[MUSIC PLAYING]
Thanks, everybody, for joining us this afternoon.
Today's program 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 and interdisciplinary
arts 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 are situated
on the Rancho Cucamonga campus of Chaffey College, which
resides on the traditional and unceded lands of the Tongva
people.
We offer our respect to the elders, both past, present,
and future.
And hello.
My name is Roman Stollenwerk.
I'm the assistant curator at the Wignall Museum.
Please visit us at our website at www.chaffey.edu/wignall
to access recordings.
We will post announcements to our email subscribers
and social media when the videos are available on our site.
Hello, everyone.
My name is Andy Hadle.
I am the preparator for the museum.
I'm also the technician for the studio arts department.
In a moment, we'll hear from Nicole Seisler for about a half
an hour or so.
And then we'll have the remaining time
available for Q&A.
Thank you.
So today, we're pleased to introduce artist, curator,
and educator Nicole Seisler.
Seisler is a Los Angeles based maker, curator, and educator.
She received her MFA from the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA
from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
She's exhibited at venues throughout the US,
including the 2020 Craft Contemporary Clay
biennial, The Body, The Object, The Other, on view
through January 21 of 2021.
She's also exhibited at venues in Australia, Turkey,
and Brussels.
Seisler recently completed a large scale
permit installation for the Airbnb headquarters
in San Francisco, and was a resident visiting
artist at Ash Street Project in Portland, Oregon.
She has taught ceramics at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, the University of Washington,
and she was the Lincoln visiting professor
of ceramics at Scripps College.
She currently teaches at UCLA, and Pasadena City College.
And she's the director of the Los Angeles Contemporary
Ceramics Gallery A-B Projects.
Please welcome Nicole.
Thanks, Rebecca.
Thank you for having me today.
It's nice to see a lot of familiar names as well,
also a little intimidating to see so many names
and not faces.
So I have a pretty broad practice,
too broad to cover all of it in one talk today.
I tend to think of my practice as an artist as kind
of existing as a tripod.
The three legs of the tripod are making, curating, and teaching.
What I'm not going to talk about today
are my curatorial work, my gallery A-B projects,
or my teaching.
And I probably won't be able to get
into a lot of my participatory work today either.
So what I am going to talk about though
is the making leg of the tripod.
But at that, just a couple of the kind of telescoping
parts of that one leg.
The focus of my talk today is really about
how kind of a love letter that I wrote to clay
turned into a specific body of work over the last decade or so
and how that letter and other letters with it that
were really a turning point in my practice
in defining my commitment to clay.
So when I was in graduate school in 2009,
I really didn't want to be there for ceramics.
I wanted to be there for sculpture.
I didn't want to be pigeonholed as a ceramic artist.
And so pretty early on, in my enrollment
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
I was like, that's it.
I'm not working in clay anymore.
I'm leaving clay, I'm abandoning clay, I'm broader than that.
And about two weeks later, I was like, oh my gosh,
I miss clay so much.
And I like crawled back to clay kind of like,
I'm sorry I left you.
And it was at that point, that I started really exploring
my relationship to clay more directly
and I started writing these love letters to clay.
So I'll go ahead and read this one, I honestly, I don't know--
this is an earlier one but definitely not the first one.
Dear clay, you must know that I adore you.
There's always been something between us,
a mark, a hidden layer of energy where our surfaces meet.
To say that I feel a sense of comfort
with you would be wrong because you challenge me
and persistently present me with the new.
But somehow, you make that unknown
feel like a place in which I can reside.
I have noticed that you're at your most
vulnerable when things change abruptly.
I identify with this.
But I've never seen steady change approached as gracefully
as the way you do it.
You are adaptable and yet decisive.
You're always reasserting yourself,
redefining who you are while simultaneously never straying
from your core principles.
I admire you deeply for this.
Change has not been an easy thing for me
but you inspire me to embrace it with strength.
I'm so grateful to know that you will always
be a presence in my life.
Love, Nicole.
So it took me actually several years
until I finally kind of moved those letters off
of paper and onto and into clay, and really
kind of started responding directly
to the materiality of the clay.
Even so-- let me kind of move you here a little bit.
Even so, making these objects, which
I'd kind of do blindly, just kind of holding the clay, kind
of being present with the clay, it still kind of felt to me
that something was missing in these early object love
letters, and that they didn't really
capture the metaphoric potential of the material of clay
and the process of working with clay, which is really
what I was speaking about in the letters,
how the kind of human experience relates
to the experience of the clay.
