Where to go from here: thoughts on my changing ceramics practice

When people ask how long I’ve done ceramics, I never really know how to answer. One possible answer is that I learned in high school in the late ‘90s.  But I didn’t actually learn to throw until college in 2005. And then I had a ten year gap after college and started again in 2015. When I took ceramics in high school, like all art classes, I loved it. I only remember learning sculpture and hand building, though a clunky wheel thrown bowl with “Deason, D period” carved in the bottom holds potpourri at my parents’ house, suggesting that I did try out the wheel at some point. 

a mug from my college class

But college – pardon the cliche – is when I fell in love with ceramics. I went to the studio outside of class hours, working on my throwing skills every chance I got. I went to school in Mobile, AL, and despite living on a very walkable campus, everyone (myself included) drove their clunky SUVs to get from one building to the next – probably to avoid the stifling humidity. But that spring I got a bike, and I remember zooming through the roundabouts from my dorm to the art building, feeling like this is what life could be like if I moved out of the heavy humid suburbs of the south, and into a city where I would ride my bike, and make pottery, and reinvent myself.

 My ceramics professor was named Tony, and his wife had been my photography professor the semester before. I was wrapping up my BA in Communications with a minor in English, but I stacked my schedule with art electives whenever I could. I had gotten a B in photography. I loved the creativity of composing photos, but hated the technicality (and the darkness) of the dark room, so I rarely made a flawless print, and I never re-printed a piece for a higher grade when given the chance. But ceramics class was different. Tony must have been a good instructor, because I don’t really remember the process of learning the wheel, but I know that I caught on fast. I just remember that when it clicked it was all I wanted to do. I made a set of bowls that I still had up until a few years ago when the last one finally broke. I made a silly mug with a scgraffito unicorn drawing, and I probably made a dozen other jejune pieces I don’t remember now. I graduated that spring and lived in Birmingham with my family for the summer before I moved to Portland. I joined a ceramics studio downtown where I spent all my time when I wasn’t making giant sugary coffee drinks at the drive through Starbucks. 

I moved to Portland that fall, and I signed up for a community education ceramics class at Portland Community College. It was a fairly substantial commute for me since I didn’t have a car. I biked part of the distance and bussed the rest. I didn’t mind though. It felt something like the life I’d envisioned for myself when I pedalled across campus to the art building every day the previous spring. Eventually though, the commute and the cost became too much, and my ceramics practice withered away. There were no community studios in Portland at the time, so my only option was to register for a class, which meant that I had to work around my always-changing work schedule in retail. 

It wasn’t until 2015 when I picked up ceramics again. By this time I was teaching English at the same PCC where I’d initially taken ceramics. I had been teaching for three years and was starting to feel some sense of stability and a desire to do something other than work all the time. I learned that I had unlimited, free, non-credit classes through PCC, and I signed up for a ceramics class. Despite the 10 year gap, some of the muscle memory remained, and after the first quarter I was hooked again. I took classes every term and organized my teaching schedule around when open studio hours happened. 

Looking back, I’m not sure when or why I decided to start selling my work. It certainly wasn’t good enough to sell at the time (I cringe), and I didn’t really need to sell it to pay for space or materials (a bag of clay was $9 at the time, and the classes cost me nothing). But what else was I supposed to do with everything I was making? Despite my early high school interest in sculpture, I had only been interested in wheel throwing since my college class. I cranked out mugs and bowls and vases, and when a friend contacted me about a pop-up market in 2016, I signed up; a booth was $50. I was the only ceramicist there and I sold most of the work I brought, making $300 or $400, which felt like so much at the time. I hadn’t invested anything in a market set-up. I brought our kitchen table and stacks of books for my display, and that worked great. After a couple of these markets, I decided to call my business Punctuation Ceramics, because I’d been making mugs with punctuation marks on them. I made an Instagram account, and from 2016-2019, I had around 300 followers and did maybe one market a year. I had some work on consignment at a local shop, I uploaded things to Etsy when I felt like it, and that was it. My choice to really invest in Punctaution Ceramics as a business and start to sell my work more consistently is a topic for another piece all together, and I talk about it some in my post “Why I Stopped Trying to Have a Career.” Like many people, 2020 was the year I found the time to invest more in creative pursuits, and for me that meant taking Punctuation Ceramics to the next level. I got my work into more shops, set up my own website, and started vending at bigger markets. But at the beginning of my 10th year of my second iteration of ceramics, I’m ready to take things in a different direction.

