I made this piece in early 2010.
For a very long time, my primary focus in ceramics was sculpture. I always made mugs and whatnot in between, but never really hunkered down and concentrated on a cohesive body of functional work until...well, until I finally had a reliable studio to work in (outside of a university setting) and started posting to Instagram regularly. I’ve made more work these past five or six years than I ever did when I was still a student, and it’s been one of my largest periods of growth as an artist. Because of this, I think it’s easy to scroll down my feed and assume that it holds the entirety of my ceramic career; there is a lot of evolution and honing happening there. In actuality, I had already been working in clay for over 15 years when I made my IG account in...2015? (Although I think that’s hard to tell by some of the early work I posted to my account, which looks so embarrassingly remedial to me now, since my area of focus was sculpture for so long, ha!) Which circles back to all the sculpture I was doing previously, including this piece.
Such a huge chunk of my “language” in functional work (academic lingo alert!) comes from my past sculptural work. It might come across as odd to say, but I get the most inspiration for new work by looking at my past work. There is always some idea or direction I only played with briefly that I look back at later and go “Oh, yeah! I really need to revisit that!” The little beans I made that filled all the small divots on this pod-form is one of those things I’ve been thinking about recently, and how to bring that back into my functional work.
They were all put into those little spaces unattached and free-moving (what a pain to glaze), and then two friends helped me bravely raku fire the piece, since it needed three people to lift it together with large, metal tongs out of the kiln. (Look up videos of the raku process if you’re unfamiliar) That’s where all those cracks came from. The piece surprisingly held together despite of them, for several years at least. I’ve moved across the country twice since it was made, and it ultimately didn’t survive. But that’s just another good reason to revisit those ideas, and perhaps make a new version of this one. Or a few....or a whole series. We’ll see.