And I was trying to kind of resolve that
through making these displays and experimenting
with different basis for these objects.
But ultimately, that kind of pursuit
led me to really think deeply about form and function,
or form and functionality.
I had been using these metal L brackets
that I hated so I was like, I'm just going to make them
and clay.
I don't need metal, I don't even need wood.
Clay can do everything.
So I started making these L brackets.
Of course, these particular ones were a little bit brittle.
So it started kind of moving out into a lot of other forms.
But I was really thinking about how the function of clay
is now, not only to hold, but also to support,
to fassen, to join, to bear weight.
And ultimately, I wanted to assert its kind
of prowess and its strength.
Sometimes I was using clay to support the wood
and then support these small objects that themselves
were capable of holding.
I started highlighting different clay bodies,
a lot of these little pinch pots, which are
kind of an obsession of mine.
If you've been a student of mine,
you know I walk around the classroom making them
constantly.
But these are made of different clay bodies
that I dug up from different localities in my travels.
So I'm starting to really think deeply about
the materiality of clay itself and the meaning of that.
I'm showing you a lot of images I don't typically show,
either these are some old studio shots.
This is in process of trying to make a newer love letter.
This would have been around 2015 or 2016.
And this is a clay body from Seattle.
And I was starting to use those local clay
bodies for these, and then again,
reconsidering the basis that these objects were
sitting upon.
So when I had been creating that object,
I was working on a piece of paper
and then the paper was recording the marks of the clay.
And then I used that paper as a template really,
that's where these lines exist on the page,
to trace these layers that the object would then sit upon.
That particular love letter exploded in the kiln.
I had a really--
a kiln that needed a little loving.
It was an old kiln and it fired this object too quickly
and then exploded.
And yet, that seemed really apt to me for the vulnerability
that I was feeling in that time, in that place,
and in my relationship to Seattle,
where I had been living the year before I made this piece.
I started collecting more local clay bodies.
I was out at the Bristol Dry Lake, which
is in the middle of a desert, and I was digging up some clay
around the Bristol Dry Lake, which has a ton of salt.
And so I ended up making this as a kind of wordless love letter
to the clay in that area, where the object that's
being supported is a piece of salt or calcium chloride,
and then it's supported by the clay from the land around it.
That clay, ultimately, did in that old kiln of mine.
Salt is not the best friend of kilns.
This is clay from Glassell Park, and is actually
from right outside of my boyfriend's house,
which is now my house.
And this was one of the first moves
I think I made into really thinking about how
the form of the material also continues to reflect
the meaning of its materiality.
So this is kind of a typical way that someone
might dry clay, clay that has been processed and really wet.
You form this arch and then it allows
it to kind of dry more evenly.
But I was thinking of this drying arch also as a bridge
and also kind of as a reference to that relationship.
There's words inscribed on this as well.
This is, again, some of that Seattle clay.
And here, I'm going into the next step,
maybe after you might dry your clay, you would wedge it up.
I use the Boar's head wedging method.
So now I'm starting to think a little bit more
about these kind of foundational actions in clay.
And you can see here that, again, the kind of base
that it's on, I'm thinking about it
kind of like the shadow of itself.
I was thinking that with the other one
too, where I was tracing all these elements.
This form is kind of the form that was left behind
as residue on the paper when I was making this,
and then that shadow kind of becomes its base.
Then at that time, I was starting
to think about wedging as a state of becoming.
It's that moment before it turns into something else, where
I started to think about it almost as tying and untying
a knot.
Like you're aligning the particles
and you're loosening the particles,
and you're compressing the particles.
So that's this constant kind of push and pull, back and forth
within this piece of clay.
I had a lot of different experiments going on
at the time.
Again, this was around 2015 or '16,
and I was thinking a lot about those material shadows and also
the absence of object, how you know an object was there
based upon the residue and what's left behind from it.
That ended up translating into a much larger exploration
of that, where almost every object I was making,
I was documenting through paper, through drawing on paper.
And every mark and kind of impression,
or push and pull that I was making into the clay body,
would then be recorded on these papers.
And for me, a lot of the process in the studio
is about observing, observing the process and kind
of expanding from there.
So here, there is a lot of drawings made of local clay.
