Chris Gustin - Walter Gropius Master Artist Ceramic Symposium

[Music] so let me throw a bowl and when i throw the bowl when i'm done throwing it it by itself is really just how i would think a painter would think of a gesso white canvas it's what i'm going to put into it that is the actual uh energy that i want to uh convey so the um so the bowl itself is just this form and but then i'm going to go into it and bump it and move it and use my hands to create kind of a top graphical trail if you will and and that will be um that that's what the bowl is about it's it's that kind of analogy to body to landscape and the emotions and and experience that that kind of conveys to the viewer so i'm going to start this again i'm going to use a smaller bat on this one and i'm using about 15 pounds of clay this is a porcelain [Music] the way i think of these the the bowl is a form that is um it's functional it has a utilitarian past but every culture that's ever made them has also explored the metaphorical either through form or decoration painting how they how they put image and narrative into the inside of the bubble that space that beautiful enclosed kind of volume that a bowl has the potential to express it's a very powerful space um back in the 90s i had the opportunity to to work on the island of thailand in the azores and there was a volcano one end of the island and it was almost a perfect bowl it was just ash and it was the scale was such it was a small volcano crater the scale was such that you could actually walk down into it and walk around the perimeter of that bowl uh i spent two days in there just walking and feeling that space and it had a profound um effect on me um in understanding kind of the the power of that containment in a physical way in a human way um not intellectual but one that's felt so kind of when i was walking in there it's like i'm the tip of the paintbrush that someone's painting an image or a decoration on that curved rim and when you're when you're walking on a curve your body feels that and as you leave a trail of your footsteps the memory of your path is left uh in the exact same way as a brush glides over you know from the center of the of the bowl up to the rim and back down again how that curve expresses that line well it's the same thing with your body when you're walking in that kind of a volume so anyway so so that was kind of profound for me and then up uh in the i don't know 2000s early 2000s sometime in there i found up at anderson ranch in aspen and snowmass and i flew in from denver and i came in over the rockies and as you come in you're flying actually very close to the top of the mountains and when you're up at that level what you see is not what you see from the highway um you're above timberline so it's all lit just landscape no no vegetation no growth and you just see the the rolling topography of that of that landscape and see the rock formations you see how that land moves and undulates but what you also see is is how it collects water because at that altitude snow melts and then it drains and it fall forms all these little lakes and as i flew over that i had all these ideas about bowls about defining the topography of that landscape so that's where the displays come from i think of them as as landscapes and topography both of the body but also of of the exterior world so when i'm trying this i want a nice flat skin i don't want memory of the throwing lines on it so um because i i wanted to when it's done i want the curves and the fluctuations in the form to feel like you know the arm that the divot between a muscle um i want it to feel like flesh us to feel like like those beautiful landscapes when you have vegetation this soft vegetation growing on an undulating topography it's like you see this in iowa and nebraska when you're going through corn country and corn is like healthy and full growth and you see these beautiful undulating landscapes when i was up at archie bray foundation in the 70s working the hills outside of helena were in this um absolutely gorgeous growth and it had this low vegetation and it just covered the hills and it's just so soft and it's actually moving across that landscape so so when i'm throwing i want a nice tight skin so that as i bend it and form it that those curves really pop out and are very soft and undulating i don't want the memory of that that finger pull in there it's a language that doesn't belong in this type of a pot so i have to spend time at the beginning to make sure that i pull all those out compress the heck out of them [Music] so now we begin to open and this is what this is the tricky part because this is when you can lose it it's just a lot of small moves do it too quick you lose the strength of the clay that holds up the vertical if i expand the bottom too fast then i lose that so i have to be careful all the while i have to compress it just keep compressing it's the tightness of the skin that'll hold it so a lot of the times the way i open is i open from the top down not from the bottom up and that's so that the arch that's holding the form up down in here will stay strong if i widen that too soon then it can't handle the weight on top of it it can collapse so when i threw this i purposely kept it a bit thick so that the rim could thin out as i pull it out if you leave the top too thin then you tear the rim as you drop drive it outwards in space so when i make these balls i wedge up a pile of clay and i usually do these in series of depending on the scale four to six um i make them in different scales different pounds this is 15 pounds i've made them up to 30 pounds and down to about three you know what's interesting about how your mind works is there are different scales the analogies shift and by that i simply mean that that how your memory triggers the larger the scale the more your memory brings it into kind of a felt experience the smaller the scale the more it is is kind of into an intellectual ex connection so i'm interested in kind of what that's all about and how how how memories triggered in people and how an object can do that at some point here i'm going to stop