[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome, everybody.
Thank you for joining us AT today's program
featuring Stanton Hunter, Presented as part
of the Wignall Museum's Home Edition,
a series of curated artists talks,
workshops, and discussions, featuring
artists and cultural workers.
My name is Rebecca Trawick, I'm the director and curator
of the Wignall Museum.
The Wignall Museum is a teaching museum,
an interdisciplinary art space that introduces Chaffey College
students, faculty, staff, and community members
to innovative contemporary art objects and ideas.
By fostering critical thinking, visual literacy, discourse,
and empathy, the museum seeks to enhance
the intellectual and cultural life of our community.
We want to take a moment to recognize that we're situated
on the Rancho Cucamonga campus of Chaffey College, which
resides on the traditional and unceded lands of the Tonga
people.
We offer our recognition and respect to the elders
both past, present, and future.
And Hello, my name is Roman Stollenwerk.
I'm assistant curator at the Wignall Museum.
Please visit us at www.chaffey.edu/wignall
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Thank you.
Hi, everyone.
My name is Andy Hadle.
I am the preparator at the museum.
In a moment, we'll have a presentation from Stan Hunter.
Afterward, we'll have time available for Q&A.
Thanks Roman and Andy.
So today I have the honor of introducing our guest artist,
Stanton Hunter.
Stanton Hunter is a mid-career artist exhibiting nationally
and internationally.
Writings both by and about him and images of his work appear
in numerous publications, including Craft in America ,
Ceramics--
Art and Perception, Ceramics Monthly, Studio Potter Craft
Arts International, and others.
Hunter has been an instructor and guest
lecturer at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena,
he ran the ceramics program at Scripps College in Claremont
for five years, he was visiting assistant professor of art
at Pitzer college in Claremont, and is currently
a professor of art at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga.
Prior to receiving his MFA in 2000
from the University of Southern California, where
he studied with and was a TA for Ken Price,
his undergraduate studies were in perceptual psychology,
alternative education at Eckerd college
in St. Petersburg, Florida.
And he pursued a career in music before the visual arts.
Hunter's work incorporates vessels,
autonomous sculptural forms, and site-specific installations,
with work in or referring to the landscape.
Here at Chaffey, we're happy to call him a long-time colleague
and happy to have him with us here today.
So please join me in welcoming Stanton Hunter to the Zoom
stage and in giving him a warm virtual welcome to Home
Edition.
Welcome, Stanton.
Hi, everybody.
My name is Stan Hunter, and I run the ceramics program
at Chaffey College.
Which, if you're taking my class,
I hope you know that already.
But for those of you who don't take that class,
that's who I am.
I want to thank the Wignall for this opportunity
to talk to you.
This is part of the Wignall Museum's Home Edition series,
and I'm going to be speaking to you today
about a residency that I went on in the spring,
during spring break, of 2019.
The residency, it happened at Mission Clay sewer
superpipe factory in Phoenix, Arizona for about eight days
and very interesting time.
Artist residencies are a very popular thing
for artists to do.
It's a really awesome activity.
It's like a retreat where you are allowed to go--
oftentimes it's funded by the residency or by corporations--
and spend a week, two weeks, a month, a year making art.
And it's your obligations to the outside world
are cut to a minimum, you're just making art.
And so it's a really good time to do a deep dive.
It's a little bit like graduate school, which
is sort of a deep dive as well.
But it's a way to really kind of connect
to what means most to you and what you most want to make.
Normally, with residencies, you go there with art
that you want to make.
You have an idea or you have a body of work
that you're exploring.
And for most of these residences,
they're in very beautiful, rural,
sort of rustic conditions out in the middle of nowhere.
And it's places where you can walk
and your mind can just be clear and free of city,
of home, everything, of distraction.
So you can really devote yourself to your practice.
That's one kind of residency.
Then there are other residences most often connected
with the material, for instance clay or glass
or metal or rubber and plastic.
In these residences you'll actually work in the factory.
One of the more famous clay residences
in the United States--
in the world actually-- is the Kohler residency in Wisconsin,
which is at a toilet manufacturing plant.
Kohler toilets, you see them everywhere-- porcelain.
And so people will go there and make work using that porcelain.
And oftentimes, they'll actually make work riffing on toilets.
