Being an Artist
The doors to Thinking through Making are now open...
Whenever I open my doors to welcome the public during one of my Open Studios, I spend a good portion of that time sitting at my pottery wheel making new work. The reason is simple. Have you ever tried to look away from a bonfire while its flames rise and the sparks defy gravity to disappear high above you? Witnessing pottery being made by hand can be just as difficult to turn away from.
There is always something special when you get to watch a new piece being formed on the wheel, almost magically, right in front of you. The barriers between me as an artist and you as a visitor shrink away and conversations begin to flow readily.
During one recent Open Studio a group of visitors gathered round just as I was beginning to make a new piece. My hands started to transform a lump of clay into the basic shape of a simple serving bowl. As this particular bowl came to life someone in the crowd asked, “Why are you doing that?”
My response was–
“Why am I doing this, as in…Am I making pots because in our current culture of overconsumption and its constant demands for our attention, continuing to make pots keeps me grounded to our common world and our shared humanity. Something I have grown to find especially important in this turbulent moment of late-stage capitalism that has deliberately confused our understanding of community and our ability to define what is real?
Or…
Why am I doing this, as in..Why are my hands like this, in this position, while I maneuver the clay to create this particular bowl we’re looking at?”
As we all processed what I had just said (myself included), I let my studio guests know that I have at least a twenty minute talk ready to go on either one of those versions of the original question. I wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass with my response, that part comes naturally. Throughout the remaining time it took to make that piece, my hands and the clay had a conversation about why and how that particular bowl was going to be created, and everyone of us in the room shared a conversation that touched on my response and more. The simple truth for me though, is that it is all related.
Throwing in the Studio, May 2024 photo by Carter Hiyama
I am beginning this newsletter in order to explore all of those connections. To wander through my thoughts on being an artist. To understand why I am compelled to make things. To explore this world through the methods I have for understanding it. I do that by creating objects, by making photographs, and by writing about all of the links that I discover along the way.
I have been making pottery since my college days in the mid-1990’s. For some reason I have always hesitated to call myself, or perhaps more importantly, to think of myself as an artist. Maybe it was because I wandered into my first college ceramics class during a summer term with the simple intention of getting through that pesky art requirement for my degree. Maybe it was because I majored in American Studies, interned on Capitol Hill, and always thought that there was a master's degree, or perhaps even a law degree in my future. Maybe it was because I thought that since all I knew was how to make pots, I had to think of myself as a maker, or a craftsperson, but never an artist. I never took a drawing class, nor a 3D design class. It has never crossed my mind to pick up a brush and find some paint…Those people were the serious artists. I was just making pots.
Making work at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, NY. Fall 1997. Photo by my dad
Thankfully, those days and that way of thinking are in the past along with many other insecurities about my work. Late last year, for what felt like the first time in my professional life, I decided to own that fact that I am an artist and I intend to move through the rest of my days holding that knowledge at the center of my being.
For over thirty years I have taken raw clay and created new things out of an incredibly simple material. I have brought ideas into my studio and turned those internal thoughts and mental images into real things that will exist for an indeterminable amount of time in the real world. These things, these objects, these artifacts that I decided to bring to life have become an integral part of people's lives. They have become part of experiences and of the culture of the time and place that I live in. That is a very real thing. I am ready to celebrate that beautiful fact.
It is easy to feel that my inner monologues and my writing are unimportant compared to the objects I make. Deep down, I know that my thoughts and feelings are more than merely a method of self-rationalization for my work. I now understand that how I see the world and what I want to add to it is a huge part of what makes me an artist. My views and my desires are part of the work that I create. They are what drive me to create more work and are inherent within each and every piece of work I make.
I want the world to be a slower, more caring place and I want those ideals and values to live within the walls of my ceramic pieces and within the frames of my photographs. I am lucky to know how important my work is within our current culture. At the same time, I understand how small and how insignificant my work is in the history of all of the objects that have already been made. I believe understanding that dueling concept of scale is an incredibly important part of understanding our humanity. We must understand both our greatness and our insignificance. We have the ability to hold time in space in this beautiful world. Within that, I am using my time to bring something new and thoughtful into it every time I decide to create.
Having my hands in clay just makes sense. My brain understands what to do. My body understands what to do. The anxiety that can surround me so often slides somewhere else when I’m working in my studio. I have said, and written, before that when I make pots I am immediately connected to an unknowable number of human beings that have taken clay and turned it into something their people needed for living, for celebrating, for memorializing, or for nourishing their community.
I am an artist and will always understand how important it is that I am part of the incredibly human tradition of working with clay.
I am an artist. It is no longer just about my work in clay. I take photographs and I have for a large portion of my life. It is only recently that I have decided to make photography part of my work as an artist. It seemed absurd until I decided that I would just start making photographs alongside my pottery. I now understand that making photos is a part of my creative output.
I am an artist. It is no longer just about my work in clay. I write. As it turns out, I have always done that as well. That is why I have started Thinking through Making. I needed a space to write that would be part of my work as an artist. It no longer made sense to have these thoughts and essays as part of my regular newsletters from my website. That newsletter is primarily about what I’m making and what I have for sale in my studio. I wanted the freedom to write outside of that paradigm.
With these essays, I hope to share my deeper thoughts of my work without feeling a direct conflict to the commerce side of my work. I look at Thinking through Making as a wonderful opportunity for me to be an artist and share how I’m making my way in this confusing, exciting, scary, and beautiful world.
So, with that…I’d like to welcome you to Thinking through Making
Thank you,
Keith
Self-Portrait on Film, December 2024