and let it set up for a few hours and go back at it and the reason for that is just let the skin set up so that i can bring it farther out in circumference basically having it kind of maintain structural strength so we don't get a collapse drawing is a has has always been kind of a critical part of of my studio practice it's how i think and it happened you know it's interesting how you how you identify um something that's important from your kind of experiences that you just kind of take for granted you know so back in the early 80s um i had a studio in guilford connecticut with my sister-in-law jane gustin and she was back then she was kind of a painter potter and she'd make this myalica wear and then she'd do all these with just wonderful drawings on the myalka and you know i'm i'm making pots i'm out of grad school and trying to figure out you know what i want to make and how to make it and you know i want to be in the world as a potter all that stuff and you know my ideas are triggering my studio work and so i get a group of ideas for teapot saying i'll make a whole series and then i'll get a group of ideas for bases i'll make a whole series um and so but as i'm doing all this i'm doodling and one day we're at at a little diner for lunch and i'm sitting there doodling on a on a napkin and i'm i'm just drawing these teapot kind of um kettle type forms that that i was making in the very late 70s early 80s and i'm doodling them on a napkin and and jane looks across from me from the table and she goes what are you doing i said oh i'm drawing the teapot my teapots and she she goes let me see and she takes a nap and she goes no you're not i go what do you mean i'm not she goes does this don't look anything like your teapot i go well yeah they do and she goes no they don't look at them and i started looking at them and what i realized that they really didn't look anything like what i was making they had a very different sense of energy in it they might have had a you know the shape might have been the same or the um you know how one line met another line might have been the same you know when you think of silhouette but what she was talking about is that there was an energy and exuberance in the drawings that was lacking in the pot and it was like this aha moment of just waking up and going oh my god you know i think i know what i'm doing i don't know what i'm doing at all so i then began to doodle all the time and and then started to look at the doodles and pin them on the wall and then try to work from there and that practice of taking a this little throwaway thing you just draw this stupid little shape on a napkin or a piece of paper and you know you can you can fill it up you can make hundreds of them and they're inconsequential they mean nothing and yet on some level they mean everything and so so i started to do that i started doing all these doodles on paper and i'd get newsprint and i'd roll out roles in newsprint i'd go down to the newspaper and get their end roles and just roll them out i had a big long studio space it's a big old chicken coop and so it's bit narrow and long and i'd roll out 30 40 feet of it and then i just get india ink and brushes and just dip the brush in the ink and just start doodling shapes doing doodling forms so if i'm drawing if i'm making vases i'm doodling vases i'm making teapots i'm doing teapots and i'll throw i'll draw like two or three hundred of them and then what i'd do is i'd cut out sections of it and pin them to the wall and i could so i could see this huge amount of energy of this one thinking process surrounding me so before i ever even went into this into the clay before i even wedged the first ball of clay my pseudo was filled with a couple hundred pots all kind of directing me to to a um a way of thinking and and man i did that for years and years and years excuse me and so so the um the the idea that of that just putting something on paper to just get it out of your brain and then respond to it became really important so drawings has always been a factor for me and uh you know i like to think of them as doodles you know that word has a different kind of weight to it than drawing i never really showed show them to anybody you know i had a retrospective a few years ago and from there you know i put some of them in and um it was interesting to do that because again they're just kind of they're not meant as a finished project fermenter is kind of a synapse you know as like a trigger here's a little moment think about this and then let's move on and um but they're critical to my work uh in 2010 i started doing some serious drawings with charcoal and graphite and that that was important you know big drawings you know and um that was important because those drawings were riffing off the um the big vessels i was making at that time so i'd make these big pots and then i'd go in the st go upstairs and i've got this nice kind of clean space upstairs that i turned into a drawing studio for that period of time and i just laid out tables and i got big reams of paper big sheets of paper and i started just doing graphing charcoal drawings on them and and i started to find that the drawing started to feed into the work and the work fed into the drawings and uh it was really nice you know i did it for i don't know three four months and and i don't know made about 20 drawings um i haven't done that since not so much because i haven't been interested but i haven't really had the time to do it you know to take away that amount of time from the regular studio practice and and again that's simply because of schedules and you know that kind of thing but um i tend to focus on on you know it's like like when i go into something i go into it so i can't do a drawing in the morning and go in the studio and work in clay in the afternoon you know i just my mind doesn't work like that i have to kind of sink deep so so where i am now i'm doing these little doodles of the um of the cloud series and again trying to just understand kind of proportion ratio and relationship and you know how these objects kind of work and and then kind of work very