You can kind of spot some of the earlier love letters
that I showed you.
There's also one from Tucson and Chicago,
and kind of accumulating these.
Around that same time, I had just kind of completed
my three-year position teaching at Scripps College and I had
started--
when I was teaching there, I'd started my gallery A-B projects
in conjunction with that position,
in some free real estate I was given on campus.
But when that job ended, I was moving the gallery
to build out the front of my studio
to accommodate the gallery.
And I needed some funding to make
that happen so I ran a Kickstarter for the
build out of my gallery.
And I decided that to fund this building
of my conceptual ceramics gallery,
that I would make functional ceramics, which
seemed like a really good use of function to me.
And I would say that often in my practice,
I'm undermining or kind of usurping
the functionality of clay.
I'm often poking at it, challenging it.
And here, I'm kind of doubling up.
I'm using function in a traditional way,
because I'm making plates, but I was also using the plates
as tools to make drawings.
So I would make these plates and kind of ask this question,
how many drawings can a plate produce on its way
to becoming a plate?
So I was observing that as I made these plates,
I would stretch a slab of clay and it would leave
behind this circular residue.
And as I observed the kind of residue and remnants
that were being made, kind of almost as a byproduct
or an off-gassing of the original object,
I would observe those and then begin to really
intentionally replicate them.
So I was making these slab forming drawings.
And then once the original kind of form I
was making on a hump mold, I would pull it off.
I had all of my hand marks in it from kind of pounding the clay.
And then I would turn that on this piece of paper
as I worked the rest of the form,
and it would produce these kind of gear like shapes.
At that same time, there was something else going on
in my studio so I was really thinking
about this process of making those plates almost
like a recipe of some sort.
So gather your ingredients and then step 1, step 2, step 3.
And part of the recipe was that I was wedging the clay,
as I always do.
But I had decided that I would wedge the clay on the wall,
which is what you see there.
So, like I said, around this time,
I was finishing my full-time teaching position
at Scripps College and Claremont Graduate school.
And when I was teaching there, I was advising grad students.
And part of that program is kind of enticing
this bridge between CGU and Scripps,
and bringing grad students into the studio.
And I was having this experience where
grad would be really interested in clay,
they'd never worked with it before,
and they would come over to the studio
and say, where do we begin?
And I'd be like, well, you begin with wedging clay.
This is kind of the foundational thing.
And we didn't use bagged clay there.
We mixed all of our own clay.
So wedging is pretty important when you want
to get those air bubbles out.
And then what would happen is I would
go through this whole studio tour
and we would get into wedging, and then that student
would just never come back.
Wedging, for most people, is not the most fun experience.
It's very labor-intensive and it didn't
align with what their expectations were.
So I found myself teaching this really foundational act
over and over again, and it felt futile in a way
because there was no kind of return on it.
And here I was in my studio having just
finished a job, going through several different shifts
in my life, moving my gallery, and it just
felt like that kind of futility of teaching those students how
to wedge clay.
It seemed to align with a lot of futility in my own life.
And all these shifts really required of me the developing
of a new pattern, a new way.
So I've been wedging it for like 20 years so I figure,
let me start by watching clay in a different way.
So I decided I would wedge against gravity and wedge
on the wall.
And this, of course, relates back
to some of the love letters where I'd been making marks
on the wall, and you could see that an object was present
but you couldn't see the object anymore.
So I wedged on the wall and I would kind of
trace the tectonics of each mark in a thin layer of pencil,
kind of showing this gradual accumulation and layering.
That became, for me, kind of a sketch for a proposal
to make this work at the 2019 NCECA Annual Exhibition.
By then, I was pretty good at wedging on the wall.
So you can see like this one was a little
sloppy in the upper left and then you
can kind of see where I get my rhythm,
you can see where I become tired.
But I've got it pretty dialed in and this
shows some of that process.
So I don't know if the sound on that video came across,
but you can hear my breath.
And when I was installing that work,
I was the only person in the gallery.
And it was this really huge space with very tall ceilings.
And the assistant curator would be sitting all the way
in the front of the gallery, and she was the only other person
there for the most part, and she would tell me, Nicole, I
know when you're wedging because I can hear you breathing.
So it was this interesting thing that
started to happen where breath also
became this kind of residue of the process.
But wedging, a lot of people overlook
this foundational action in clay.
Some people wedge their clay like 10 times.
