Politics / Protest Mugs

A screaming Trump with his wall. I like the face, but the wall is boring.

This past summer, when I began working on my 30 pieces in 30 days project, I had originally intended to make three sets of 30 pieces, because, apparently, I like to give myself too much to do. I did finish and display a set of 30 abstract bulbs and a set of 30 politics bulbs, but I wasn't able to finish the mugs.

A (poorly lit) detail shot of my abstract bulbs at Columbia Center for the Arts. As far as I can tell, exhausted me from the summer never even took a decent photograph of the other installation.

The concept I was playing with was the contrast between sides. In the abstract bulbs, I simply created contrasting textures and colors on either sides of some of the bulbs, but for both the political bulbs and the political mugs, the original plan was to create imagery that represented contrasting political perspectives on opposite sides of the same piece.

The opposite side of the "wall" mug. I'm reasonably happy with this side.

If I remember, correctly, I abandoned the reversibility of the bulbs when I realized that some of the more sculptural forms would make the bulbs difficult to hang both ways. The extra depth of the sculpted parts would force the bulbs to hang at a funny angle or not at all. Eschewing the reverse side sculpture also allowed me to close some of the bulb fronts.

I didn't glaze this one yet, in part because I'm less happy with it's opposite side, the Obama "Hope" poster.

But the mugs work as reversibles. The handles are the automatic hook for hanging, and the handle is automatically some distance from the decoration on either side. The depth of a nose won't cause them to hang much differently than they would with a flat surface. Also, the forms are larger, meaning more space for some of the sculpted forms. 

A diagram of two alternate setups for the same mugs, with A side displaying one political perspective and B side another. Each mug has an A and a B side.

I have to admit, the ubiquity of the mug form for a potter, and the fact that people buy mugs, was also part of the appeal. I teach Functional Pottery all year so when I get to the end of the year, I have trouble stepping away from the functional forms. I can't tell if it is just familiarity or if it's a result of the fact that I spend the entire year trying to get students to think critically about form, function, handle shape, rim definition, and surface decoration. After harping on about it all year, I think I need to make the forms I'm bugging them about.

This one has a male dominated side and a gender equity side, but its a little trite and a little boring. It might work ok as a supporting actor for related mugs, but I'm not excited about it. there are some flaws in the glaze on the rim and handle, too.

I abandoned the mugs this summer when I'd made only about 15. I had simply taken on too much work, as I'm wont to do. and I realized that to finish the other two projects, I'd have to drop something. The mugs weren't working as well as the bulbs, so I stopped building and didn't even glaze them. I also knew I'd have to fire the mugs separately. (I was using a cone 6 throwing body and planned to use cone 6 glazes, but the bulbs were done with two different low fire sculpture bodies that I finished with the same low fire glaze.)

The opposite side of the gender equality/inequality mug.

I finished some of the mugs in December in the days I had off between the end of the quarter and our holiday travels. I took the pieces out of the kiln just before we left and mostly wasn't happy. The motifs didn't work as well as I'd initially planned, regardless of color, but I was also unhappy with some of the glazing.

One of the exciting things about the bulbs that I decided to avoid in the mugs is the use of mixed media. If these mugs are functional, they can't have holes, materials that aren't able to be washed, or undercuts that can catch water. The result is more subdued decoration.

I didn't glaze everything. Two pieces had cracked, two were too complicated to finish in a few days and I'd left one blank because I planned to paint the decoration, but I can't now remember what I was planning to do.

The idea for this mug is the two favorite amendments of the two contrasting political parties. The second here and the first, above, but as is, this just looks like guns randomly stuck on a mug. 

I'm still halfway interested in trying to finish the project, but I need dedicated time. The political or protest inspired pieces are simply more taxing mentally than the abstract pieces. Working on the abstract pieces is repetitive and relaxing and the results aren't controversial, so I don't stress about how people will react.

The glaze was either too thin or underfed on this mug. I was too lazy, too, on my glaze application. This one, on its own, probably put me off writing about these for over a month.

With the political pieces, I know I'm going to make someone unhappy if I'm doing what I mean to do, but the worst result is if people don't know what I'm trying to say. I'm afraid I've accomplished that (a lack of clarity) with some of the mugs, and in general the mugs I've finished are, across the board, more disappointing to me than the political bulbs. Some of the mugs simply feel cheesy and/or amateurish.

This one has protestors and placards on both sides. The decoration is ok, but it felt like too much work to glaze it in December. I'm glad I didn't, too, because I'm unhappy with the contrast I got from the commercial celadons in the text mug above. Instead I'll use underglaze like the gender symbol mug earlier.

