The Updated Challenge

If you’re a reader of these newsletters, you will have noticed that I recently cut back on teaching. This is not because I was tired of teaching but because I needed more time to produce work.
About a year ago I wrote about a new challenge I was working on. I had my work shown to a buyer for some high-end home stores and she had some suggestions for making it more saleable. The challenge was to make my work more saleable but still make it my work. So, here is the update.

The journey of this work started unknowingly one Winter Solstice.
My family and a few friends went to North Beach in Point Reyes for the day. I took some clay to make little pieces to remind everyone about our day together and just before we left I very quickly made little pinch bowls and rolled them in the sand. I also took a bit of the sand home with me.
After glazing and firing, I distributed them to everyone and didn’t think much more about it.

A couple of years later, during that wonderful, quiet time in winter between the end of obligations and the start of the new year, I made some porcelain pinch cups and rolled them in that same sand and I liked them!

I gave one to a friend, accidentally broke one and took the other two inside to try out. Using your own work is a great way to learn how it performs!

After that I started exploring-shapes, kinds of clay, throwing versus hand building-and I was off and running.

My lovely friend Delia got involved and started bringing me sand from every beach she would visit (many thanks!) We did a bunch of tests to see how the sand would look after firing and after even more throwing and glazing and evaluating, I ended up with enough work to show the buyer.

So, now I’ve come full circle. I’ve gone through many batches of this work, lots of trial and error, and received a lot of feedback from my friends and family. The work has definitely changed and improved and I feel much more comfortable with throwing thin, naked porcelain!

I can’t believe its been a year but I finally have a very small line of work that I like, can sell wholesale and keep working on expanding. It even has a name-Coastal.

The result of all this is that I now have Coastal pieces in Rye Home in Santa Cruz!

In this process of making a line of work, I decided I needed some color! So, at my husband’s prompting and with some glaze tests from a former student I started another line-Color Blocks. These pieces are like a glaze class experiment in every load. But because of all the work making the glaze test wall at least it’s informed guessing!

Working with ceramics is this never ending and always changing journey. Every firing shows me something new. The journey continues!!