winter 2013

Bitoey takes the helm on day 5 of the King’s Cup.             photo Carolyn Kovacs

Hello from Thailand!  After the successful launch of the porcelain pickling crocks this fall, I have  joined my Pop aboard the Argo, a 110′ schooner sailed by college students attending a program called Seamester, which he founded.  She sails around the world: the students join for one semester, attending courses in oceanography, marine biology, leadership, seamanship, and scuba diving.  This semester is ending at Phuket Island in the Andaman Sea with the King’s Cup Regatta; I blazed out of town as soon as I could after my own class ended to join them in time.  What an awesome treat!  I’ve been aboard a few times, but have never able to sail with her.  Like a good pot, a sailing ship comes alive in use.  Argo is a beautiful functional vessel.

As I contemplate wearing  the mantle of a social entrepreneur, I think peripherally about my father’s example. His entrepreneurship is in business: Seamester provides experiential education.  The adventures are challenging, direct and dynamic, involved with immediate skill-based realities as well as interpersonal subtleties.  The undulating blue steel waters connect your passage to exotic places but also confine you to this pressure cooker of your own and everyone else’s story.  For as long as I can remember, my Pop would talk with me about how intention becomes action, thinking outside the paradigm, and following my own star.  I believe that I have, and now I am ready to incorporate the meta of that experience into what else I can offer to my culture.  Business may not be my strong suit, but experiential education is what actually happens around a kiln like the Tin Man.

Back to sailing… about 100 boats raced for the King’s Cup over five days, in different classes- ours was the classic class with one other competitor, and we were smoked every time by them, but no matter!  Argo was designed to be gorgeous topsides but ultra-safe and utilitarian (read: heavy and slow), and running rigging is manual.  What that means in operation is that it takes at least 8 people to haul in a sheet (rope adjusting a sail), as you can see in the following picture.  All those pink shirts are tugging as hard as they can on what they can grab of a line that controls one of the most forward sails with no mechanical advantage, and then the last person in line secures it in place on a cleat.

On the fifth day, we invited 20 Thai kids to join us.  Coming from all over the country, these were the young sailors who competed in their own race in the prams (affectionately deemed bathtubs with sheets). Paired up with the shipmates, the Thai kids participated as much as possible by tugging on lines and steering.  It made sailing extra-crazy and impossibly sweet.  And when we crossed paths with our competitor, we all lined up on one side of the boat and did the wave.

Meanwhile, my work is around town- Eutectic Gallery has pots from the Tin Man in their holiday-friendly gallery display, as does the Jasmine Pearl.  Mirador Community Store is the place to find pickling crocks if you are in town.  If you are passing by Blackfish Gallery, you’ll see a few choice pieces in the fishbowl.  But the Etsy store is closed, I am sorry to report.  If you are interested in purchasing a crock but do not live near Portland, please contact me, and I will take your order and send out a gift certificate to a friend if you’d like.  If you could, please contact in a new email thread instead of replying to this one.  New members (pickling aficionados) to this newsletter, hello!  Until I have a new website linked to mailchimp, this is a direct quarterly email, and I hope you enjoy them!  I am certainly delighted to have met you at recent events, and look forward to offering more tools for your healthful food preparation in the future.

Sawatdee Ka from the Land of Smiles!

Careen

winter 2012

It’s the last day of my temporary teaching gig at Pacific University.  My students come find me in the borrowed office for seven minutes each to show me their final piece and share feedback.  It’s been excellent, a challenge, enriching for all.  At the close of the day, Terry O’Day tells me the latest progress that has stemmed from her tenacity, and at my request, goes through her library sharing titles for my future education.  I want to tell you about this woman: she is so rad.   She’s the woman for whom I’m filling in at Pacific U this term.  She and her husband did blown glass for a long time, found their niche and did all right, but she grew weary of making objects.  Not the work of it but the fact of taking refined materials and producing more stuff.  She got a job at PacU and set about creating a classroom environment that fosters a comfort with the nature of the clay.  But she also founded a permaculture project on land that the campus leases, and has worked there with a teaching philosophy in line with experiential education: DO the thing to make the mistakes to see the results to learn the best action.  This is not a lecture, it’s a lab: the learning is in the work of it, the observations over time, and a debrief of that work’s result. 