They'll actually use toilet fixtures as part of the work.
So my residency was at the Mission Place sewer
pipe in Phoenix, which I will show you in just a second.
I did want to show you some pictures of other residences,
just to give you an idea of sort of the broad range that
is available.
So I'm going to share a screen now.
I want to get this up first.
One of the things I kind of just mentioned in passing
is that you go there with your own ideas of what
you'd like to make.
That's especially true when you go to these places
out in the middle of nowhere where you just
have your body of work.
And that's interesting.
And I went to my residency in Phoenix with that in mind.
I had ideas going in.
But what happens in the manufacturing environment
is that it starts to play on you,
and also your work starts relating to the interface
of manufacturing and art--
creativity and industry.
And so it's a whole different kind
of thing, where it's not necessarily just your own body
of work, but it's sort of in relation to something else.
And I've always loved site-specific work,
which is work in and relating to an environment, where
the environment changes the work,
or your work changes the environment,
or at least they talk to each other.
They relate.
They're sort of like, instead of this object
on a pedestal that has its own thing,
it doesn't relate to a background.
It's shown in the White Cube, a gallery which
supposedly doesn't have historical reference.
It's just its own thing.
Site-specific work actually is more
where it relates to the environment.
It might be an installation where
you walk through the artwork.
The environment might act upon and change the work.
So it's a whole big broader thing
than just the object itself.
So anyway, as I said, I went into the Mission Clay
with some ideas to make.
But then it started playing on me.
But anyway, let me show you some other resonances just
to give you an idea.
This, I believe, might be Skowhegan
in Maine, a painting and sculpture
residency, a very famous one.
This is Anderson Ranch in Colorado,
a very, very beautiful place.
This is Haystack residency in Maine, a very famous clay
residency.
I think they're using other craft materials now as well
besides clay.
But they're this dedicated out in the middle of nowhere
to your own art practice.
And then there's Mission Clay sewer pipe residency
that I went to.
This is funded by Mission Clay.
The head of Mission Clay is Brian Vansell.
He also runs Laguna Clay company here in California.
I should say, Mission sewer pipe is a huge manufacturing plant.
They used to have three of them in California.
They still have one in Corona Del Mar
and they also have one in Phoenix,
but those are the only two remaining plants.
But this company made all the sewer pipes
underneath all of Los Angeles and underneath all
of San Francisco, San Diego, and I also
believe Portland and Phoenix.
So we're talking hundreds if not thousands
of miles of sewer pipe.
So that can give you the scale, just
sort of the vastness of this kind of manufacturing.
So anyway, I went to the one in Phoenix.
They put me up in a hotel--
motel, sorry-- right on the freeway,
right off the 10 freeway in the industrial area of Phoenix.
It's very simple and clean, and I enjoyed it actually.
The walls were extremely thin, so there
was a lot of bumping and walls and being
woken at all times of night.
So I didn't sleep great, but it was was.
It worked.
And it was very close to the factory,
so it kind of kept me in the milieu of the industry
in the industrial area of manufacturing.
It kept my head in it, which was very interesting how it played
on me and my dreams, which I hope
becomes evident in this slide presentation.
This is driving to the factory.
And it's called Mission Clay, but all
says on the sign is building products company.
You go down this long, long driveway,
about a half mile long, and you end up at Mission sewer pipe.
And there's a whole stack of sewers.
It really became kind of like a Mad Max landscape
to me, which sort of played on me.
It had its own kind of special beauty--
sort of an ausetre beauty--
well you'll see-- of these mountains of clay,
of local clays, and feldspars, and pulverized
fired pipe that had broken, just mountains of these things
that they use as materials to make their pipes out of.
So it its own sort of austere landscape
that really started to become quite beautiful to me.
These are some of the mounds of clay and dirt.
And here's shards of pipes have been broken up
that they use in their clay body.
That's the landscape.
That's what you walk on.
It's just all clay.
That's the next door neighbors.
And Don Reitz, he's a rather famous ceramist now deceased,
he left this golf cart there with the horns.
I got many rides in it.
And I even got to drive it, which is quite special.
A very big sort of complex, so the golf cart
came in very handy.
And the weather in Phoenix is very dramatic.
