designer verses maker

I'm in a bit of a conundrum these days, trying to sort out my next move.  It's as though I need to go back to the drawing room of what I want  'dahlhaus' to be.  When I started out on this journey to make a living from my art, I thought about this dilemma a bit, but left it well behind for the immediate issues surrounding making unique work that could become my signature, and that I could make consistently well.  I was grappling with the day to day concepts of how to get my work 'out there' and how to get people to buy it so I could keep doing what I loved.  Along the way I found out what people liked about my work and began to tweak it so that people would begin to love it and want to buy it.  There's a big shift that goes on in that stage and it is very exciting to have shops start to contact me (instead of me contacting shops), have some blog and press mentions, and start to feel like maybe, just maybe, I can really make a living at this. 

So now I'm in the grind of making.  I am a great maker, it's what I seem to do best.  I've never thought of myself as a designer, but these days I find myself envying them.  The idea of coming up with an amazing ceramic design and then passing it along to a manufacturer to do the making.   I used to scoff at this with my art-school turn up your nose to everything that seems like the easy way out.  But now, in the midst of all my making and the constant requests by new shops to wholesale my work, I dream of passing along some of my work to a manufacturer to make it for me, because I can't do it all by myself anymore.  I have a whole host of ideas of how to avoid my work being 'made in china'.  I have all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't quite be the same to have my work made somewhere else- it wouldn't feel or look the same.  I think about raising my prices to meet the demand of my work better so I could avoid this (it's a good start).  I think about expanding my studio to have a staff or 2  (and all the issues in expanding and staffing that would come with this).  So it's a conundrum, you see.  Financially not much seems very viable, and yet, it seems a shame to just throw up my hands without at least searching for a way around it.  At the very least, it's not a terrible place to be embarking on- a crossroad in life has always been an exciting place to be standing at.

Studio work

...is coming along, slowly but surely. Orders are starting to get finished and shipped off.  My glaze tests didn't quite turn out the way I was hoping, but it wasn't all a wash.  I've been hoping for a great semi-matt charcoal grey (the one I've been using has a green tinge to it- beautiful, but sometimes, one just wants grey).
I recently realized that I've been throwing on the wheel for 18 years now.  When I first got started (took my first ceramics class at 18 in college), I was told by an older potter that I'd need to be working in clay for 20 years before I could consider myself a 'master potter'.  The term seems a bit archaic to me now- not really something I would think about ever striving for, but at the same time, I did take the advice to heart.  I decided to slow down, take my time in school and really spend years honing my skill before launching out on my own with my own signature style.  Maybe it held me back a little, because it would be about 13 years before I started 'dahlhaus', but on the other hand I think I needed that time.  It gave me space to sort out my ideas, and to work out all the kinks that were going to come up.   And most of all it gave me the confidence I needed to really make the kind of work I wanted to make.

So long Eva

Even though Eva Zeisel lived such a long and productive life right up to her passing yesterday at 105 years, it goes without saying that the ceramic and design world has lost a dear and treasured soul.  For someone with such a remarkable story: studying in Weimar Germany in the age of the Bauhaus Movement; developing from a studio potter to a ceramic designer for manufacturers all over Europe; surviving imprisonment in Communist Russia for being accused of conspiring to assassinate Stalin; fleeing Nazi Germany for the US, starting life in New York with a family, all the while designing ceramics, furniture and glassware for the modern American home in a sea of male designers, is truly an amazing legacy for one woman to have.  Imagine if we all had the tenacity to overcome these kinds of obstacles in life and to stick to our passions with such determination and grace right up to the very end of our lives.  Imagine if we all felt that kind of passion for what we do in our life that it would occupy our time right to the end. 

It's the friday before Thanksgiving weekend and I'm at home today, catching up on all things computer-related, with my mind spinning and my body slowly starting to decompress from the last 3 months.  It's been an intense period of production for me: I shipped and dropped off over 500 pots this week!  That's a lot of pots for my 2 hands (with a bit of help from a couple of other hands here and there) to make in my little 300 sq ft. studio, and as you can imagine, I'm asking myself how I can possibly keep this up and where I can possibly go from here. I had a really significant conversation with an amazing ceramic artist this week and am processing some much-needed insight into what a career as a ceramic artist in today's day and age can truly be.  Mind-boggling actually!

The day Steve Jobs suddenly passed away was also the day my 93.5 year old grandpa passed away.  His passing was sudden, and yet not sudden.  He had fallen and ended up in emergency.  He seemed fine and he was himself, but he had a bit of pneumonia.  No one seemed alarmed and so he had told my grandma and parents to go home, have some dinner and come back later.  And an hour or so later he had passed away.  Just like that.  Of course we all would have wished that he was surrounded by his family.  That we all had been able to say 'goodbye'.  That's the part that's hard. 

