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.

the difference between: wheel-throwing verses slip-casting

So I have a 'confession' to make.  It's the kind of dilemma that's been running through my head since I first embarked on making ceramics full-time.  It's the whole wheel-thrown verses slip-casting debate.  It's a discussion I've had with numerous ceramic people and I thought I would bring it up on my blog. To get started, my mugs in question.  The two images, one slip-cast, one wheel-thrown.  Photographed at different times so the lighting in one is darker than the lighting in the other.  Although the clay is slightly different so my glazes are a little brighter on the porcelain than 'porcelaineous' clay body.  You be the judge- is one 'better' than the other?  Can you tell the difference in how they were made?

About 2 years ago now I embarked on my first slip-cast project.  I had a wheel-thrown and altered bottle vase form that I wanted to make multiples of.  The drying time on this form, being altered with a new bottom being put on to oval it off, was taking way too long and I really wanted a 'blank canvas' to put glaze designs on.  The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to look into making a mold out of it.  So I got in touch with Russell Hackney, a master mold-maker who's worked on making prototypes of intricate clocks for the Queen, no less.  It was a pricey venture to get it the master and molds made, but I didn't want to fuss with my own lack of skill in the mold-making category- I wanted to put my best foot forward and come out with a near exact replica of my original design. 

In 2010 I decided, after much deliberation and months and months of sitting down with each little wedged 1 lb ball of clay, making hundreds of mugs with the same 2 basic forms, not ever quite keeping up with my orders because I didn't have time to make other things, to make my 2 mug designs into molds.  This was the hardest decision for me yet.  I really love looking inside a wheel-thrown mug and seeing throwing lines on the inside.  My outsides are pretty void of throwing lines because I use a rib to smooth them out since my glazing method works a lot easier if I have a smooth surface, so the outsides would generally be the same.  But the insides would be, different.  Perhaps a little too manufactured.  Regardless, I needed a break.  I was beginning to dread making mugs all the time. My body was telling me it needed a break from throwing, and my head was saying it didn't make financial sense for me to wheel-throw each and every piece that I make.  So I took the plunge and made my mug designs into a mold and have been slip-casting them since last spring.  Just the tall mugs, not the little latte mugs, or my cups, or my bowls, or my platters, or my teapots, or my espresso cups, or my plates.  
Now slip-casting itself was no small leap for me to make.  I had to find a good slip recipe and mix slip by hand (measure out dry materials, sieve it, mix with a drill mixer for 2 hours, allow for air bubbles to settle for a few days before mixing for another hour).  The trial and error of this process ruined a lot of work before I started to see results.  The molds themselves are not a cheap investment to make.  And I still pour them, pull them out of the mold, clean up the seams, put handles on them before they can be bisqued and glazed by hand.  But the big advantage is the drying time.  They don't need take nearly as long to dry out as wheel-thrown work does.  And they are all the same size so if someone orders multiples or comes back for a second mug, it will be the same size.  The handles always feel great and are big enough for different hands to hold it.  The whole process has freed up some of my time to work on new designs and new glazing patterns.  In the end I feel like it was the right decision to make, but sometimes with a twinge of guilt.  I know there are some amazing ceramic artists out there who make their work exclusively with molds.  I also know die-hard wheel-throwers/hand-builders that wouldn't touch a mold and put down the process as being too 'manufactured'.  In general the work I see coming out of undergraduate schools these days is all slip-cast.  Generally people don't seem to have the time to invest in throwing on the wheel to make a form they have in their head, so they become mold-makers and slip-cast.  And in the world of design, it's a widely accepted practice.  But I still sense a stigma attached to slip-casting as though it's a cop-out, or easier somehow than wheel-throwing. 

In the studio the other day, putting on handles...

So I'm curious what your impressions of slip-casting are.  Do you place value on slip-casting verses wheel-throwing?  If you make ceramics, have you tried both wheel-throwing or slip-casting and do you choose one over the other?