So here's a very dramatic picture of a cloud.
I think it might have been the only one that showed up.
Maybe not.
I think there's some other clouds in other pictures,
but they don't have a lot of clouds down there.
Here's the landscape again.
These mounds appear and disappear daily.
So it's a very movable landscape,
and quite beautiful I think.
The pipes themselves-- just row upon row of different size
pipes.
Here's some more.
Rows and rows-- endless rows.
It's almost like a library.
The kilns and the factory--
the kills are huge.
This reminds me of the big top tent
at Burning Man a little bit.
These are about two stories tall, just huge kilns.
And these are for the large pipes.
They're firings take anywhere from a month
to two months to fire, and that's
after the pipes have been drying out for a long time.
And they have these enormous wet rooms.
So they have water underneath the floor
just to keep them wetter longer so they don't crack,
and then these really huge, long firings.
That's Hans Miles.
I'll introduce him in another picture.
He's the resident tech of both the residency
and of Mission Clay.
He designs their clay body, does all sorts of tests for them--
young guy out of Arizona State University.
This is one of the car kilns.
And this car kiln is about 100 feet long,
maybe a little bit longer.
And these are getting rolled in.
It;s like on a train track, getting rolled into the kiln.
I have a picture or movie right here I can play you.
So he's inspecting the pipes as they go into kiln.
And here's on one of the beds.
These pipes are getting unloaded I believe.
But this is sort of the rail cart,
the cart that the pipes are stacked on
to be taken into the kiln.
So it's quite enormous.
They've got about three or four of these carts
that they have lined up to fire.
And here's one all packed up ready to go into the kiln,
and there's the kiln itself.
This is the ceiling of much of the plant.
It's quite dynamic.
Indoor and outdoor sort of blend together.
There are a couple of feral dogs that eat there and roam around
the factory.
Birds nest inside.
Wind whips around there, and clay dust-- just
plumes of clay dust.
It's a really sort of a dramatic,
like I said, Mad Max type environment that really played
on me and became beautiful.
Here's the clay mixing area, where
they take all those mountains of dirt
and they go out these conveyor belts and go through sifters,
and then they combine them.
It's quite a huge operation.
There's Hans.
he's a really smart guy, and he can do just about anything.
So it's really great to have him as a help--
a very big help.
You can see some of the work in the back.
I'll show you more artists' work.
But most of the time people come in
and decorate the outside of the pipes.
Here we go.
And I should know the name of some of these artists,
and I've forgotten them.
But anyway, like I say, they come in
and they decorate the outsides of the pipes,
and they're quite attractive.
So they keep the pipes from being pipes.
This one I do know.
This is Jun Kaneko.
He's an artist out of Nebraska, very famous artist
who does huge work.
And he actually glazed the pipes and fired them.
A lot of people carve on them.
This is graffito.
So I'm getting to my work now.
And again, these are ideas that I
had before I went down for artworks to do with the pipes.
The first one was I used the pipes as--
I've been obsessing about mugs, coffee mugs.
And especially I've been obsessing about handles on mugs
and the look of them.
I've been taking pictures of handles, and making handles,
and trying to get the perfect handle.
and the way that the handle joins the mug, it has to--
I want it to have a nice solid joint and the look of it
flowing out of that.
Anyway.
So I thought it'd be funny to put a set of handles
on a set of sewer pipes.
So they became like bottomless mugs.
I had solid ones, and I had polka-dotted ones.
So I did one set of solid mugs and one set
of polka-dotted mugs.
And they were bottomless cups.
So these about two feet tall.
Very heavy-- they're a couple hundred pounds each.
But I thought it'd be funny to have a set of sewer pipes
with handles on them--
decorative handles.
Another idea I had before going down was displacement.
I had Hans cut up one of the pipes into four pieces,
and then I bought Plexiglas at different thicknesses
to stick in between these things to displace--
so I'd put the pipe back together again,
but it'd be offset because of the different thicknesses
of Plexiglas.
So here I am gluing the Plexiglas to the pipes
and then put it together.
And then I started buying hardware for this as well.
It kind of gave it sort of an industrial look and also almost
like ship building, like ship sails and stuff like that.
And the hardware is almost like-- it's
this sort of refined hardware you find like on fishing
tackles for bait.