abstractly off of that so but but drawing is one of those things that that so many people discount and i think it's incredibly important and um and it's been really valuable for what i do one of the wonderful things about ceramics is the the the i mean of techniques possible that someone can use to make optics you know the the history of our field is is just full of invention and and um every culture in the world has come up with ways of making things um in clay and they have you know from the most raw rudimentary types of forming methods and firing methods to the most advanced and you know we each have it in our in our in our decision making is like for the things i want to make what what how do i realize that you know what methods do i use to realize that vision and you know that's what school is about is trying to show you all these different opportunities and and and possibilities within the field you got everything from you know just pinch pots and and that type of thing and you know digging a hole in the ground so throwing some wood on top of your work and burning it and yeah you've got that to like you know space age technology and kilns 3d printing you know rapid prototyping that type of thing um and that's that's fascinating i find that really intriguing and so technique is one of those things that we all have to find our own door in um you know what what's the best methods to use to realize the idea and uh you know my technique what i've used over the years has has really been idea driven i mean when when i make objects you know i have an idea in my mind of what i want to make i have a vision i have a a point of view and and so the the way i touch the clay and whether i throw or hand build or or whatever comes from trying to realize that vision so so early in the work it was throwing and then the ideas kind of led to asymmetry and asymmetry led to coil building and and the that decision wasn't based on oh i think i want a coil build i hated coil building i didn't want anything to do with it i hated hand building i mean when i was in undergrad school i wouldn't do it they gave hand building assignments and i refused drove george timmock nuts you know and um and that uh that that kind of specific specificity is the dogma that like i won't do this you know it really inhibited me for years it was this stupidity of youth you know that arrogance and um but boy once once i started to make some drawings and i could couldn't figure out how to make it on the wheel and i had to figure out how to hand build to make it you know i wanted to hand build up really badly so so for me the the door into something is the idea and then i gotta work backwards from that and that comes in forming processes but it also comes in firing and firing methodologies you know you know we deal with rules a lot you know oh we you need to throw a pot like this or you this is how you throw it this is how you roll a coil this is how you hand build and all that's kind of you know it's it's it's all those rules are there for a reason they're really there so that the school's facility isn't like destroyed and that you know teachers can go home on the weekend and you know you fire the kiln this long because you know you have another kid coming behind you who wants to load it and instead of a three-day cool you do a eight-hour cool you know there's there's reasons why we do things and if you kind of peel away the onion skin there you find out that none of them have to do with ceramics that's very few they have to do with all these other outside um perceptions or realities that we have to deal with like i fire my kiln this long because you yeah you know that's i got to go pick up my kid from school in the afternoon so i wanted to fire off first early um you know it's those types of decisions and it has nothing to do with thinking of how glazes melt or the time it takes to to mature something in heat it doesn't you know the cooling of a kiln is decided upon schedule rather than on maybe how crystal formation is formed in the cooling cycle um you know and i found out early in my career when i was up at alfred getting ready for my grad show um i was you know this is when chinos were brand new and i developed this chino gustancino and um it's around now it's all over the place but um i was trying to figure out the glaze back then and i would fire at night and i'd do all my reducing cycles at night so i could really see the flame coming out of the kiln and the color and the length of the flame and the whole thing which was the guide to the color once the kiln cooled and and right before my end of the thesis right before i was about to present thesis and set up my exhibition i had one last kill to fire and it was all she know pots and i loaded the kiln and fired it and but i had because of the schedule i had fire during the day and i couldn't quite tell the color of the flame and i ended up oxidizing the kiln so i opened the kiln and every damn pot in there is white instead of orange and i freaked out um i mean i was really upset and i thought i'd destroyed you know i ruined my show and because some of the best spots i had were in that that firing and so i just go to the bar the local bar up at alfred and i just get rip right drunk and really really upset and and then i go back you know to the kiln later that evening i guess and um still not feeling great obviously and i unload the thing and the next day i look at the pots and and it was the next day that i realized that these were good pots and and i had an expectation of outcome and my my um being upset had to do that that i didn't meet the expectation i i wasn't looking at what was sitting in front of me and that was i'm so glad that happened that was like one of these little life lessons that that you're thrown every once in a while and you could just miss it so easily you know you could just walk by that one and not not realize what what gift was given you and um and from that day on i started using chinos um both in reducing and atmos and oxidizing atmospheres and i started to realize that the kiln was a tool that i could use so length of fire length of