On her sabbatical, she is trying to create an Artisanal Craft major at the school (or a permaculture certificate) (or insinuating these ideas into freshman level core courses via a major grant): organizing existing classes and putting the role of the handmade object into its historical and contemporary cultural contexts (pre and post industrial age) as well as in ecological context as our use of materials becomes more pertinent to our environmental health.   As she jets from one place to the next, she also takes long moments to share with me her insights into, well, all that and also resource-based economy, founding something in a way that allows it to grow and support itself over time, her trip to Italy to represent the local Slow Food movement, Deep Green vs Bright Green vs Green Washed, and as to be expected, we can talk for an hour about eating meat.  

Sadly, at this point, it sounds like admin isn’t really going for this new major.  For one thing, the art department is about art, writ Art, not craft, and won’t budge about that.  Never mind the historical dominance of fine craft for millennia and meta-thinky Art as the new kid on the block.  But for another thing, the whole premise of the major is based on systems thinking (new to me, and I have much more to read about it), awareness of design, writ large: that we would do well to have young people aware of and practiced in what it takes to analyze a situation in its micro and macro perspective and make critical decisions about how to move forward while knowing how to do so because they have some hands-on experience.  Using a permaculture garden as a lab setting or tool/ metaphor.  It’s a different paradigm, a different teaching philosophy than the status quo. 

This is why I call her rad: a radical, and totally undaunted by the system.  Laughing (as always), she describes herself as a visionary wacko maniac.  She is widely and effusively beloved by her students.   At the close of today, she tells me the latest: the college of Business is splitting off from the college of arts and sciences, and the director is very excited about her proposals.  Wonderful news!  As she pulls books for me about craft, design, and permaculture, I ask her advice about attending the multi-week workshop at the Bullock's Permaculture Homestead on Orcas Island that I am thinking of attending.  She says, read these, develop some questions, go visit them.  And then go visit again each year.  I assume, and state, oh, to see how their place changes over time… she smiles… go there every year because you will change, your ability to see what is there will change…  I love her- that she can be so right on, yet correct me so gently.  I don’t envy aspects of her job.  But I do wonder at whatever path of patience she has traveled that has led her to glow the way she does.  I will miss those crinkly Mongolian eyes beneath that orange baseball cap.

Here’s her reading list: A theory of craft- howard risatti / the craft reader / the unknown craftsman / choosing craft, an artist's perspective / beauty of craft / Glimmer / the third teacher / the design of business / the link in above paragraph / farmers of 40 centuries - fh king / Fukuoka - 1 straw revolution / david holmgren - pathways to sustainability / toolbox for sustainable city living- scott kellogg / linda weintraub's series on art and permaculture, also, "to life" / earthuser's guide to permaculture - rosemary morrow / gaia's garden - hemenway / just enough- brown / sep holzer's permaculture

I must do my duty, since this newsletter is also announcements for where to find my work! Lots of potters are having studio sales.  For a map, go to the OPA website for the pdf.  Here’s a shout for Victoria Christen, whose work I have admired since I first saw it at Linda’s house a decade ago.  Go to her studio this weekend for soul-warming earthenware.   Mandy and I have joined the good people at Mudshark Studios, et al, in a pop-up shop downtown for a holiday sale.  Located right across from the Real Mother Goose, it is in a prime location with extensive open hours from now till Christmas.  Please join us on first Thursday (this coming) for brandy sipping and hob-nobbing..  Full details on this facebooky page. 

For sale is my studio work and also the results of this year’s adventure with Mudshark Studios: a slip-cast version of my popular mug in white or black.  I tried on a new hat this year: designer.  How does it look?  New Seasons Market likes it: ordered 260 mugs wholesale, and they are currently for sale at all 9 stores that have a homegoods department (everywhere in OR minus Hawthorne).  Dubbed the Mermaid’s Cup, they are a story of local economy, and as such, a litmus test for where my attention will go in the future.  Retailing at 25 dollars a pop, they aren’t Chinese cheap.  But almost everyone’s earning a living wage from concept to cash register.  “Buy Local” is what it says on the featured product image.  Yup, that’s me as a mermaid, dressed in my hair with threads of pbr beads and blue make-up.  Please let me know if you search for them and don’t find. 

Ps… I received many kind replies to last quarter’s newsletter.  Thank you.  You are marvelous people. Life has taken a remarkable turn for the better in the past few months….......  “they say the darkest hour is right before the dawn” (Dylan)............

