Why Crumpled Brown Paper?

If you’ve ever bought any work from me, you probably got it wrapped in crumpled, brown paper.

I hadn’t thought of this from the presentation side of things until two weeks ago. A very nice man was buying one of my big bowls at the Farmers’ Market for his wife’s birthday. He asked what kind of wrapping I had and I responded that I didn’t have any gift wrap just brown paper. It turned out he was only asking to make sure the bowl was safely wrapped for transportation. I started swaddling it in several pieces of my brown paper and felt a little unprofessional. The bowl was safely wrapped but hardly beautifully presented.
Later that week I got to thinking about this. Everything you do and show to the public says something about you. So, what was this saying about me?

It’s important to me to reduce wasting resources wherever possible and unfortunately, ceramics as a medium does not have the smallest of carbon footprints. All the clay and all the minerals for glaze have to be mined somewhere. And firings of every kind use a lot of resources–electricity, natural gas, wood or oil–and they all add pollution to our atmosphere. I use both electric and gas kilns and while my electricity is from renewable resources, gas isn’t.
I try to help mitigate these problems where ever I can. I recycle my clay endlessly until it’s fired and I’m mindful about how I get rid of potentially dangerous glaze waste.

I’ve always gotten used packing paper from stores to wrap my work in for storage and transportation. And if you’ve ever bought anything from me, you know that’s what it came wrapped in! Once I started thinking about my packaging and presentation, I realized that this looked shabby and not very well presented. But then I thought about why I do that and how reusing that paper aligns with my values. I decided it’s okay if the wrapping looks a bit scruffy as long as the work is beautiful and people know why I’m giving it to them wrapped  that way.

So, I’ll keep on using and reusing my brown paper. I’ll just be sure to tell people that I’m doing it to save resources!

I still have my booth at the Fairfax Farmers’ Market until the middle of October. So, if you need a new mug or bowl or just miss that little bunch of brown paper, come and see me!