cooling all these cycles when i reduced when i oxidized you know i really started to play with and with very few glazes i got you know if i use four or five glazes i could get it looked like i had 20 different glazes and i've used that all the way along so so technique is one of these things how you use process it's it's all open-ended and it really has to do with your ability to to actually see what's in front of you and not be wedded to outcome and if you can do that i think the the decision-making and how you use the material and how you use the process available to us can get expansive very quickly within a very tight tight um you know construct i mean you have a kiln you have temperature you have atmosphere you've got this clay that you're handling you're built you're building something around you know it's it's pretty tight what those boundaries are and yet there's so much room for invention within it but you can't be welded you know you can't be um nailed down to outcome because if you are then if it doesn't meet it it fails and you don't see what actually happened um and this happens a lot in wood fire and i can't tell you how many times we unload kilns and somebody is so upset that their work came out the way it did and like there's a group of us looking at the work and we're going what's going on here this is kind of nice they're not seeing it and why aren't they seeing it they're not seeing it because they had an idea of what they wanted and it didn't meet that but oftentimes if you are asked to look at something differently you are your viewpoint expands and and and in my work i'm just always trying to figure that out i'm always trying to rattle the cage a bit so my viewpoint expands you know it's so easy to get wedded into this uh i want it to be like this attitude and i i find that that is just um you know it can bite you if if you're not careful so that's why i i kind of purposely put my work in situations that that that struggle is part of the end result of it and um you know and sometimes the work sucks it's just you know it's not so good i hope that didn't work but even in the bad work you know i had a crit once with ferguson this was after i i graduated school and he came to out east and he visited my studio and he talked to me about my work and he told me to like take take the worst pots and put them on the shelves and live with them you know live with it live with us the failure and that was really great advice because it really forced me to instead of discarded something and walk away from it and then kind of get it out of my mind and not think about it anymore i had to kind of live with it live with it and look at it and ask questions you can't help it if you see something ugly sitting in your space it does piss you off a little bit and um but there's also there's there's some learning in there and it's not just about what not to make but how can you how can you use what's there what's the good part of it you know and i do that a lot you know i live with my work a lot i have it in the studio i have it up in the gallery area you know i i i think it's important to kind of put it out there to to the view that so i'm aware of it you know it's not just when it comes out of the kiln then it's shipped someplace and then it's gone um and i and it still stuns me sometimes you know when you get something that is kind of remarkable um you kind of can't believe that your hand was in that and that is like what an amazing feeling that is you know and i think that that is one of the wonders of ceramics because you can have that feeling the first day you step into a clay studio and try and throw a pot you know the feeling's the same it doesn't matter how far along you are in your career or how good your work is or anything like that that feeling of accomplishment of wonder of um you know i made this how great is that you know that's that's a um that's a powerful thing it's why students who take ceramics one many move on to ceramics too because they're they're they're in it they they see they recognize the power of of success and that power of success is weighed against the power of failure and failure is really important and failure is critical in ceramics you know fire kilns that don't work you you screw up on this you screw up on that you know that plot didn't work you know you learn from that and i think technique and how you approach technique you know in the large sense of what that word means is is an interesting thing to ponder and to ask questions about so so i i try to i try to do that and i try to set up situations where i have to struggle with the techniques i know and um out of that struggle always always always comes something that that um you know light bulb goes off and it takes me into the next move let me talk a bit about kind of the cloud series and and how this all came about in 2014 i was invited um with my wife nancy train smith to go up to archie gray foundation up in helena montana and uh we went up there and spent about i don't know a month making work uh in the main studio and uh and what what's interesting when you go someplace to work you have you know it's like you can't if you take your own studio with you you you you're just going to another place and then you're just making what you make and i'm really not interested in that i'm interested if i do go someplace i want to be able to to ask a question i hadn't asked or to put myself in a situation where i kind of have to struggle and i'll talk about the idea of struggle in another conversation but but but so when i went up to the bray i wanted to say okay well what what do i want to do so um i talked about this a little bit in my lecture the the um i think of my work one of what the ways i think it might work is that it it moves from a to b to c to d it's it's it's fairly linear it always has been it's the way my mind works it's like i make something i look at it i respond to it and i make the next thing um the work always kind of leads itself obviously the things i think about and feel and and you know all that that's in the work and and i kind of trust that it comes out i lead it in