The pieces I still like the best and that I most enjoyed making are the screaming faces. They're fun to make and they also feel like they capture the mood of the country right now. I've been toying with the idea of making an installation composed exclusively of screaming faces. And really, who doesn't want a screaming mug right now?

These two are my favorites. The screaming person is the opposite side of the screaming Trump above and who even cares what is opposite the birth control, because the color worked well. I used underglaze for both and the color is much more what I want than what I got with the celadons.

I think I will eventually finish the mug pieces. During the year I've got a day job that takes a lot of my mental energy, but in the summer I think it might be worth it to push past the unpleasantness and the failure of some of the mugs to see the whole set installed together. Though I'm disappointed with the current results, I'm not totally over the whole idea.

I Broke A Pot

During a glazing demonstration this week I broke a pot. It simply slipped out of my hands and smashed on the floor.

I really wanted to "quote" an image from Ai Wei Wei here, but I felt too conflicted about copyright and ownership to pull an image from another source, so I quoted a video.You all know these photos are by Ai Wei Wei anyway, right?

The pot I was demonstrating with was an old friend, one I have used as an example at least twice per quarter every quarter I've taught at YVC since 2006. I figure I've shown students this pitcher and told them about its features 60 times at least.

the pot is broken

This pitcher was so perfect. It was so bad, and in so many ways. It was heavy and large and awkward, and best of all not made by anyone I knew, so whenever I talked about its shortcomings, I wasn't criticizing a real person. Not only was it perfectly bad, it was a pretty good bad pot. It was large and its walls were even, and its handle was strongly attached. It survived more than 10 years without any cracks or chips. Until this week.

I have no picture. You'll have to imagine it.

I am so sad that I broke this pot and I won't be able to pick on it in class ever again. I don't even have a photo of this piece. But, I do have video! I recorded a whole bunch of demonstrations this summer for my clay classes. The video in which I discuss handles includes this amazing pitcher to illustrate how not to fit your handle size to your pitcher.

You can see the pot in question starting at 3:32.

This pitcher's handle was too large, forcing the hand far away from the weight of the pot and it had a skinny part that make the handle look weaker than it was. But, unusually for a bad pot, the handle was well attached to the body of the pitcher. After I smashed it into roughly 20 pieces, I noticed that the handle had broken in the middle, and the pot had broken, but the handle had not broken away from the the pot.

this artist's rendering of the most important qualities of this ex-pot

Besides having this ridiculous handle that strained the wrist and caused the heavy pot to tip forward, this pot also had a badly made spout and it was glazed badly. I was using it in the glaze demonstration because of the latter issue. Much of the glaze was applied too thin, leaving the interior and bottom half of the pitcher rough and brown. The glaze that was applied more thickly was dribbled down and across the side of the pitcher. I always use this pot as an example of what happens if you tip the pot up before the glaze is dry. The glaze will not just run down the pot, it will run sideways while the pot is being tipped through 180 degrees.

via GIPHY

Why aren't there gifs of pottery breaking and pottery falling on the wheel? I'm going to have to learn how to make gifs.

The fascinating thing is, though I've made fun of this pot for years, it isn't a pot I can easily replicate. For those of us who have been throwing pots for some time, it is difficult to throw badly. But it is also  tough for a beginner to throw this large. Someone who knows how to pull handles, will naturally pull a more even handle, but someone who doesn't know how to pull handles will have trouble pulling such a large handle. This pitcher was a fascinating intersection between developed throwing skills and underdeveloped knowledge of form. I will miss this pot. I'm thinking of offering extra credit to anyone who can make me a replica that recreates the size, quality, and lack of quality of this amazing ex-pitcher.

Failure

Sometimes an idea keeps coming at you from various angles as if the world wants you to take notice. Or maybe you've taken notice of an idea, so it just keeps coming to your attention. Anyway, this week that idea, for me, has been failure.

Wait, that sounds awful. It sounds like this has been a terrible week. And it absolutely hasn't. I'm talking about the good kind of failure.

the bad kind of failure (because it breaks my kiln)

In my throwing classes, in particular, I encourage failure. For years, I have started class by telling students they need to make mistakes to learn about the clay. This quarter I'm either saying it more, phrasing it differently or just noticing how frequently I say it. Regardless, I was feeling pretty good this weekend when, twice, my methods were supported by outside sources.

learning to throw

First, my mother-in-law sent me a link to an article, "How Failure Molded Spanx's Founder." The Business Week interview with Sarah Blakely focuses on her successful undergarment company, but her answer to the third-to-last question was what caught my mother-in-law's attention and what caused her to share it with me.

