As a project & container I am using all my old journal posts, chronologically, as a springboard for my free Substack to see where it might take me. Decision fatigue is real, and sometimes you just want someone to tell you what to do.
STUDIO LOVE IS REAL
We create space to create. Sometimes we take what we can get, sometimes we stretch. Chance, effort, luck, timing, needs & leaps of faith.
One Sunday in March of 2017 I went to my studio in Brooklyn to unload a kiln. It was a lovely day and I distinctly remember feeling REALLY GRATEFUL for the beautiful studio I was in, my team of makers, the work we were creating and loving the whole process of making it- the good, the bad & the ugly. The cracks, the failures & the mishaps (well not really).
The Sunday Studio Tour post from 2017 took me on a deep dive into my photos and inspired me to create a studio tour of all the different spaces I have worked in. The ‘great’ idea quickly became overwhelming and threw me into procrastination mode, till my friend Kelly said “That sounds like it could be multiple posts” haha hallelujah! Sometimes you just really need someone else to tell you what to do.
HENCE
Part 1! Pre-Studio
(2002) I spent almost a full year of Saturdays pinching pots and learning to throw at Third Ave Clay. I loved the studio funkiness, Adrienne, and the train ride to Brooklyn. Being in a class with other people making things. Solo in your making but also in a group. I loved it.
(2003) Did a one month residency at Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock NY. More studio love in a barn in the woods on the side of a mountain.
(2005-2010) I started taking classes at Greenwich House Pottery in NYC.
One class turned into 2, and eventually into 3. It was a vibrant learning community in a historic three story brownstone in the west village filled to the brim with clay, glazes, kilns and amazing people. A total New York Story. I used GHP, like many other artists there, as a studio. They had tons of open studio time, but you had to be in classes so you could store your work on the shelves.
I started with wheel class, but everything I wanted to make was in hand building. Skulls, garlands, shells.
Everywhere became the studio.
Home.
Upstate.
Montauk.
A lot of the work needed to be assembled, so I turned a room in my apartment into the assembly studio.
This was the last stop till I rented my first studio in Brooklyn on Ainslie Street. Macho Studios. To be continued.
Quote from the 2017 journal post:
‘VISION is sometimes a terrible thing. Ideas are easy to come by, they spring effortlessly out of the vacuity of the mind and cost nothing. When they are held and projected onto one’s self or others they become a project. When the project is enacted it becomes the work, and when the work is completed it appears to be self-existent. Creation is the process of form manifesting from emptiness, where that which arises from the mind comes into existence. Yet the distance between conception and realization may be enormous, as vast as the distance between stars’ Robert Beer