different directions at various times but but how i actually make significant moves in my work over the years has been the fact that i take it to a certain point and then i hit this moment of struggle and then i have to figure it out and usually the way i figure it out is i just change something i just take one little thing in the work that i kind of keep repeating and i change it so i i make that that happened through going through the formal door okay so let's say you know i'm working on a vertical scale and everything you know the center of gravity is at one part of a piece and i look over about period of time the center of gravity is always kind of in the same place and i'll go okay i'm going to shift the center of gravity so instead of it being high i'll make it low instead of low i'll make it high and then everything changes in the work you know it's just you get different forms and you get different ideas based on those forms and those forms actually take you to different places of analogy so so um so this is what i do so i went up to the bray i thought okay instead of working on a circle i'll work on an oval and then that just changed everything and it just allowed the forms to kind of morph in a different sense of direction um when i came back from the break i started building these pieces in the studio and they got bigger and bigger and bigger and then from there you know they they lost the sense of interior or not the sense of interior they they lost the vessel the the the pieces asked to be enclosed they they didn't want to have a neck on them they didn't want to be kind of a pot they wanted to be a sculpture and and and so i just kind of let kind of let that happen and which was actually a pretty difficult thing to do because i've been making pots for god knows the entire length of my you know studio career you know and so this was kind of a big move but you know so then i do a whole series of these cloud pieces and and then i get to this point i go okay well i want to bring these cloud pieces back into vessels so how do i do that so now i have to get entrance into them again i have to give them some way to get into the pot you know that air can either enter or be released and um so these cloud jars came out of that and that's how that's how they started and so again it was asking a formal question just saying well well you know instead of enclosing it i'm not going to close it and now they're going to be vessels again and so how do i do that so so that was the investigation and i started making them in about 2017 2018 i guess and um and you know i haven't made a whole lot of them we've probably made a dozen over that period of time um maybe maybe a little bit more but they all again lead one thing to another and so the one i'm doing for the demo i'm working on two i'm going to work on two and and you know they'll kind of riff off each other um and then from there they'll uh you know they'll take their own kind of identity and one of the things i was down in mexico in january in early february on the yucatan i was looking at a lot of mayan pottery and i was really interested in interested in these in this one kind of form of this vessel that the mayans made and they it was it was they're these beautiful kind of wide open pots they come up like that and then they have this like beautiful rim on it and the language in the pot is completely different than the language on the rim and i was interested interested in that dichotomy so anyway so in these pieces i'm going to be working on different rims different entrances you know different necks however you want to describe that and so so these are new for me so this is kind of you know i'm intrigued by that [Music] one of the things i've thought a lot about over the years and has been instrumental in kind of the early development of my work and and kind of how it's transitioned to where it is now has been kind of wrapping my mind around the construct of time and how time is used how you participate in it um in your work you know how much time do you spend on something what's the what are the variables that that contribute to the way you work or or the variables that prohibit you from working you know and you know very early on in my career i realized you know i came out of the studio production you know the 70s you know it was like i went to school to be to learn how to be a potter and my my vision at that time in the 70s was to settle in and and build a studio and and make pods and sell them and that's what i wanted to do and there's there's something in that process of of like kind of having this dream and trying to then realize it um [Music] it's an interesting process because you hit these walls along the way and you have to decide what you know is your dream the right dream or is it you know the wrong dream and and i kind of you know it was i was coming up at a time period in late 70s early 80s where ceramics was just changing rapidly the the conversations around clay and what pots were and all of that and i got really intrigued with that you know when i first started the studio my f you know i worked my butt off for for months and i had the first christmas sale it's a four-day sale and i made ten dollars you know and you know that was that was like a it was a kind of a heavy moment you know right where reality kind of smacks you in the forehead you know and i was making good pots it was just they weren't the pots that the people around where i lived wanted to have you know there was already a sense of the type of pottery that was being made in that area and being shown in that area and you know my pots weren't it i had a completely different aesthetic and so the the the people in that area were educated to a certain sense of form and color and decoration and mine was just left field so you know i got i got i you know i had a reality smack and and that that was incredibly freeing on a lot of levels i was also incredibly lucky because because right as this is happening i got an nea grant and at the time it was seven and a half thousand dollars so this is early seven it 77 78 and you know seven thousand five