Works in Progress: Zoom Meetings in the Clay Studio

The sculpture I finished building during the meeting in question

 

I've spent an inordinate amount of time on Zoom and Zoom-like applications this year. Some of this is teaching. Though all my classses were asychronous, I held regular office hours/student hours and student meetings via Zoom. I also met with my colleages both locally and across the state via Zoom, Teams, etc. For student meetings Zoom is a bit better and a bit worse. The increase in convenience for students who work is a great feature, but the meetings require a bit more effort for me to arrange (when we're on campus, these short meeting often happen before or after class or students simply walk into my office during the day). As far as what we can communicate, the meetings are pretty good, but some tools and techniques would be easier to show without the computer /video in between. On the other hand, more students came to my (required) Zoom meetings than come to my (not required) office hours on campus.

Another angle on the sculpture above

For statewide meetings, Zooming has been a real improvement over how things used to be. Before March 2020, statewide meetings usually required driving. For folks in Yakima, that often means driving 2.5 to 3 hours over the pass to Seattle or Olympia, making for 5-6 hours driving time total. Pre-pandemic I was regularly attending some statewide meetings via Zoom, but with most everyone else in the same room, the sound was atrocious for folks trying to attend via Zoom. People speaking sounded like they were underwater and it was often difficult to tell who was speaking, based on the poor video and the direction in which the camera was pointed.

After the second layer of underglaze (purple on white) to highlight the stamped texture

Moving the meeting to Zoom and sitting everyone in front of their own mic and camera evens things out. The ocassional slow internet connect is annoying, but there isn't one group that can hear well in person and another group that is just trying to keep up. I suspect a lot of it is also that the pandemic forced folks to upgrade their technology. I am sure I am not the only person who had to acquire a new computer and new router to be able to work from home. Not to mention new electrical outlets at our house.

The surface decoration in progress, two layers of underglaze on the "background" and one on the sprigs

An ancillary advantage of my new router at home is that I can be online in my home studio which is in the back of the house--a later addition to the house. The wifi signal never used to reach the back of the house. With a new router setup, I can bring my laptop into the studio to do a live demonstrations of techniques for students in my online studio classes. Before the new router, I was recording videos in the studio just fine, but I'd have to come into to the house to upload them or bring materials into the house if I wanted to show something during a Zoom meeting. This works fine for Design, but not so great for messy clay.

selfie during a zoom meeting in my studio

Something I discovered late in the year was that I could now attend a Zoom meeting while working in my home studio. I don't do this much, since most meetings worth attending are worth taking notes during or require me to interact in ways that involve touching the computer keyboard (which I can't do if my hands are full of clay). But this particular spring meeting was one I felt I should attend but I also one where I felt I could simply listen and not interact much. So I set up my banding wheel, got out my clay and worked on a couple of projects while I listened to the speakers.

mostly I was attaching sprigs (like this but different texture) during this meeting

This was towards the end of the year, so it really felt like a great break, to just be able to chill and work in my studio. The endless meetings and emails and planning and putting everything online and fixing and triple checking links and just the unending computer work of this year was starting to wear thin (she says, while typing a post in a completely unnecessary online blog). During this meeting, I believe I finished the surface decoration of the first sculptures I made in 2021. I also dropped a sculpture on the floor, but that's another story.

Unfortuantely, I'm less happy with this angle of this sculpture