So anyway, this is all about this placement.
And then I added my architectural elements
that I had been making for other things.
And I added it on to here.
So it's sort of an architectural piece, a design
piece when I finished it.
I like that view of it.
So you can really see how things are kind of displaced
and offset and stuff.
Another idea I had was to make a geode of out of one of the half
pipes.
This is Hans cutting one of the pipes
in half to use as a mold to set the other half pipe in so it
wouldn't fall apart.
And he sent me a whole 40 pounds of the clay that they
used for the sewer pipes, and I did
press molds of these different geometric,
mostly triangular-based, forms that I
was going to score and slip into the side of the pipe.
You'll see in the second here.
When I got there, I painted them with underglazes.
And then I laid them in the pipe in sort of this open geode
type of thing arrangement.
One of the ideas is that people have been decorating
the sides of the pipe.
So I thought, well, why not decorate
the insides of the pipes.
I used to do a body of work--
I still do it from time to time-- of butterfly migration
grids.
Scientists discovered, back in 2006,
that monarch butterflies migrate from the Sierra Madre
mountains--
actually they migrate from the Midwest
down to the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico and back.
It takes five generations of butterflies
to do one full migration loop, which is pretty crazy if you
think about it.
And the way they find their way is they
discovered that they see, invisible to us, grids of UV
light in the sky.
And they follow those grids.
And that's how they get to Mexico.
I think there's numerous insects that
see these grids in the sky.
But I was fascinated that there's a species on Earth that
lives on the same planet but according
to totally different rules and really live
in a different world.
So I make grids as if we could see them.
So that was a whole body of work that I did
for a number of years actually.
And I decided to put grids--
they're sky forms.
So I thought it'd be kind of fun and interesting to put them
inside of a sewer pipe, which of course goes underground.
And then I made it so they could view them,
and I'll show you in a second.
So we cut a pipe in half and I set
the grids inside, different kinds of grids
that I had been making.
These are being set in place.
It turned out that I had these peepholes, like using a door
to look through.
And so I had peepholes drilled into the pipe.
and it turned out that the pipe was not wide enough
to be able to get a good view of the grids,
so I had to add spacers.
I added these metal spacers in the side,
and they had to glue them in.
And I had to sand off the rust of them.
And what's really cool is the iron dust shadows
that they left.
I thought that was pretty interesting.
It's sort of a kind of a-- what would be the word.
I'm not thinking of it.
But a record of what happened ther--
it's sort of got that shadow.
So here we are.
There's the middle glued in.
And then we placed the top.
That's the top with the peepholes in there.
I have them covered in tape so they don't get dust on them.
And there's the piece.
I lit them.
And then you could look through the peepholes
down into the grids.
So I kind of like this idea of these huge, very heavy pipe--
and it's really a big pipe--
to be able to see these really intimate, little grid
environments inside the pipe.
Now we're starting to get to where
the place is playing on me.
And I didn't realize I had a photo project like, I say here,
until I returned home.
So I had a photo project going on sort of unconsciously.
And then the vessels started playing on me.
Because vessels-- a normal pottery is a vessel.
It's a container.
We use it for coffee, for cereal, for storing things.
And then the sewer pipes are vessels also,
but they are vessels like blood vessels.
They are used for transport.
So it was a vessels and vessels.
And so I came up with that idea down there.
Hans had two wheels there, so Hans and I sat down
for a couple hours using the sewer pipe clay body,
and we threw a bunch of rather large bowls and vases.
So here they all are.
We had a lot of fun that day, as you can see,
a couple of hobbits looking at our pots.
And then we put the pots inside the vessels
in one of the stacks, and I started taking pictures.
So it's vessels and vessels, as above,
like containers on Earth, and so below,
which is below the earth.
That phrase, "as above, so below,"
comes, I believe, from hermetic philosophy.
And then I photoshopped a whole bunch together.
So it just took on this more repetitive nature.
When we were done with this photo project,
because it really existed only as a photo or photos,
Hans glazed all these and then fired them there.
And he gave them to the workers there,
which I thought was really a wonderful thing.
So this also became a social practice practice in a way,
because all these workers--
they're these tough factory workers,
working with a very heavy, unforgiving material,
and here they have artists come in making stuff,
and they're very curious.