"When I was growing up, [my father] encouraged us to fail. We'd come home from school and at dinner he'd say: 'What did you fail at today?' And if there was nothing, he'd be disappointed. It was a really interesting kind of reverse psychology. I would come home and say that I tried out for something and I was just horrible and he high-fived me."

My mother-in-law must have read more than just this article because, as she explained it to me, Blakely talked about her father working with her on each failure to improve for the next attempt. The idea here isn't that she should be bad at stuff, but that she should try stuff she isn't (yet) good at. She needs to be willing to take the risk and then, later, willing to look for ways to improve so she can try again.

a bowl with beginner mistakes

Sunday morning I was listening to the TED Radio Hour via an NPR app. The interview with Sir Ken Robinson sounded interesting because it had to do with teaching creativity, or, more accurately squashing creativity in school. I started listening to hear what he had to say about encouraging creativity in school. (Another recurring class issue for another day: why do students always tell me they "just aren't creative"?)

cutting off the mistake on a beginner bowl

The interview on NPR included segments of Robinson's TED talk. Around the start of the second minute he tells a story about a girl drawing in class. He explains that kids aren't frightened to be wrong and then identifies the value of taking these sorts of risks: "If you are not prepared to be wrong" he says, "you will never come up with anything original."

the beginning of something original?

He continues to talk about valuing creative pursuits in school rather than looking at them as dead-ends, soft options, or "easy" classes. Robinson talks about the hierarchy of subjects with STEM and language at the top, humanities and bit lower and the arts in the basement. I particularly like the way he phrases this academic focus "...and then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side."

I'm sure I'm not the only person reading who will sympathize with students being steered away from certain subjects. My high school guidance counselor told me I should take fewer art classes in my senior year because I was "smart". I reacted by asking to see a different guidance counselor. It might be funny that I reacted this way, and ironic that I ended up as an art instructor at a college (I think about going back to tell her sometime), but the incident reveals more about what a privileged kid I was--I knew I could get away with asking for a new counselor.

yuck, my mistakes

The TED Radio Hour interview and the TED talk are both interesting and worth a listen and both talk about more than just the failure I'm focused on, but I keep noticing this theme of being wrong and failing and making mistakes as paths to success later on.

I learned about the underglazes after making these mistakes

So back to my clay studio classroom: When throwing pottery on the wheel, student naturally make mistakes that lead to the clay collapsing, in sometimes dramatic fashion. Lumps of clay fail to become bowls because the wheel is spinning too fast, or too slow, because the student pushes too hard or moves her hands or leans the wrong way. There are lots of ways to fail on the potters wheel.

centering the clay is the most difficult part of the process

There are also a few ways to avoid failure on the potter's wheel. I always tell my classes about two students who took my class years and years ago. The two would sit together, chatting about everything and anything. Their wet hands would hover over the lump of clay and the lump of clay would spin and spin and spin around the wheel, never changing. The girls would use just one piece of clay the entire class period and would never break through a wall. Because they never actually touched the clay enough to make a mistake. They didn't make much. They didn't improve and they didn't "fail." (Obviously I mean their pots didn't fail. I wouldn't discuss their grades even if I could remember). They safely passed the time in my class chatting while the wheel spun.

centering the clay

On the other hand, the students who come in a throw and throw and throw and end up with a lump of broken bowls on the side of their wheel are the students who, suddenly, in the third or fourth week are making lumps of clay into shapes that look just like bowls. They know what they need to do to make a bowl stand up because they've tested all the limits. They know what it feels like to spin the wheel too fast and too slow. They know what happens if they push too hard or move their hands or lean the wrong way. Now that they've tried all the ways to fail, they can also find the space in the middle: the right speed, the right pressure, the right angle and the right position.

yea for failure!

I tell my students if they aren't making mistakes, they aren't trying hard enough. And it seems there's some other successful folks who agree with me on this method. It applies so directly to clay. I wonder how it applies to other disciplines, or if, like Robinson suggests, it applies more to the arts than to the academic "core" subjects.



*After writing about failure this weekend, I showed a DVD to my Art Appreciation class on Monday morning and realized that even it (a film I show every quarter) illustrates the value of failure for an artist. Rivers and Tides documents Andy Goldsworthy building his temporal sculptural installations in various natural locations. The segment from about minute 18 to 26 shows Goldsworthy building one of his seed forms out of stone. We watch him build it over and over again each time it collapses, while the artist talks about how, each time, he understanding the material a little better.

(sorry if the video goes bad, I can't believe the whole thing is available on YouTube right now)