Studio Update: Week of 9/29- 10/5/24

This paragraph includes general life info and feelings so feel free to skip past it to the second paragraph if you are here just for the art!!!! What a week ya'll. Things in my life have been very unpredictable, frustrating, and difficult recently. I have found myself in another position where I am in need of a new money making job due to some instability with my current gig. I know that many artists my age also work customer service jobs to make ends meet so that is validating to some degree. However, I find it so invalidating just how hard it is to get a customer service job these days. I have a degree and years of customer service experience ( and I'm so cute and nice !!!) and hardly anywhere is getting back to me. In an ideal world, I would find a serving job that I could balance well with my ceramics schedule. As it stands, I will need to take whatever job hires me regardless of how that impacts my ceramic schedule. At least for now. I am trying to remind myself that being an artist can look a lot different during different times of my life/ the year. Sometimes I will have to suck it up and do things I don't want just to survive, and that's just an impact of this shitty economy. There will also be periods of intense making, and sometimes there is an in between. I hate not knowing what to plan for, or even what my schedule will look like for the near future. I hate change, and navigating things I can't plan for. The beginning of October also just always holds some hard dates for me and my family. I always find myself more emotional in these first two weeks so I am trying to be gentle with myself, but boy are things piling up. I am so grateful for the friends and studio-mates that I have in my corner. Their warmth and kindness has meant a lot to me recently.

In the studio this week I have been really productive! Call it a product of having 100% free time currently or call it sheer artistic will power, the latter makes me sound cooler so I will be going with that. I threw a bunch of plates this week. Some are smaller 6 inch plates that I plan to use for my big sculpture, and some are my regular 12 -13 inch plates that I threw with my reclaimed dark clay body. All of Tuesday my mind was blank, only plate existed. It was great! Then I had to sit back and look at what I had done and come to terms with the fact that now the rest of the week I will have to babysit all these damn plates until they get to the right dryness to trim. Drying plates is harder than throwing the plates as you have to wrap them differently at different stages of drying so that they dry evenly and don't crack. Unfortunately, the plates took up all of my available studio space, and I don't want to overwhelm myself with more work because they will take up all of my time once they reach the right dryness. The back studios seem to have really humid, stagnant air this week so I ended up having to bake them in the sun for most of Thursday. In the meantime, I did a lot of random studio tasks. I worked on finalizing my pied mother sculpture from months ago. I set her up on a pedestal and documented her along with some other recent pieces. I rehydrated old dark clay that sat for too long. I made test tiles for upcoming glaze research. I talked with studio mates. I met up with Molly to talk more about our upcoming show. I thought about my trajectory as an artist. As the week wraps up I'm taking an impromptu trip back home to stay with some friends. The Ham (my dog) has been staying at my mom's for the past 2 months and he is finally ready to come back so I will grab him as well. I'm sorry in advance for the influx of dog pictures that will make it's way into the blog.

If you read all of that, thank you! I appreciate you being interested in my weekly updates and whoever you are, I hope that you have a wonderful day:)

Image 1: Plates

Image 2: Jooby doing a Pit Firing!

Image 3: She's put together (good for her!)

Image 4: I am starting to add detachable plates to this sculpture