They come around and see what's going on.
They help out a lot.
And so Hans fired these up and then gave them
to the workers, which I thought was a really wonderful gesture.
And here's the inadvertent photo project, dreams, and language.
So this is where it becomes really kind of interesting
to me and very poetic.
So I was taking these pictures, and this moment's just crazy.
It looked like the Starship Enterprise
when it goes into warp speed--
like that.
It kind of looks like that or looks
like looking into a Chrome tailpipes
of racing cars or something.
It has this kind of feeling of motion.
And then day to be able to look through the pipe
at other pipes, you get these sort of--
they became like viewing portals into other realms of pipe.
And so they became doing devices, almost
like telescopes or microscopes.
So you got these great views.
That's pretty stunning I think--
these great views of other pipes.
It's almost fractal.
So that particular semester, I went
during spring break of spring semester 2019,
I had a student in that class, really talented.
And she showed up very early on in the semester
with this henna tattoo on her hands that just blew me away.
It looked like--
I looked at a hand, and I kind of
felt like I was being slipped into dream time or something,
it was just shamanic somehow.
I took a picture.
It was pretty spectacular, her tattoo.
The reason why I have a picture of her hand here
it's that one evening while there, probably
about the fifth, sixth day, I had
a dream of one of the ends of the pipe,
and this student with her henna tattoos
put a medicine pouch at around 2 o'clock
on one of the ends of the pipe.
And all of sudden, when I woke up, or even in the dream,
I remembered the movie Arrival.
I don't know if you saw that movie,
but this is what it looked like, exactly
with this medicine pouch here.
And this is actually the heptapods, the aliens,
had this language that was communicated in circles,
these smoke circles.
And they said different words, but I
have a whole thing in here.
What's so cool about that movie and about the language
is that it's actually based on solid linguistic theory.
They cite the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, which
is how you see is determined by the language
that you speak and use.
So anyway, what the movie's based off
this about perception.
Orthography-- this is from the movie--
is a set of rules about the way language is written,
including spelling and punctuation.
The alien language of the heptapods
is nonlinear, written in circular puffs of smoke
with no beginning or end.
Information at the end of the sentence
is known at the beginning, because they
both exist at the same time.
So anyway I was sort of tripping on these circles
as being language and then the medicine pouch too.
And then the light was coming out in circles at me.
And so everything was becoming circular
and talking in circles.
And the whole thing became kind of language.
So anyway, it hit me very poetically,
both visually, the stacks, and the circles,
and the repetition, and then in this
case the concentric circles.
My son gave me this t-shirt.
You may have remembered Trump's made up word covfefe--
anyway, this is covfefe in heptapod language,
one of my favorite t-shirts.
Le petite pipe-- "pee-puh." this is referencing The Little
Prince.
The Little Prince, if you haven't read the book,
please do read it--
very poetic, very beautiful, very moving.
And in one part of the book, he grows a rose.
And the rose is protected and it's a very vane,
until it sees a whole rosebush with hundreds of roses
and just thinks, oh, I'm not special.
I'm just one of many, of thousands.
And the little prince assure her, no, you're special.
Because I grew you, and I took care of you,
so you're special to me.
So I was thinking about these pipes,
and when they're cranking out the pipes--
and they're not drying, but when they're actually making them--
that factory can churn out, they can crank out,
1,000 pipes a day.
So I wanted to show you a couple movies
of them making these pipes.
They extrude them.
Meaning it's like an adult Play Doh
factory where they squirt these things out of machines.
So those are the small pipes, and then here
are the large pipes being extruded.
These things are pulling an enormous amount of weight.
Very highly [INAUDIBLE] clay.
The clay goes up these shoots and into these other shoots
where it gets mixed all together,
and then it's squirted out of the [INAUDIBLE]..
It's very, very highly compressed.
I could kind of watch that all day.
Call me nuts, but it's pretty cool.
So anyway, like I say, they can make about 1,000
of those a day.
So I thought it would be kind of--
what would be the word--
pathetic or something "po-thetic,"
poetic just to make my own sewer pipes.
So I make my own custom sewer pipe, and I use coils.
Here I am working on it.
Here's a movie about me working on it.
I like the whole idea of making some by hand too.