hundred dollars at it at that point in time that was that i could live a year off of that easy you know studio bills everything you know apartment food gas all of that and so it was incredibly freeing in the studio so so i figured out that the idea of working rapidly on something and make a body of work that all speak to each other was something that i really wasn't very good at and i also you know it was it wasn't that i was i could technically do it but my interest wasn't in doing it and i found that out by trying you know you have to try this stuff to figure out if if it works for you i found out i did it and i found out that the longer i spent on a piece making it the better the piece was and the more curious i became so the element of time which i kind of started with this conversation uh played a factor in how my work moved through the late 70s into the early 80s i just needed to spend more time with what i was making and and that is not just in in the making of the object that is in making a series of objects or exploring a series of ideas or you know exploring a single idea through a series of objects so you know i was never good at making six of this and six of them six of that you know make a dozen bowls make a dozen teapots make a dozen jars you know i could never do it um it was it was like i was when i was making the teapots i was still involved with the bowls and as i making the bowls i was involved with the jars you know it was in my head i just realized that that was not for me and so i had to make the change and the change was just just lengthen the time frame of my [Music] engagement with the things that were in front of me that i was working on so if i made platters you know i made a hundred platters and it took me three months to make them you know i just threw platters for eight a day and you know trimmed them and you know it was like i could go through a series of platters eight to ten over a period of a week or two and then i'd start again and then i'd start again and over that period of time i'd make a hundred and then i'd glaze a hundred i'd stack them up and then glaze them all at the same time by the same time we went through the cycle so i'd place eight for a kiln fire the kiln see what they came out fire another egg you know and just do it that way and that worked for me you know and that has worked for me ever since and so when i build work when i make work the element of time is very important and when when outside world interferes with that i've figured out all kinds of strategies to lengthen the time period that you can make work so i could go away for a month and i figured out how to keep pieces wet and damp and ready to go so when i come back i can just again jump right back in and and just pick up the conversation you know and that what it feels like it's like oh there's an old friend we've had a conversation time has gone by oh let's revisit that and you just get right back into it so so the element of time is is one i think about and i think it's an important thing for other people to think about too or at least ask questions about um when i'm talking to young artists and and kind of what they're struggling with and and you know how they're getting along in the world and their studio practice and everything else one of the things i always ask them is kind of how they how they think about time and how they think about the their relationship to the objects they're making and then if there's there's a question in there that i sense you know then i'll i'll take a little deeper and try to propose kind of strategies they might use to screw around with that a little bit but i think everybody's everybody's sense of that is different and and i think what's important is to try to find your own um but mine has simply been to to spend as much time as necessary on a piece until it's done and that could be months or it could be days it depends on the optic with t-balls it's it's it's literally minutes um whiskey cups the small stuff it's very quick and fluid because that's what that kind of object calls for uh for me um but the bigger work just requires a different strategy and i see people building big work and they build it really quick it can build huge pieces quickly and uh i can't do it you know um i i go slow you know and i've just accepted that and and have built kind of a world around me to allow that to happen so so when i'm struggling that part of it isn't part of the struggle struggles and ideas or or kind of conceptualizing something and trying to make it real in front of you and it not meeting what you're kind of imagining and and trying to figure that out but but i i refuse to struggle on on the element of of how i engage with the work um and the the energy and time needed to do it and so i i push everything else aside to make that happen so so time is an important thing to think about and your relationship to it in the studio and the processes you use and the um uh you know the what the work is asking for in response um sometimes it's so clear that work is asking for just a little more time spend a little more time with me and and sometimes the work is just like god go away you know you've been you're just killing this thing you know so you have you have to be aware and and aware of that conversation between object and your hand and your mind and it's got to sink and oftentimes one could be one element of that triad could be out of whack and you've got to bring it all back into into focus so it's something i think about and i think it's important to talk [Music] about the bowl porcelain bowl i've made these probably since around 2007 or eight and um i make them in different scales and i like to work with porcelain because i like how the glaze moves on that interior surface they came out of of flying over to aspen one year to teach at anderson ranch and crossing the rockies and you know you're above tree line when you cross over and i took a uh uh kind of like a small plane from from denver over to to aspen and and you come across the rockies and you're actually pretty low to the mountaintops when you come across and the um what's