I'm due for a good relaxing weekend off from the studio but I'm anticipating being back here a little more next week, now that things have calmed down a little in the studio.  Have a great weekend!

on my side of the fence

I've had to step back on the blogging front here this past week. I'm so busy, working hard, long hours to be on schedule and to keep up with everything while Dean is away.  The boys were at the family farm for a few days and I was able to pool together a few lovely people: my sister, my good friend Kat, Sarah and my cousin, to help me out with the most tedious and repetitive part of my glazing process- the stripes. I'll be firing my first of 6 glaze loads to complete this order I've been working on... so much work.  In the meantime, a lot of my local galleries are starting to send me orders to finish up the summer with.  Not only do I not have a lot of spare work in the studio, but I also don't have any room or energy to make anything besides this order until September comes, even when they are expecting and asking for me to send the work asap.  Since when did pottery get made asap?  
I often straddle between worrying that I can't possibly keep up with the demand for my work verses being concerned that people won't be able to afford what I make, considering all the financial crises and budget cuts.  I hesitate to push my little studio into a bigger space with more equipment and a full-time assistant in order to keep up production, and yet I am at full capacity with just one order right now.  It's clear to me a few things have to change for me not to burn out, but I'm not quite sure what it will be yet.  I'm just taking it one day at a time and trying not to feel too overwhelmed by it all.  

Ladies Makin' Things: an Interview on career paths in Ceramics

Compare and Contrast: Ceramic-talk by dylemmawalter

I recently had an Emily Carr University student contact me about being interviewed for a class project she was doing for her Professional Practices class.  The only chance we had to do the interview was right at the end of my 3 day show at the Eastside Culture Crawl, so it's blowing me away that I actually sound kind of intelligent here.  Emma Walter, the interviewer/student is in her 4th year at ECU, and for her project she paired my interview along with Ceramics professor Julie York.  We have vastly different stories and yet it's really amazing how it all comes together in the comparison. 

In the kiln

After a summer of pumping out work for my galleries, I've finally had the chance to sit down and come up with some new designs for the fall!  Here's a sneak peek before the kiln firing that I did yesterday.  It is a pretty remarkable process to have the glazes transform from a thin powdery layer to a smooth hard glossy layer of glaze in 2300 degrees.
I love glazing. For me, it's where the magic happens.  I glaze each piece with a method that took me a few years to develop, where I cut out each 'stencil' that masks out parts of my pot while I glaze other parts.  After waxing around the stencils I can then glaze the in-between spaces with a different glaze.  I've worked really hard on making this process simple enough that I can re-create my designs. At the same time, this process is labour intensive and takes me 4-6 different glazes with the right combination of colours and design, with about 9 different steps (with drying time in between) to get each piece in the kiln. 
I've lost sleep over the last few nights trying to come up with good glaze combos for my new designs.  Glazing a mug is not like painting a picture- you don't see the colours until they've gone through a kiln firing, and you can't really glaze over something that didn't quite turn out. You can try to re-fire, but for the most part, it is what it is when you pull it out of the kiln.  There are any number of things that could go wrong here: bad application, hot spots in the kiln, or just a bad combo of colours. Sometimes I marvel at the patience and persistence that goes along with being a potter.  The amount of bad pots a person has to make before the glimmer of a good pot keeps a person going.  It really is a labour of love. 
 

Ceramic career path for the directionally challenged

I've had a number of chats with my studio assistant about career directions in Ceramics.  She's entering her last year for her undergrad with a major in ceramics and has had the summer seeing me at work to think about what might come after school for her.  Of course this has meant that I've had a few critiques about the route I've taken.  I don't mind, I remember being at Art School and being critical of artists and makers that were making a go of it.  It's hard not to have an opinion about what someone else is doing when you are thinking really about how you want to do something.

So I've been occasionally thinking about which direction I've taken in clay, what kind of work I make and what kind of work I might make if my direction would change.  Lots has changed for me since I first embarked on this venture of 'making a living making pots'.  I no longer have the initial desperation that I first had about applying for shows that I once did.  I no longer feel like I have to prove my work to anyone, be it clients or galleries or peers. Without those initial drivers that seemed to plot a course for me, I've been asking myself which route I might take.

I guess I feel as though navigating one's way through a career as an artist, or specifically a ceramic artists, is confusing and at times difficult.  It's like a 'choose your own adventure' book with a number of different outcomes, none actually guaranteeing that you will be able to make a living at making pots.  Sometimes I feel like I'm directionally challenged.   Which adventure do I want to take?  The production potter adventure or the one of a kind adventure?  Selling directly to my customer base or selling through a gallery or shop? Selling consignment or wholesale? Custom orders?  Get my Masters and teach?  Do I think like a business woman or like an artist?  Should I make more work, up my sales, raise my prices to finally pay myself a decent wage?

I know that it takes a number of decisions within this to make a go of it.  Nearly every day I get to make a decision about it and frankly, at the moment I'm just glad to be on that road.  The road where I get to choose my own adventure...