Yeah, that's what--
[INAUDIBLE]
That's the cameraman.
That's how you roll a coil.
Straighten it.
Cameraman and commentation-- commentate--
common?
Commentator.
Thank you.
Hans Miles.
Yes, sir.
Resident tech God of the Mission Clay factory.
So there I am hand-building one of these
while they're extruding 1,000 of them in the other room.
And there it is pretty much completed.
That's the one I used as a model to make the top.
And it's pretty fun.
It's life size.
And then they have a stamp they put on there--
I have another slide-- that they put on all the pipes.
There it is.
And it has the date, and the batch number,
and all that sort of stuff there.
Le petite pipe.
And then the studio, that's a bigger, broader view of all
the props going at one time.
That's Hans sculpture in the background
there it's quite spectacular.
And then I went to dinner with Susan Beiner, again professor
at Arizona State University.
Hans studied with her.
She used to be out of Cal State San Bernardino actually.
And then Hans and his girlfriend,
Susan and her husband, took me to dinner.
And parting shots.
And there you go.
And that was my residency.
I hope you enjoyed the journey.
Alrighty.
Well, thank you for watching, and I
understand there might be some questions, which
I'd be very happy to field.
And fire away.
Thank you, Stan.
What a beautiful introduction to your experience
at Mission Clay, and also a great introduction
to artist residencies.
So yeah, we'd love to open it up to questions or comments.
I'll see if I feel comfortable answering them.
Yeah.
Right.
Hi, Stan.
I wanted to ask you about the application
process for the residency, and what your research went
into the application, and if you have any tips for students who
are applying to residencies.
Very good question.
And yes, applications are usually what you do.
What I did was I had the good fortune
of having my work included in a couple of group shows
over at the MOCA.
And Brian Vensall, who is the head of Laguna Clay and Mission
Clay, he happened to be there, and we just
got to know each other.
And he like my architectural things,
and he thought it'd be really cool for me to start
playing with inside of pipes.
So it was just kind of--
there was no application.
I was invited, and it was very organic,
and I was really lucky.
And that's how that worked.
And with my application for Vermont Studio Center,
that's an unusual residency, because they do it
on sort of merit.
So you can go there and you can do nothing for a month,
or you can make something, or you
can do something totally different-- write or a movie.
I don't know-- whatever you want to do.
And it's just sort of a "reward."
Most people do make art.
That, a resume, and images, and an artist statement.
And you didn't even have to say what you
wanted to do on the residency.
Often they want a proposal.
So you want to get a really good proposal.
I'm glad that I didn't have to do a proposal for Mission Clay,
because that left it open for me to come up with stuff while I
was there.
Three or four of those projects came to me while I was there.
So that was kind of cool.
I was impressed with all the different things you did,
the directions you took the residency experience.
And I really appreciated that.
So I'm glad you had that freedom.
I'm wondering-- well, I have one comment,
and that is that I was struck at how Minoan the pipe
you made in particular looks.
It looked like it was smaller at the base and approximately
that ratio of Minoan columns and also a little bit of, what,
Egypt in there somewhere.
So that was kind of interesting.
But I was curious about how you decided
on the scale of the handles that you put on the pipe mugs.
Well, I'll comment first about the Minoan.
When I actually sort of thought about making the pipe,
I had no idea what it was going to look like.
I thought was going to be really lumpy and funny looking.
I was going to paint it red in sort of this really crude,
sort of Beavis and Butthead type of pipe.
But then as I started building it sort of
got more and more kind of tight and kind
of looking like a pipe, and I sort of went with that.
But it did go--
I think when it dried it kind of took a right-hand turn too.
So it's definitely a custom sewer pipe for your house.
But you probably want it above ground.
I'll put them in my garden.
Oh, the garden.
Everybody needs a sewer pipe in their garden.
But anyway, that was sort of, in a way, unfocused.
I wasn't sure what I was going for.
I just went ahead and did it.
But it came out, as you said, like that.
The second question, what was the topic of your question.
Oh, the handles.
Yeah, the handles.
Yeah.
Well, I they're mug handles.
And I went to NCECA, the national clay
conference, that year and the year before,
and I took pictures.
I mean, I have about 50 pictures of mug handles.
