "wasted" clay. In her studio Ayumi has an assistant who immediately takes her trims and scoops and wedges it up to use again.
The other parts of the workshop included some exercises and slide/video/lecture. Maybe I would have liked a little more time for exercises. There were these slab tiles that were AROUND the studio all weekend, being moved from shelf to table to shelf again, and dipped in slip, and the techs were HANDLING them and preparing them ALL weekend, and I kept anticipating this exercise we were going to do with all these tiles, and we didn't get to it till the very end of the 2nd day (it was a mark-making exercise). I could have used one less slide show in order to have more hands-on time. I did skip the Peters Valley slide show the first night in order to spend a few hours in the studio to play around and try stuff out. That was good. I don't usually let myself play. Playing around is something I ought to do more if I want to loosen up, soften up, and if am concerned about seeking my own style, or distinct vocabulary, for my work.
The slide lectures were a good way to see a lot of pots made by lots of different potters. It made me consider many adjectives and words I would or wouldn't want people to associate with my work. Or me, for that matter. That's something about making stuff that falls under the category of "art", it ends up being an extension of you, or at least an expression of you. I hear potters say to make "honest pots", I guess because it's going to be the most convincing way.
She also showed us a fascinating movie, Isaac Button, Country Potter, a B&W silent film document of the last potter at one of the last England countryside potteries. He did everything from digging the clay out of the ground, to throwing and glazing all the pots, to shoveling coal (coal!?) into the kiln. I found an excerpt from it on You Tube.
His pot-making responded to the needs of a different lifestyle; the pottery had been there for centuries making ware for the villagers' every day use. It forces you to think about your own work in this context. No one who buys a mug from me "needs" it in the sense that he'd be out of luck for drinking, otherwise. So why do I make, and what other needs shall I fulfill? The industrial design student in me hopes my pots would provide interesting solutions. Must think about this more. More later.
I spin lumps of clay into useful objects. Most of my work is done at The Clay Studio in Old City. For more about me, visit the links for Snowday Ceramics below!
Following my teacher's demonstration, I threw a bowl with a hollow lip--a neat way to add some volume to your piece without adding a lot of extra weight. Then, I altered it by pressing a rib into the lip in four places. This had a way of making it look slightly puffy.
I made another bowl and did this again but tried to exaggerate the effect, this time pressing the the rib in further, so the four puffy parts even look like lobes, which you can see from the top. I also pushed out from inside the bowl a bit, thinking I was squaring out the piece but I don't know that achieved the desired effect. But anyway, you have to show the clay who's boss sometimes.
I then tried to get more extreme, and threw a bowl with an even larger hollow lip. When pressing down with the rib, I actually cut through the rim, which really emphasized the fat, puffy form. It is starting to look like an inflated raft or link sausages or something. On a larger scale, this could be a very impressive centerpiece bowl, or could have a handle across the top and be a quirky ceramic basket.
