pottery open studio report

It is approximately half ten on a Sunday evening and I am feeling pleasantly tired and a little drunk. I am drinking tea from an extravagant mug* I purchased only hours ago. I purchased the mug in the final hours of the studio sale that the pottery studio I am a member of runs twice a year. I also had work for sale! I sold approximately £220 worth of it! More than I ever have before!

I was mostly selling "bud vases", a selection of vases I made while practicing collaring in to make bottle shaped forms. They are pretty cute, I think! I was also selling some new stuff I've made trying out more exciting clays than the standard studio stoneware. Some decent sized bowls in lavafleck, and some delicate cups in porcelain, both glazed (with pretty different effects) with turquoise. I also had some older stuff on the seconds table – a load of cups glazed in a pinkish glaze called "rice husk chun", and a vase which I personally hate, but think is a decent prototype for something that could go somewhere good in the future.

You might be reading this post and thinking... why are there not more pictures? I want to see the nice pottery! Show it off! And the answer is that in my pottery journey I got to the point I was making good stuff, and to the point where I had to think about whether I wanted to take this seriously and sell my work and generally build myself up as a potter. And the first step of that was getting kinda okay as a product photographer, so I could represent my work online rather than purely when you hold it in your hand. And then I decided... I couldn't really be bothered? I wanted to get better at pottery, not photography. Not that I hate photography, it's just a different skill, and I only have so much effort to put into this stuff, and apparently I want all of that effort to go into making and not into ~~content~~.

I guess what you could say is that for the first time in my life I faced down the barrier separating a hobby from becoming a different type of work, and I said... nah. Let it be.

But actually I should say I think I have gotten decent at pottery? Like, I find myself offering up advice to other people in the studio and realising it is based on some experience. I think the stuff I am making is good? I should say that I seem to be allergic to having a consistent style or a consistent type of thing I make, and instead find myself constantly shifting from project to project. Stuff that looks very different from each other, new techniques, etc etc. It's fun! I like to figure things out! I've never been one to focus on steady improvement if there's novelty I can explore instead. And it turns out that in exploring new things, you find some steady improvement - some things repeat, and some things you can take from one place and apply to others.

Anyway - with life and fatigue and everything I sometimes don't get to the studio much. And I think about how much I'm paying for my membership (about two hundred pounds a month) and I wonder if it's really worth it. And then I think about how if I left, I wouldn't be able to just pop in and do something creative of an evening. And when I do pop in, there's almost always someone I'm friends with (or at least friendly with) in as well. And then we have a chat about each others work, or just a chat in general. And often enough someone's brought some snacks in, or asks if I'm up for a beer. I am a little drunk because I was there after we closed having drinks and chatting. It's a community! It's an important community in my life! I enjoy being a part of it. And I enjoy making pottery. Long may this all continue.

* by Esme!