interesting you don't see this when you're down driving through that landscape but when you fly over it the tree line ends and the whole top of the mountains are bare and there's beautiful topography and you see these big kind of bowls forming where peak comes comes up and then but you have these movements coming down and they're down in the middle of it as a is a lake formed from all the snow snowmelt and i saw this though that topography is these big bowls so i started i made a few up at anderson ranch and then when i came home i i started really working on them and over the years i made quite a bit quite a few of them and i make them in different scales and um and so i like that i i'm after the glaze kind of rolling through that topography you know and i i throw them and then i punch them and i bend them and i do all that and i create little finger dimples and marks and you know i push them around a bit but i think of all those as kind of like impositions in landscape i i see that as like you know you got this beautiful field and you have this boulder that comes out of the ground and sticks but it's in the field but it's not you know the field could be full of wheat or something or you know but then you have this little stone outcropping that everybody works around and so that's how i think of these this is kind of top topographical landscapes landscapes so so make one of those and and i'll do uh uh you know i'll make one i'll make one usually i make them in series i make six or eight at a time and then when i'm doing the drawings i riff between one to the next to the next and that way you know i'm kind of inventing mark making as i go so i'll do one mark and one bowl then then i'll go that's kind of that's kind of interesting and then i'll kind of try to figure that out a little bit more in the next bowl and i'll go down the line and out of that comes you know some invention and it's quiet it's not radical in a specific move but over time you you get to places you wouldn't get to otherwise um and again it's it's like one mark leads to another not mark they're they're responsive to each other um i think a lot of the stuff is like music and and um where one note is responding to another note and they have meaning because you're playing you know they're working together or they're pushing against each other um you know it's like dance it's like movement um so that's that that's what the bowls are uh i'm gonna make a group of tea bowls whiskey cups and um every kilogram fire i have put a lot of them in and um i like the sense that the scale is instead of being larger scale it's really shrunk down to your hand and so you experience it through your hand you experience it through your lips and and i'm interested in this at least in my situation you know i work big most of the time so to bring it down into kind of this really diminutive scale it's hard and and your hands work differently they touch differently but also the world you're trying to create is different it's it's a it's a different sense of intimacy and i enjoy that conversation between the large and the small you know if all i did was that i i don't think i could do it if all i did was large i don't think i could do it you know i have to move back and forth i'm sitting inside the anagama uh my killness is i basically built three chambers so this is the first of three and this is about 400 450 cubic feet we have 25 people in this firing from all over new england someone from phoenix and couple people from new york and uh we do this twice a year but with kobit we had a delay of firing so we're doing in september instead of june and this is pretty unique firing simply because of the covet situation we're having to schedule it very different what usually takes three days to load is now going to be about 10 days 10 to 12 days and we just spread everything out so that we have very small groups of people on property at any given moment they're all socially distanced and uh and we're just going to take our time doing something that usually is more frantic we're going to load the start loading the first chamber first and then the second chamber which is a soda chamber about 100 cubic feet will be loaded this is saturday we're going to start on a tuesday so we're going to start staggering the loadings so again to control the amount of people in any given time um now this is going to be a little more difficult to load because we're only going to have one person in the kiln at a time so there's going to be more moving around more stretch breaks that type of thing more more times to to kind of take care of your old back so um so everyone's delivered their work they spent about a week delivering and again we did it so that only a few people showed up at a time to deliver work so we didn't have large groups here so it took about five days to to deliver all the work and it's all out on pallets outside and we have a tent up and back for the second and third chambers and they're pretty much full so we're going to start loading soon we're getting wadding ready we're kind of organizing right now and um what i'll do is i'll video the whole inside of the kiln as we load to so every we'll get to see what's going on uh but everything goes well and we get this thing filled then we'll begin low we'll begin firing on the on the 21st which is the following monday so a week from this coming monday so anyway so so it's it's this is this is an interesting time we're in and we're having to accommodate the needs of that that time and we think we've figured it out a way to do it so um you're all going to be kind of privy to that it's a different world now but i think there's certain things that that are consistent in it and these are the abstractions um that my teacher ken ferguson at the kansas city art institute always used to just drive this thing home he would just rattle this off at the at the moment's notice you know it's like pots come from pots and you know he just screamed that and and you know you got to make work you got to make work because if you don't make work it isn't going to be made in your head you have to make it real you