The kitchen table market set-up in 2016

Much of my business has been built around Instagram and pop-up markets. But perhaps more importantly, it has been built on the assumption that I will want to keep making and selling large amounts of wheel thrown dishes forever. For the first few years, this was challenging and thrilling, and pushed my creativity. I loved the intersection of functionality and art, and the ability to make slight changes to a wheel-thrown mug in order to make it feel and look the way I wanted it to. I loved the convergence of my interest in writing and literature with my ceramics practice, and I enjoyed the abstract connections I was making between my favorite authors and the color and pattern choices I was using to decorate my mugs. But as I started to get more exposure and monetize my work, I needed to make that work in much larger quantities in order to simply afford to sell it at all. I’d moved away from the free community ed classes and was spending hundreds of dollars a month for a studio space and firings. Clay that used to be $9 a bag was now $30 a bag, and the $50 markets were long gone. In their place were markets ranging from $115-$700 and requiring that I have a pop-up tent, folding tables, and a full mobile shop set up. And of course, I also needed thousands of dollars of work to make it worthwhile to vend at these markets at all. With all of these changes, I’ve had the opportunity to sell way more work, but I’ve also had a lot less time to experiment or change my work. The thrill of selling at a larger scale was enough to keep me interested and engaged for the first few years, but as more time has gone by, I’ve begun to feel like I am stuck in an endless loop of producing my best ideas from four years ago over and over again. The labor of producing, marketing, and selling this work will absolutely take up all of my time if I continue down this path. Materials, markets, and space are only becoming more expensive (one of the markets I’ve done for years is now going to start charging just to apply to the market). But do I even like this work anymore? No, not really. 

This isn’t new information for me. I’ve been thinking about it for a little over a year now. This time last year I took a sculpture class and learned to sculpt a ceramic head. It was around this time that I had started doing physical therapy for the tendinitis I’d developed from throwing so much, and I was looking for a different way to work with clay–one that would be less hard on my body and less boring for my brain. I loved sculpture right away. I hadn't done it since high school because I’d been so taken with the wheel, but challenging my mind and hands to do something new with the clay was a revelation. 

I’ve known for a year now that this is what I want to pivot towards, but it’s hard to break away from the dish hustle. Oddly enough, the decline of Instagram and the oversaturation of the market scene are helping me inch closer to what I really want to be doing. Aside from the abhorrent morals and serious political corruption of Meta’s owner and CEO, Instagram is clearly no longer a place where I can find a new audience for my work. I’ve tried in earnest for the last year, and I’m not willing to put any more time or effort into it. It’s a relief just to say that. It’s clear that the app operates like a casino, allowing users the occasional thrill of a win to ensure that they keep coming back with a glimmer of hope even when the odds are stacked against them. I didn’t come up with this analogy myself. I saw it in (of all places) a social media strategist post. But as soon I read it I knew it was true. I can’t think of a more terrible way to spend my time than rolling my metaphorical dice at the casino of instagram. This isn’t to say that I’m going to quit using it all together. But it’s a relief to know that the strategies that worked really well for me to find an audience for my work from 2015-2020 just aren’t applicable anymore. In other words, it’s a good time for a fresh start. 

The same goes for markets. There was a time when they were the best place for me to find customers, connect with the community, and sell my work. But it’s starting to feel like there are more markets than there are customers at this point. And there are about 10 times as many people selling ceramic dishes than there were when I started in 2015.  At the last market I did, I counted how many ceramics booths customers would pass before they reached mine, and it was somewhere between 10 and 15. I’m friends with lots of these other potters and the organizers of these markets, so it’s not a critique of them, but an observation that what used to be effective for promoting a ceramic dish business is not effective anymore. 

If I was really invested in continuing to grow as a dish lady, I know I could learn more about the instagram algorithm, make more videos, learn to write SEO, and become active on more social media platforms. Similarly, I could apply to bigger markets and invest in a flashier market set-up. But the truth of the matter is that I’d rather invest my time and energy into something else: getting better at sculpture, applying for artist residencies, getting my bigger vases into interior design shops, submitting my work to galleries, dreaming up a group exhibition with other artists, and submitting my writing for publication. 

So how long have I done ceramics? Long enough that I’m ready to re-invent myself now. 

p.s. This post is my first attempt at something new that I’m trying this year: spending less time on a piece of writing before I post it. I hate that I only posted twice last year, and I know it’s because of my own perfectionist tendencies. So if there are errors or it seems kinda rough and ready–it’s because it is:)