I’m beginning this weekly blog to reflect on and keep track of the things going on in my life. I’ve kept a journal since high school, but I often come up against uncertainties as to why I’m writing in that context. Sometimes the writing feels purely cathartic in the moment and helps to give rhythm to the day. Often it helps me process and reflect on things that have been going on. I used to try to maintain a documentary approach and would be pretty meticulous about making sure to go through all the things that happened in the day. But recently it’s been a lot more abstract. I’ll focus in on something that happened and then burrow down into all the details of what I think about that thing.
One current of the shifting, changeability of my relationship to journal writing has always been the extent to which it is a private thing. I can never entirely shake the feeling that it isn’t an entirely private thing, that the act of writing it invites some idea of a reader. But sometimes that reader feels closer than others. Sometimes that other is a future version of myself, or some less articulate inner self that stays quiet but reads, sometimes it’s a friend, a partner, or a stranger.
Developing a writing practice that does some of the same things – reflects on things going on in a day to day way – but that is public, shifts the question somewhat. I may still have all those abstract readers in mind, they may still be addressed by the writing, but the deeply rooted fear (?), that nothing is really private, that any writing is going to find a reader that is not the person writing, that’s addressed, maybe put aside by letting the writing be totally accessible.
To jump right into it, the main thing that has been occupying me recently has been starting a pottery studio. This will be a one person production studio making porcelain work, at least at first. I moved to Atlanta a few months ago with my brother wanting to have some sort of art studio in which to process and move forward from my time as an MFA candidate at Goldsmiths. Within a couple weeks of getting here, I started being obsessed with the idea of opening a fully fledged production studio. The idea was very strong in me. It would keep me up at night and I couldn’t walk by an empty storefront without looking for a “for lease” sign and thinking about how it might work as a pottery.
This period lasted through until I actually started fully committing to the idea and working out what the details of realizing this plan would be. This past week I’ve been thinking about that transition a lot, wondering if I lack the enthusiasm needed to really sustain the project as a business largely because I miss that enthusiasm that started out the whole process. The feeling that has replaced the feverish enthusiasm is a mixture of frustration, anxiety, and pride. The frustration and anxiety come from the slowness of the process. A lot of the early enthusiasm was tempered by the slow, slow process of actually finding a place to lease and thinking through what it means to be responsible for a lease, for the cost of a kiln, wheel, and all the supplies that go into running a studio. The pride comes from actually tackling these issues, reaching out to people who have equipment, looking at different potential properties. It doesn’t feel like an unmanageable or unhealthy mix of emotions when doing something new and interesting which requires a different type of independence than anything I’ve done before. But it does feel very different from the initial emotions that drove me to start this project in the first place.
One thing that I often think about/notice in myself is how emotional responses often overlap each other. What started as a reaction to one thing might only become felt much later and have lost its relationship to the thing that started it. In this case, the emotional intensity I attached to wanting to start this pottery, retrospectively, feels at least partly to be the result of a more general sense of aimlessness, idleness, need to do something that had been growing in me for the last year or so without a sufficient outlet. Does tracing the emotional history of this desire to start a pottery diminish the intensity and the validity of that specific desire? Do I worry that the pottery itself will not be able to hold my attention because it is just a scape-goat for a generalised crisis of identity that comes with ending school and no-longer having the clearcut sense of direction that education offers? I guess the answer is, at least somewhat, yes.
I don’t necessarily want to try to make a happy flip side sort of thing for this. Like, “but if the emotions associated with doing something lag somewhat behind, then now you are feeling a truer version of what it is like to tackle this project. And it certainly isn’t bad, it’s stretching into new tasks and ways of relating to the world… etc.” Yes, that’s there, of course, I don’t feel that this is a wrong decision, I am excited about it and deeply committed to it. But that negativity, the scape-goat for a generalized crisis thing, is an important thing to build into how this pottery develops.
Narrowing down has always been a really hard thing for me. I find it difficult to see a project through to completion, often for the really disheartening reason that I stop believing in it after a certain point. It’s not that it is too hard, but that certain very convincing inner voices start pointing out the general uselessness of whatever I’m trying to accomplish. And, maybe more importantly, certain other inner voices start shouting very excitedly about this other, different, more valuable and interesting thing which is far more worthwhile than whatever hollow shell of an idea I’m currently working on. When I realise I’ve been had, the Elliot line “distracted by distraction from distraction” gloats around my mind for a while.
One way that I hope this project will avoid being cast aside is that it simply can’t be. It is too big, I’m too responsible for it. It isn’t on a few sheets of paper or a hard drive, it’s a lease agreement with long term obligations and several thousand dollars worth of equipment. It exists in a different sort of ecosystem than projects done as a student. The scaffolding that any institution provides isn’t there. The scaffolding is whatever I make of it. And so, another form of scape-goating, that of blaming the institution for whatever tragically never comes to fruition is not available.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that as with probably almost every business ever started, there is an immensity of barely articulable hopes and dreams behind this one which are being fit into a ceramics shaped box. All hopes and dreams, if they are to materialize as anything other than words, must be fit into a box of some kind. They must go from being limitless to concrete, solid, singular. And maybe there is something about personal identity within that as well. Educational spaces are a place of formation, of becoming something solid and specific, but, at least in my case, that process feels significantly incomplete, as I have maintained a critical and speculative distance from the “art world,” the “craft world” or any form of professionalized space in which I might feel that I could take on an articulate, legible presence.
The specific ceramics shaped box that I am putting this mess of self-realization into is entirely my own. I am getting to create its shape and possibilities. But alongside the practicalities of the outside world which structure the challenges, joys, etc. of working in this form, I want to stay aware of this inner anxious energy that is very much present at the start of this project. Not to dwell on the negative or to undermine the validity of the pottery, I want to stay aware of the ways that this ceramics shaped box is less container than it is a siv. Yes, the work is valuable for its own sake. If I didn’t think that, I would be doing something else. But that shouldn’t be the end of the story. The work is valuable as an expression and exploration of self, as a way of developing a way of living and interacting with others, as a way of taking on a set of responsibilities which force me to create real, material things and avoid the endless distraction.
So this pottery will start as something very practical. It will be based around a functional range of pots thrown to consistent standards. I will run it based on the models I’ve had the luck to experience training in London and Jingdezhen. But it will not be a rigid thing. It will be aware of its origins as part of a more abstract need to shape personal and creative energies. It will give shape to those energies and also be constantly reshaped by them. While my training has inclined me to more “quiet” sedate pots, the pottery itself will be as experimental, noisy, and flexible as it needs to be to continually explore and give voice to that constant, gnawing, distractable search.