have to put your ideas into real space to try to understand them and it doesn't matter if you're making a pot or sculpture or you're doing conceptual art or you're doing performance or doing video or whatever you need to make something real that you can then respond to and and that really hit home quite deeply for me um because it asks so many other things it asks you to be serious it asks you to [Music] not only take your work seriously but to take you seriously take yourself seriously you know that that the energy put into something has value and that you need to respect that um i was just you know would drive me nuts when i had students who would spend like a month working on something and then comes to that last moment of finishing it and they just they would when i say they i mean just didn't happen that often but when when when someone did this they'd make a decision that just totally diminished the amount of effort that went into the work and almost as if nothing mattered and and the outcome was always bad you know and it was like they just didn't have the thing to take it to the next you know to just put that last bit of energy into it that they put all the way through so commitment's really you know it's so easy to say it because it's really hard and um and again the the idea of of investing yourself in your work you know you can say that but what does that mean you know i i had a student who asked me to if i would do a meeting with him out of my studio and he was about to graduate and he said he wanted to talk about some stuff about she was thinking about doing so i said sure come on out and i'm in my studio and i'm looking out the window as this car drives in and i see him get out of the car and he comes over and knocks my door and he comes in and we sit down and talk for about a half hour and i go okay what do you want to do what's your dream you know and he goes through this whole thing about his dream and it has to do with setting up a studio he wanted to be in the same town as his family and everything he didn't want to go to grad school he just wanted to be a potter and he wanted to have a little shop and he wanted to sell the work little gallery all very wonderful things and and he goes but but the problem is i don't have any money and so so i sat there and i said well that's that's a problem you know it's hard to do this stuff if you don't have an income source or if you don't have that accessibility and so then i kind of leaned over and looked out the window and in the in the parking lot was a 20 000 cheap jeep cherokee and so i just looked at him i said well why don't you sell the jeep and just cut get like a crappy little car and then take the profit from the jeep and go out and rent a space for a year and just pay the years rent you know and you'll have a certain amount of leftover and then with that buy a used electric kiln and then maybe buy a potter's wheel and you could buy some lumber and build some tables and stuff and then you can get going and he looked at me like i was out of my mind you know it's like sell the jeep you gotta be crazy you know so that's what i'm talking about it's like you know it's like what are you willing to do to do what you want what what you love to do you know what are you willing to give up because you got to give up stuff i mean there's no doubt about it you got to give up stuff so so my advice to young people or to anybody who's doing this is is it's the commitment and the commitment is about showing up you gotta show up to work you gotta show up to your studio you gotta show up to to to the act of making you have to be invested in it that's a good one if you can do that if you can come to terms with that and all the dominoes that fall when you say you will do that and accept that and go through the good stuff and go through the bad stuff and be willing to just be there in that commitment then something's going to happen you'll make a career out of it and something good will come out of it you know it always does i've seen it so many times you know there's a life of just kind of wonder and and difficulty and all the stuff that's in that but but it all goes together so you gotta show up so these are the two pieces um all finished all ready to go um where we go from here is we do some light sanding clean all the little edges up and everything get them misfired and then they'll be in the november wood fire so um i'll post these online once they come out so if you're interested you can see them finished it's really been fun doing this video the um you know doing these these little short videos over a period of time and uh hopefully you got something out of it it's been fun for me it's been fun to explore kind of a different opening for this and a different top it's an idea i'll kind of try to push over the next few pieces you know this is this is something that would take maybe a dozen forms to kind of really try to figure out for me so anyway so i'll do that so that that'll be kind of winter work i always like when i'm doing a workshop situation i'll try a little tweak on something and that opens the door for when i come back to my studio to explore that middle tweak i did and and this uh this little exercise this this video workshop for the huntington has kind of opened that door for me for these pieces so i appreciate that and we'll just see where this goes anyway i hope you all got something out of this it's been really a hoot to do it wish we could have been together in west virginia but we couldn't so we did this instead and i actually think it worked out really great so it's been a pleasure to do it and thanks for being part of all this with us and thank you to huntington for all you did to make this possible [Music] you

Channel: Huntington Museum of Art

Views: 46,877

Rating: 4.8238635 out of 5

Keywords: art, ceramics, linda christianson, pottery, Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, museum, education, Chris Gustin, Bandana Pottery, Sanam Emami, handmade, kiln, wood fire, wheel thrown, clay

Id: wEqVwckRwdc

Length: 66min 28sec (3988 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020