And I talked to people about mug handles,
about how to do certain things.
I've been really looking at them, and how they join,
and the joint, and the flow of them.
And so they were all in this scale So I was making handles.
I like larger handles too.
But I said, you know what, I'm just
going to make mug handles for these things.
I probably should have put them on the big pipes,
like six foot tall ones, just to really--
those who are like about 2,000 pounds each, so I thought I'd
go with the 200-pounder instead.
But yeah, it was just the scale.
And I thought that, again, in my mind,
the juxtaposition of intimate, hand-held, light, something you
drink coffee out of, to put on one of these monster things.
So I was really trying to play with--
it was a kind of visual joke and playing with scale.
OK.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Good to see you, Jan.
You too.
I'll go next.
I just want.
Hi, Stan.
Hey, [INAUDIBLE].
It's so fun.
It looks like you just had a blast.
It was great.
I was just wondering, what was maybe
some of the most surprising things that
happened while you were there, because it
seemed transformative in a way.
It was.
Yeah.
Well, I think it was a bit of a shock to go stay in the motel
there off the 10 freeway.
Instead of having bucolic the lake and the trees,
I had a boarded up Carl's Jr. out the front door,
and there was definitely some drug deals
happening in the front.
I mean, it's kind of like--
I was a little concerned at first.
And then to actually start feeling like it was home
was very--
it was cool.
And you know, that transition into it
sort of feeling like home, with the bail bond place
that sold pit bull dogs and stuff,
it was just like another--
it was wonderful.
I really kind of--
just for that to start feeling like home
was really interesting.
And that I can start dreaming about this stuff
was really interesting.
Although, it's hard too, because, like I said,
I was getting woken up a lot in the evening.
There were some rooms with eight people--
I don't know what that's all about.
It felt somewhere between a residential motel and
and a regular motel, where people stayed
for longer periods of time.
So that, and then the facility itself,
like I said, was sort of a Mad Max thing.
I really got into it.
It's sort of like everything got covered in clay dust,
and there was plumes of clay dust, and the feral dogs.
You know, it played on me in a way
that really other residencies wouldn't play on me.
And I never fought it if.
I mean I never said, oh, I'd rather
be in Vermont or something like that.
I think what also was sort of transformational
was I had that dream about the end of the pipe
and it becoming like language.
That was really like, oh, my goodness,
this is really speaking to me.
Because this thing with the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis,
it's based on Hopi language.
And Hopi language, that Benjamin Lee Whorf studied Hopi language
and found that they don't put containers
on containerless things.
Like there's no word for river, because it's always different.
Summer's not a time like three months of the year,
summer's when it gets hot.
So summer can be in the winter if it gets hot.
So it's a far more experiential language.
And our language, we have subjects and object,
we have nouns that makes everything kind of solid
and stop moving.
Things are static.
And things experientially are not static at all.
So this whole thing with language
and how it makes us perceive, which
has been a topic that's sort of near and dear to me
for a long time, also it came to bear on this factory setting.
So that was really kind of-- yeah.
I hope that answers your question.
It just became, like I say, really poetic.
And to find poetry in places you don't think you're
going to find it.
Just on a side note, with the pipes that are painted on,
what did they do with those?
Did actually put those into the ground or are
they sold off for like artwork or?
They don't have that quite organized yet.
Hans runs that too.
He sort of an outdoor gallery area where all those pipes are
just there on display.
There was rumor that one of my pipes
was going to go into a show somewhere,
and I don't know if that ever happened.
So I think they farm the work out to different shows
when asked for it, but it's probably a little prohibitive
since they're so heavy.
Anyway.
So yeah, they don't go underground.
They stay above ground, and there's an exhibition place.
I imagine some of them will stay inside
in that huge room that was a studio, like their other ones.
It's sort of a mystery.
And who knows.
Maybe after I'm long gone something
will happen cool with them.
I just wanted to know, when you are doing a residency,
is there only one artist there at a time?
Yeah, this one's a solo residency.
Solo residency, that's what I was-- and you how
long the period is yourself?
Yeah.
Well, we both--
I talked with Brian about that.
But yes, that's a really good point.
A lot of artist residencies have many artists there.
So you can rub shoulders, and there's
sort of a cross-pollination of ideas that way,
which is very cool.
