The things in my studio and how they got there + thoughts on the soft opening
The past two weeks have been busy. I wanted to get a body of work through the entire process to be ready to show at my open studio for Atlanta Studio Pottery, which was held on December 20th.I’ve been balancing the setup of the studio with the tasks of making the work itself, and the final days at the restaurant I’ve been working at in Atlanta.
Maybe I’ll start by talking a little bit about that restaurant, since it is the furthest from the main ceramics story. I was an “SA” or server’s assistant at a fine dining Italian restaurant near the Belt Line. I started working at this restaurant in September or maybe early October. The restaurant has deep red walls, dark leather booths, a mix of fauvist watercolors and lime green glass sculpture for decor mixed in with some soft-core black and white erotica and highly genital orchid paintings. The overall vibe was sumptuous luxury, with just a wink of decadence.
There were some great people there but I just couldn’t find my rhythm in it. It felt depressingly underpaid and it was unpleasant and fascinating to see all the different reasons that different workers felt they needed to stay in a job that paid, seemingly, far under industry norms. I could never tell if I was truly doing badly or if I was paranoid because one manager would complain to another SA about how slow I was on the floor, but never addressed me personally. Really the whole thing was a real psychological trip and when I have a bit more distance from it I’d love to reflect on it a bit more creatively. For now, I’m just glad to be out of it.
The last month or so has been spent in the initial setup for Atlanta Studio Pottery. At this point, I’ve gone through the whole process of making work once and the studio is set up in a way that is base-line functional. Last Saturday, I shared the work that I’d made so far in a soft-opening in a building near my pottery.
Looking around the studio, the objects in it are starting to feel “settled” but they still hold stories that stand very close to the surface about where they come from. As I wrote about a bit earlier, the kiln came all the way from Weaverville, NC, and was collected in the back of the minivan. The whole drive up there was done with deep trepidation that it would all be for nothing and another trip would need to be made with a U-Haul some other day. But, piece by piece, the kiln fit into the minivan and now they feel deeply connected to me. Like, the kiln was born from the minivan, or something like that. A very mobile mother and a very imobile child.
The table that my wheel sits on was collected from an old watch repair guy near Piedmont Heights. He said he’d been using it for ten years in his shop and was glad it was going to a new home. The table seemed quite well maintained for its age, but for the first week or two, whenever I got water on it, it smelled intensely of dog shit. That smell has mellowed somewhat now, though I think that rather than being truly cleaned off, the smell is now trapped behind thin layers of fine clay particles.
The wedging table was purchased for forty dollars from the basement studio of the Monroe Community Arts Center. I arrived in the middle of their town holiday sale and everyone was dressed as an elf. I located the elf selling the table and we went down to look at it in the basement. It turned out that there were two immense cement blocks poured directly into the frame of the table. This makes the table satisfyingly sturdy to wedge on, but, also, insanely heavy. The elf selling the table was quite a senior elf, and so we had to enlist some junior elves with strong backs to help move the table. Getting this table out of the basement via a steep exterior stairwell was probably the most dangerous and difficult bit of studio setup thus far. The table was inverted and slid up a ladder laid across the stairs to make a smooth track. I pushed from below and hoped for the best. All worked out fine though and now the table is securely installed in the studio and will not be moving unless absolutely necessary.
The wheels were won from government auction and came originally from the Cobb County School District. I collected them from an immense warehouse filled with surplus school equipment. It was pretty disconcerting seeing school desks and lunch-tables in this setting. An unholy crossover between Home Depot and my elementary school. The wheels work perfectly well. They still had the clay remains of some middle school art class on them. They have these big, broken orange plastic splash pans that collect clay slurry that flies off a moving wheel. One of the first projects for the new year is going to be switching out those splash pans for some custom made wooden ones. That this hasn’t happened yet is evidence of how distracting the joy and possibility of throwing pots can be.
Just two weeks ago I finally started addressing the shelving shortage in the studio. My original hope was to screw a floating shelf system directly into the walls. I soon realized that the walls are solid concrete and my handheld drill can’t make much of a dent. So I developed an internal frame structure to arc around the walls of the studio so that I can have wooden boards along the wall to drill my shelving system into. I was doing this while coming down with a cold. I might have been in a bit of a fevered mindset, but I became quite taken by the idea of my studio as a whale’s stomach, which I was sort of revealing by installing the ribcage of that whale in the form of this wooden frame structure. The idea felt really visceral, though also totally incongruent with my desire to paint the posts of this frame a bright, grassy green. It was a wet week in Atlanta and I’d come into the studio, snotty nosed and bleary eyed, and look out through this fogged up window beneath my whale rib frame, listening to the low hum of the wheel and really feel like I was in some sort of living creature.
