an artist statement (in writing and in clay)

first of all, we should address my presumed phobia of capital letters. i don't fear them. i simply don't need them. they feel loud, obtrusive, sometimes petulant. brash. abrasive. punctuated. my words are softer and more fluid. my voice is calmer. i don't like to make such a bold distinction between sentences. because our brain doesn't work that way.

instead, our thought-changes and thought-pauses are more akin to line-breaks.

not capital letters.

everything i write is fiction. because i believe our world is fiction. we create our own "realities." for all you know, none of these events i describe happened just-that-way.

these are stories only you and me know. to everyone else, they're fiction. no one else can confirm or deny.




trying to make something "different" is terribly boring. emulating another artist is good for practice, but bad for execution. finding a voice in clay is extremely difficult. especially when you're in a very small, sardines-environment of a studio. i am an undergrad in a facility hosting somewhere around 8 other undergraduate students, as well as 7 graduate students. we share 2 professors. we are a lovely family. but as i move forward into my first-ever undergraduate seminar course, i am nervous. i am distraught. what the hell do i make? i don't think i'm supposed to know. a recent-graduate of the BFA program told my 3rd-year studio-mate (i am 4th-year) that it's okay to go into seminar not knowing what to do, that the point of seminar was to help you find a niche. that's really exciting. but intimidating, because i see elaborately painted porcelain plates, i see 4-sets of stylized cups, i see slipcasts of grotesque and beautiful baby-doll parts, i see geometric pots with fantastic color and form.

what the hell do i make? sure, i have had a few short stints. brief psychoses. the time i made those white spiders and nearly drove myself insane making them. the time i made all those pots-with-triangles for a project and then let that branch off as my "thing." but i stopped. i stopped making the triangles. and that in itself is another story.

they were my therapy in recovery from an 8 year struggle with an eating disorder. so simple, i know. little line drawings, webbed and networking, black lines over and over and over again. but something changed recently. and i put down the pen. and i don't starve myself anymore.

i count myself lucky. my solution, as terrifying as it was for my parents at times, and confusing to my friends and studio-mates, worked.

and i am a month away from sitting down with you, andy shaw, and having to think about what i want to do.

i have one idea.

and then i have some idealettes (my word for fragments of ideas that need love and sunlight and water and time).

my one idea is to use this raw materials class to my advantage. a friend of mine completely outside of the right-brained world asked me if i could make him some plugs (body jewelry for stretched ears) out of ceramic. i immediately spouted off that they would have to likely be porcelain, for sanitary reasons as well as gravitational (other clays can be heavy). also, durability. and in that moment, a million ideas began branching off from my words. but i trimmed it down, and i wondered if there was a way for me to run tests for, and formulate, an ideal clay body for making plugs. and a preferred method (throwing/handbuilding, press-mold, slip-casting). it could span the entire semester, with all the testing involved. and because of the extremely small size of plugs themselves, even at their larger gauges, test kilns (cara at the biggest) would be all i'd need. meaning quick firing turnaround and leaving space for people with bigger work.

my idealettes are as follows
-forcing myself back into pottery solely to continue my explorations on surface (lustre, continue sgraffito, mishima, etc)
-my interest in art education, integrating that somehow?
-the flicker in the back of my mind for tile-work, and the possibilities of that (ie, testing clay bodies, glazes, shrinkage)

this is less an artist statement as a way to get all my ideas out. but if i can get an artist statement of some sort by the end of 2012, i'll be in good shape!