Space to play!
Translating collage into clay and taking forever
Playing with those coloured slips I made in May…
I’ve been thinking about procrastination and perfectionism lately, and how I partake in both. I ask myself,
What are you hiding from?
What are you running from?
“Favourable conditions never come” - C. S. Lewis
My studio processes and progress at the moment are both delicious! I’ll take what I can get- an hour, or a whole day. Some days I’ve even happily stolen 20 minutes to work on my pots.
Sharing my work though, in writing - which is very much part of “THE WORK” - is a bit stickier for me. I absolutely procrastinate on writing and sharing. The last time I properly addressed my creative practice with words was way back in 2015, 2016, during my masters degree. Everything following that became a bit “content” - Instagram captions, blog posts that attempted to answer imaginary questions my imaginary audience might have. I lost sight of the artist part of me and became very good at ticking the boxes of the business-y side of being a ceramist striving to sell her pots.
Layered underglazes
I think impatience is a natural part of being a creative person who wants to be able to create full time. You understand that part of the key to making that possible is finding the people who will support your creative practice. So you tell yourself, if I just find that perfect idea, execute it and get it online for the world to see, then I can start selling. Then a gallery will discover me. Then I will be a-successful-artist! Now I just need to make 30 mugs and create product listings, and then and then and then…
But we can’t expedite the creative process.
We can’t select next day shipping for rediscovering our creative voice.
Reaching that goal, that destination that we’ve defined as successful, is only PART of the beautiful privilege we have of being creative people.
I have to be willing to honour the messy middle, the process, to be fully present for the whole journey as it unfolds. Sharing our work with others is wonderful (and also scary), but honestly, isn’t the act of creating and making just the fucking best? Isn’t being an artist about making art? Being a ceramist about making ceramics?
I want to jump ahead with this “perfect idea”, set a deadline in stone by booking a stand at an artisan market to force myself forward a few leaps… because I want to get back to where I was before immigrating. That’s all. I feel like I worked so hard to juuust start tasting those first little morsels of “oh, this could be working!”, and honestly thought I would simply continue from that point in a new country.
It didn’t work out that way. But I think it has worked out even better.
More scritchy scratchy with coloured slip
Now it’s not that I HAVE to start from scratch… I GET to start from scratch.
These last few years of frustration and growth have been a process of reflecting, refining, rediscovering and relearning, and remembering what I love and what I truly want.
All of this to say, I think I’m rebelling against my impatient, hit-the-goal tendencies.
I’m taking it slow, and playing, and listening to that quiet voice that usually knows best(ish). I’m really relishing my slow, contemplative, and experimental time in the studio. And for now I don’t have to share perfectly written entries on a very consistent schedule. I just need to be generous and real.
Four collages made in 2019
Sometimes I describe my creative vision right now as “translating collage into clay”. A few years ago I went on quite the collage tangent, and looking at them now still tugs at my gut in all the right ways.
These four collages above are smallish, ranging from about 10cm x 5cm to 15cm x 15cm. They were all made in 2019 using pages from charity shop books and materials destined for the recycling, mostly magazines and packaging. I remember I worked in an almost frenzied way, hurriedly cutting, tearing, sticking and layering, sometimes in a considered way, sometimes not. Some of the foundational layers are completely covered. The intense layering results in an almost obliteration of the original planes of colour and imagery; in a way I was reflecting on the destruction of the natural world, the continuous dumping and dumping and dumping of so much stuff on the land and in the water.
Layered book pages, paint, oil pastel, pencil. 2021
This piece above was made in 2021, and is about A5 in size. It’s part of a series of four, Love Letters, and I remember sticking pages from a book about South Africa onto a larger sheet of paper and then chopping it into quarters. I’m not sure if this work would actually count as a collage, as it’s technically just acrylic paint, pastel and pencil on paper. Still, it’s a continuation of the mark making that would soon be seen in my earlier collage work. The vertical crosses down the left hand side come from my grandpa’s building work. My family lived in a house he built and had left more or less unfinished, my bedroom included. He had marked out the positions for built-in cupboards with crosses and horizontal lines, and I saw those marks around me for about two years. They’ve always snuck their way into my work since then.
The question now is how do I create like this in a different medium? How much do I take from these works? Literally, how do I translate collage into clay?
Love Letters in clay
This vessel here is a reflection on the Love Letters collage/mixed media work that I just shared. It’s hard to imagine the intensity of the colours just yet as it hasn’t been bisqued or glazed. I’ve been able to achieve some of the mark making seen in the 2D work, but I think I need to try some different formats and applications of ceramic materials, such as underglaze crayons or pastels, slip trailing, and oxide pencils, to create alternative qualities of line.
Another idea I have is to create different small stained batches of clay, and use them to create torn “shards” that can be layered and overlapped for that collage-y style…
Back to where this started, on procrastination and perfectionism, Jake the Dog has the best approach:
Adventure Time 🥹
So I just gotta suck a bit at the writing until I get sort of good at it :)
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It took me so effing long to write this post, about four weeks and a bit of back and forth to the computer, losing track, off to work, focusing on making a group of pots… I’ve almost finished a 12kg batch of terracotta clay in those four weeks!
A few weeks ago I ordered a bunch of new things from Scarva, one of my favourite pottery suppliers in the UK. In this order I got underglaze chalks, a slip trailer, an oxide pencil, and four new underglaze colours! I’m taking my own suggestion to try different techniques for alternative qualities of line 😋
A few Friday nights ago I went ghost hunting at an old Victorian fort with a friend! 👻 Although I’m a believer in the paranormal, I was too distrustful of the other attendees to completely take in our experiences as real. I used an Ouija board with three other people in two different locations and the planchette actually MOVED. We spoke to a spirit named George and he answered our questions… but it was definitely magnets, right??
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Doing everything perfectly all the time is impossible: Spotted in London way back in 2022
What’s next? A bisque firing, an earthenware firing with clear glaze for the collage vessels, and then testing of stoneware glazes for cups that I’m very keen to get some direction on ☕️
Chat soon!
Jess x