The first of these rib-cage structures has been set-up now and works great. Another mental image that it brings up comes from some children’s book I read as a kid. I thought it was If You Give a Mouse a Cookie but I just checked and it isn’t that, nor is it If You Give a Moose a Muffin. The image is of (I think?) a mouse, or some protagonist, rearranging the furniture in a living room so that the long couch is propped on top of two chairs, forming an elevated bridge between them. I really remember this image and the associated feeling of being perched, secure and high up in a space where I’m used to being closer to the ground. The frame structure in the studio is very far from a couch on top of two chairs, but it is the same basic post and lintel construction idea, and it is an intervention in a space I’m in charge of that feels exciting and unexpected. So I’ve been thinking of that children’s book I now realize I can’t quite pin down and feeling a similar sort of comfort from my green whale bone shelves that I feel from that image in that book.
And then there are the actual pots that have come out of these last four weeks. They have traveled quite a lot. The installation of the electrical connection for the kiln has been complex. There’s no electricity directly to my little studio, it comes through one of two larger buildings on the property. So, to add the sixty amps that my kiln needs to operate, we’ve had to install wiring across another building, through its wall (concrete, again), and through the ceiling of my building. This all took some time and wasn’t complete by the beginning of last week. So, I laid my pots out in the back of the minivan and drove very carefully back to Tuscaloosa. The drive coincided with Ben, my brother, finishing school and one of his friends flying home for the break. The two of them ended up having to squeeze their belongings into the remaining room and not breathe or look too directly at the pots for fear of breaking them.
I bisqued the work in one of two kilns out of six that were still functional after a hard semester of work for the University of Alabama clay studio. Bisquing is the initial firing which brings the clay up to a temperature where it is no longer capable of dissolving back into clay. This allows the pots to be dunked in the liquid glazes without fear of melting them back into blobs of clay. However, the temperature for the bisque is lower than the glaze firing, which means the pots are still quite porous. So, as they are dunked, they pull in water like a dry sponge and all the glaze materials suspended in that water adhere to the surface of the pots.
This is historically more or less my least favorite portion of the ceramic process. It’s finicky and difficult to know the end aesthetic result of the things you are doing in the moment. I think this dislike comes from the fact that I often work in a somewhat rushed way. The early stages, throwing, maybe even trimming, are more relaxed, but by the time I’m glazing, there is some looming cutoff. On top of that, I haven’t worked at a single studio or with a single set of glazes long enough to develop a really intimate relationship with them. Partly this has to do with a high personal tolerance for the unexpected, but really, there are subtleties to the relationship you can build up with a glaze over time that I have not had the time to develop.
Unfortunately, the kiln was on more or less its last legs and what was supposed to be a 7 hour firing took about 20 hours and still failed to get to the proper temperature. I stayed in Tuscaloosa an extra day and tried to keep a cold at bay while letting the kiln cool down. The work didn’t end up looking underfired. Maybe because they spent so long in the kiln, all the glazes did melt appropriately, though maybe not exactly as they will in a more standard firing.
I need to sit with the pots a bit longer to reflect fully on what I like and don’t like about them, but in general, the feeling I get from them is curiosity. There is a lot that could work better, but so much is visible with this mix of very thinly thrown porcelain and thin, clear glazes. There’s a lot of information visible in the pots and they tell the story of their making very honestly. This provides a lot of challenges and I’d say many of those challenges I didn’t come through the most gracefully in this batch of work. But those fundamental qualities of visibility and fragility that the materials and processes of this firing involved are absolutely the qualities that I want to explore in this work, and so it feels very much like it’s on the right track.
The soft opening was remarkable mainly for the extreme generosity of my friends. Gwenafaye, a friend from early childhood onwards, drove over from Tuscaloosa in the morning and helped with all the setup as well as staying through the entire event, helping with pack-up and celebrating with me afterwards. Two sets of family friends also drove up, Katharine and her mom Nancy, and Kathleen and her mom Melissa. The intergenerational found family energies were strong and very, very appreciated. I’m also really grateful to my own parents. They did not come to the opening, which sort of confused my friends who did come. I certainly didn’t feel offended by their not coming, but I wasn’t fully able to articulate how exactly I appreciated it. To be honest, I still can’t fully articulate it. Something about the independent pursuit of passion, the place of a parent in affirming their child, the way silence, space, and distance can, when handled right, be a very strong type of affirmation…
I took some pots home to Tuscaloosa and photographed them. Many have found new homes as Christmas presents. But many are overwintering in the studio, waiting along with the rest of the materials there for the return to the making cycle in January.
Between now and then, I’ll be spending time with my partner, Ivy, in Ireland. During that time, I’ll reflect on the ways I want to organize my making cycles going forward. I’m very susceptible to being dragged into making pots. It feels so compelling and immediately like work that it can occlude a lot of the other things that I enjoy and which are also necessary work. Reading, other art projects, researching forms and traditions, planning the direction I want the studio to move in, etc. Some of those reflections should be coming in the next little while.