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....