Fragments from a fragmented week:
Control and routine were big thoughts this week. There’s been so much moving around and a good bit of angst around work as well (work as in the part time service job at a restaurant, not the pottery). I’ve been driving most days. Once to Tuscaloosa and Huntsville, once to Weaverville, North Carolina and most other days around the metro Atlanta area in search of different FB marketplace deals on shelves, tables, etc. It’s felt like a bit of a scattered week and that has certainly taken its toll on my ability to form coherent thoughts here for my intimidating audience. So here are the fragments just arranged chronologically from the week.
While last week’s blog makes mention of the anxious, slow, prideful processes involved in starting up Atlanta Studio Pottery, it doesn’t go into many details. Today I feel much closer to all those details. Yesterday I crisscrossed Alabama with my brother, picking up a car in Tuscaloosa, driving it to Florence and then driving back to Atlanta. Today I drove all around Atlanta looking to get the lighting cables repaired for the minivan trailer hitch so I can go get a kiln on Wednesday from North Carolina. There have been lots of little talks with different friends and mentors about design work for the pottery, Chinese teaware, collaborations, etc. I’ve also started what feel like the first moves in making the pottery somewhat public: this blog and a dedicated instagram account. As I think back on all of this, there’s a spectrum of feelings that all have to do with themes of control, privacy, and visibility. I’m going to see if I can think through some of that more clearly here.
One layer of what I’m thinking about is the actual space of the studio, its tantalizing, hypothetical presence (now waiting on insurance to be able to move in) and its inverse in the public/everywhere else world. A lot of artists think about this dynamic of studio vs. world. Some are deeply committed to the studio as a semi-sacred space of privacy and contemplation. And of course then there is an opposite side of people who say the studio is like a tomb or an isolating prison when seen as something separate from the world in general. This conceptual debate is at least somewhat separate from the practical needs of certain artists and craftspeople to have dedicated equipment which requires a physical space. Painters are a good example of that: really, the material needs are quite limited, but some worship the studio space while others shun the idea of one. The issue then comes down to the value of an “isolated” space as a stage through which material needs to move to turn from ideas, paint, clay, garbage, nothing, etc. into “art.” Or, to focus more on the artist, a private space in which their influence is ostensibly the major factor. I don’t mean extreme factory precision level control necessarily, but possibly that. In the studio, you can control the amount of control you have, you can let in as much or as little chaos as you want. That ability to control the conditions in which you work strikes me right now as the major conceptual feature of the studio. And I crave this control deeply.
The theoretical musing was put aside for a couple of days. I drove up to North Carolina, to Weaverville, on Wednesday and collected a kiln from Sue and Randy Hintz. They are at the tail end (though not quite done yet!) of a thirty year career in production pottery which is winding down in the difficult aftermath of hurricane Helene. It was interesting hearing about all the late stage musings of people at a different part of a similar path to the one I’m on. Many of those musings on control I’ve been having have had to do with the sense of a new and unknown set of parameters that define the contours of “starting a business,” and a pottery. So much of it feels like it comes down to individual decisions, made in isolation from many options and without anyone telling you what the “right” option is. But partly, the last week has been making me sense that there are certain determining factors that I’m just not used to being attuned to in quite the same way. Sue and Randy made their decisions on how to set up their studio based on a unique set of interests and abilities. Sue loves crystalline glazes and Randy worked as an engineer for many years and now does woodworking within the business with his wife. The rhythms of their work are defined by a different combination of curiosity and practicality than it would be if they did not work for themselves.
A friend recommended I read Derek Sivers Anything You Want recently, which charts his experience making and running the company CD Baby. One of the ways of thinking Sivers recommended is to construct your business as your own utopia: to build it as a microcosm that articulates how you think the world should work. I’ve been thinking with that a lot recently. It has a bit of the tone that I’ve found all over in my (very) short time reading books about starting businesses, easily self-assured from the retrospective position of success, and I don’t know that “utopia” exactly fits all businesses. The artist perspective in me is so used to thinking from a critical, participative, observational position. I’m used to looking for connections and ways in which I am implicated, doing the work of connection, rather than articulating something I can see as discreet and self-contained like a utopia. But art has different needs than a business. An artist may well have to think about how their work relates to and connects to the world. One way of reading art might be to say that artworks make individual arguments about how the world is/should be. It’s impossible to contain them, to make them not talk about the whole. But businesses participate in the whole from a less detached perspective. They are little discreet elements within the whole. Their purpose is participation, not commentary.
I’ve been buying a lot of things this week. I feel like I’m haemorrhaging money in an impossible way. And yet, these have all been entirely necessary and even responsible purchases for setting up the pottery. As the material things have collected (kiln, wheels, glaze materials, clay, etc.) and the space has begun to fill, it has started to take on a momentum of its own. It isn’t a path defined by a clear curriculum or career path, but it is something with inertia. This inertia is the cumbersome counterweight to Silvers’ somewhat light and breezy sounding “anything you want.” What I am making “whatever I want” out of has its own demands which seem to push up against any utopian aspirations I might have. But this might just be the wrong way of thinking about it. In order for the utopia to be something more than a no-place, it needs that weighty material stuff to fill it up.