This one was just sort of--
it's this whole other thing.
It's actually very contemplative,
even though it was at a factory.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Good.
It's good to know that.
I'm not sure about it.
I've never been to Kohler.
I think that-- does anyone know if they
have that one at a time?
No they have a few people at a time.
Sometimes they have two, sometimes three.
That's what I heard from the people who went there.
Yeah.
It's also kind of sometimes really long period of time.
People go there six months, three months.
Yeah.
With this residency, there are people that do return.
And Brian said something about that,
that it may be kind of cool to have me down there again,
which I'd love to do.
I have no idea what I'd as the next thing.
That's the best part that you don't know
what you're going to do next.
Exactly.
Yeah, very, very true.
Good to see you, [? Lacey. ?]
Good to see you, Stan.
How long were you there?
It was about eight days.
Eight, nine days.
Oh, my gosh.
I thought it was longer.
You did a lot.
Oh, yeah.
No, I started in the morning and went [INAUDIBLE]..
Holy cow.
Yeah.
Well, and do people actually stop in
to see that work, the work that has been produced and Hans
can let them wander a little?
Yes.
Actually, after I left there was a busload
of people that came in to look at it.
I'm not sure exactly where they were from.
Arizona State University has a Ceramics Research Division
and are very huge collections-- it's a very famous collection.
Peter Held used to run it, and then
Garth Johnson, who's now with Everson museum
used to run that.
And so I'm not sure if Peter's been there to see it or not,
but the people come by.
It's sort of connected with ASU.
So there's a back and forth with that.
Good.
I'm glad.
I think people should see it.
And how about your photos?
Have you have you shown them?
They're beautiful.
Oh, thank you.
No, I haven't.
I haven't submitted them to show as a photo exhibit
or anything like that.
The one where I did the Photoshop of the where it's
sort of like wallpaper of the vessels and vessels,
I sent a large poster of that to the office over at the pipe
place and also to Brian here at Laguna Clay.
And that's as far as that's gone.
Stan, can I ask you, has the presidency
had any lasting effects on your studio practice
that you've recognized?
Well, yes, because of that way of working.
It almost like forced me to--
it was such a clear example of something playing on me
and starting to speak to me, as opposed to forcing,
you know, this is my body of work,
and this is what I'm about, and this is what I do.
It really became--
I became a site-specific work, if that makes sense.
It was kind of like--
I don't know, I hate to be new-agey-- a little bit
channeled.
So yeah, that's really played on me.
In terms of my art practice, no, with COVID
and having to learn how to go online, which has not been easy
for an old person like me, my practice has kind of--
I'm waiting for COVID to be over.
So I can't-- honestly, my practice is sort of stalled out
right now.
But when I go back, if I go back, and how I go back,
it'll be very much informed by this way of working.
I think it's a lot different.
We're trying to find our own voice in our training,
and this is different.
I was wondering if you could maybe
speak a little bit about the value of community
and networking within the clay world, or maybe just broader
in contemporary art in general, and if going to this residency
or seeking out these residences are really--
how that benefits people in this stage of their career.
Oh, it's-- I think having shared experiences with other artists
is huge.
I mean, they always talk about networking.
You know you have to have work, and good work,
and good pictures, and be able to speak
in a way about your work that deepens other people's
appreciation.
All that stuff, yes, you get that in school.
But what really opens the doors, I think, are the connections.
Even during, maybe I should say, especially during COVID,
I wasn't going to do NCECA, the national clay conference,
it's all online this year.
And at the last minute, I said, you know what?
I need the stimulation.
I need the other people.
And so I went ahead and signed up, and I'm glad I did.
But anyway, yeah, this one was, like I say, very solo.
So I didn't really kind of like network
at all, other than with Hans.
And that's about it.
But knowing people and talking to them is really important.
I've lectured at other universities because of friends
that I know in the clay community, colleagues.
So it's really important for showing
for teaching for everything.
Yeah, that's great.
That's a great, great question and a very good thing
to think about
Thanks, Stan.
A huge thanks to you for your generosity today.
What a treat to spend time with you.
And huge thanks to all of you who joined us today.
Please take care, and we'll see you next time.
Thank you again everybody who's shown up.
It's fun to talk to you.