May your holidays be full of friends and good food..........

summer 2012

After such a busy winter and sunny spring, I dare hope for an amazing summer. I will be exhibiting work at the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival in mid-June, and will have a booth at the Bellevue Arts Fair in late July (#I-06). Hosted by the Bellevue Art Museum with its focus on craft, the fair is of long-standing excellent repute in the NW and promises to be a relatively lucrative one for me. I am psyched to have been accepted. Relieved too, since the juries of other regional hi-mid-quality fairs did not esteem my work enough to include me in their selections. I am weary of that high-stakes gamble and will move towards applying for retail representation next year. Fairs are a serious hassle for the full earnings which are still mediocre, and impossible to do alone. Fortunately, I have Mandy’s help for this one. I hit a low point recently, concerning all this. If you’d like to read about it, look to this blog post.

After the fair, I will be visiting with friends and family in various places as well as attending Burning Man for the first time. My body and hopefully enough of my mind will return just in time to pick up a one-term teaching job at Pacific University this fall.  Thank god for teaching, man... students energize me; I like the regular little paycheck... I get into it...  But too much would kill the joy..

So who’s this Mandy girl you keep talking about? Well, that’s her, trying to move a petrified tree…. Mandy is my first ever (sound of a little copper bugle) studio assistant! She’s been making work and making me laugh in my studio here for a number of months now, and a very welcome addition to my world. Connected by a mutual friend, she has recently completed the same graduate program as I did, and found a ceramics tech job not long after moving to town. With a focus on large slab-construction sculpture, it is a significant shift for her to be making utilitarian ware in my studio, so excellent conversation is growing out of that fertile ground as well as the many commonalities of our personalities.

We have a work for studio space exchange and are slowly tuning the parameters of what both of us think is fair (a little hard to do between two workaholics). For Mandy's artist statement and info about the studio assistantship program, look to this page. Here's a vimeo tour of the studio. She will be here until the completion of her solo show at the Blackfish Gallery Cooperative in June 2014. The position will then be available to another woman, should you know of someone else who might be a good match for the situation.

This winter I sat in front of a huge sheet of paper to “mind-map” the short and long term goals of my professional life. Coincidental to that was a series of group meetings called Vision Planning for the Community Minded, hosted by a somewhat fledgling cooperative workspace and facilitated by a potent independent consultant named Cheri Anderson. Free but incredibly valuable, the conversations greatly assisted me in analyzing my branding, vision, and mission statements.  Not an easy task, that! Here's what I ended up with for a business card:

Have I captured myself?  Seriously, I'd love to know what comes to mind when you see this... The back describes me as a potter, instructor, and mentor as well as including the more extended explanation that I make "luscious porcelain for everyday ritual created with ecological consciousness".  Branding-wise, its hard to get into the details of my sweet kiln without the message getting confusing... Wait, she's dirty, but she's clean?!?  Marketing my"self" as an artist is arguably the greatest existential loop I've ever traveled.

The Vision and Mission Statements were just as hard, and as yet unfinished. Basically, my vision was for a contemporary culture in alignment with permaculture principals and international social justice. Just a leeeeetle too broad! Someone heard my statement in the group and asked “where’s the handmade pots part of that?”, a completely valid question. Uhm…. so ubiquitous that it doesn’t need to be mentioned? Clearly, I have a long ways to go before I get my vision condensed into one lifetime's worth of work.  Can I make a vision statement for how I see my interaction with this world continuing three hundred years after my corporal death?  I can, apparently, since a vision is just that, separate of my ego, if you will.  Eventually, I tuned it to this: A return to interpersonal economies of heirloom-quality goods produced in awareness of nature's needs.  The pace of contemporary life is sustainingly slow, with gatherings of friends, neighbors & travelers over slow-cooked foods served on hand-made dishes.

As a related closing note, I haven't spoken about Reseach Club recently, but it is still a very important part of my life.  My friend Nim Wunnan is a source of great inspiration to me.  He is the mover and shaker behind RC and now the Portland Passport Project, which tried to take RC to a new dynamic with both web-based and analogue media.  Based on the modus operandi that we are truly fed by face to face interaction with like-minded curious people, the passport project seeks to create a record of same, mapping and stamping our everyday journeys to interesting gatherings around portland.  By tangibly connecting organizations like Portland Open Studios and Supportland with individuals like you and me, the reminiscing over looking at accumulated stamps could be as contagious as remembering those from international travel.  And its one beautiful example of the kind of cultural activity that has me waking in the morning more energized than melancholy.  Unfortunately, there wasn't enough community commitment.  As Nim writes: "we have not acheived escape velocity".  But you know what's super-sweet?  Some of these people that I met through RC brunches are becoming genuine friends.  These are the kind of people that I wanted to find in this little city.  This kind of friendship is what makes life worth living, and THAT, my friend, is what feeds more cultural creation.  I'll be there at Portland Prom, quite likely dressed as a cat in coat-tails. hope you can join us....