Some people, they get a bag of clay,
they don't wedge it at all.
They just grab that handful and they're good to go.
Potters will set up on the wheel,
they might wedge their clay like 300 times.
They've wedged it on the table and then
they're wedging it on their wheel
because a huge air bubble can really
be the bane of a pot's existence when
it comes to centrifugal force.
So all these different people are
choosing to prepare their clay at all these different rates
and ways, 10 times, 30 times, 300 times.
I personally always wedge my clay 100 times.
And I teach all my students to wedge their clay
100 times because that's what I was taught when I started
working in clay when I was 14.
That was the rule, wedge it 100 times and it'll be ready.
And invariably, it always is, this magic number.
But ultimately, if everybody is preparing their clay
differently then what does it mean
to be underprepared or overprepared,
or is there such a thing as preparing your clay just right?
And thus is it possible, as a human, to actually be prepared?
When are we prepared?
Are we ever prepared?
Is it possible?
So in going and doing this whole drawing or kind of wall
wedging, I'm preparing the clay and I'm also
attempting to prepare myself, and that's the work.
That is also essentially the work
that is up at the Craft Contemporary Museum in Los
Angeles right now.
So that show has been extended to January, as was mentioned.
You can see here that I have basically the same setup that I
had at that NCECA show.
I've got my yoga mat because my body--
I used to do a lot of endurance-based work
and I don't do as much of it anymore
because I am getting older.
So you got to bring all the props to stretch with
This time, there were some different things
about this installation.
For me, part of why--
when I was making those plates, when I make functional work
and I do things in repetition, I get bored with it.
And honestly, that's part of why I started
making all of those drawings or having the plates make
the drawings for me, it was because it adds to the process
and gives me kind of more pieces, more
ingredients in the recipe.
So for me to present this work again,
meant that I needed to go deeper.
I couldn't just replicate the previous work,
but I needed to go further and I needed
to keep myself interested.
So one element that shifted was that I
draw a grid on the wall, which I'll
explain a little more later, which actually made
it more challenging for me.
Another difference was that the space is different.
There's corners instead of just a flat wall.
When I approached that corner, as I
was doing this work in wedging-- so bear in mind I wedge
100 times so every single one of these marks on the wall,
I have held a piece of clay against it and wedged 100 times
with the wedging motion, which means, I calculated
in preparation for this talk, that I've
performed that action against the wall over 20,000 times.
Call me crazy, I don't know, but when
I was doing this installation and I reached this corner,
it truly felt like I was turning a corner.
It felt significant, it felt different.
For all of that repetition, something
shifted in literally turning that corner.
The other element that was different
about this installation was that I
decided, you know, I've wedged like 20,000 times on the wall
so how do I expand from there?
How does that kind of shift?
Well, it turns out I've also taught, in my time teaching,
around 600 people how to wedge clay.
That seems like a lot of wedging out there in the world,
if they're still wedging.
They might not wedge anymore.
But I contacted several of my former students
and invited them to participate in this project.
And so at least 15 people came from, a lot of them
from Southern California, some from other parts
of the country.
And they came to leave their mark
and add their mark into the installation.
And the thing is that we all make marks differently.
Everyone kind of has their own wedging signature.
And you can definitely see where these other people started
adding their marks, these former students of mine.
It felt important to me to have my former students-- most
of them have graduated by now.
I think one of them is still a student at Pamona College
right now.
But this felt like expansiveness to me
because my students, your students,
or if you are a student here today,
they're the future of ceramics.
They're who's next.
They're going to determine what traditions kind of stay
or from what traditions they stray.
And so it felt like a way to really show
that things blur and expand, and shift,
and change as we kind of choose to keep some rules
and choose to abandon other rules.
The other aspect of this exhibition--
so obviously, this is before the rest of the show was installed.
This is a view with some more work.
So in addition to the wedding marks on the wall,
there was this kind of further respect
that I was giving to residue as being complete
in and of itself.
So there's also this pile of the wedged object
that is in a corner.
And thinking about this act of preparing is a seed,
or that this action is enough, and really
kind of trusting that these actions were what's next.
This is just a glimpse back at the work
I did in Milwaukee for that initial drawing.
And I'm just showing this because
of the, again, the setup but also
because while I was doing that, I was kind of keeping notes
as I was working.
So the clay was really wet and it was sticking to the wall
so we needed to kind of add some time to my process.
And I had decided that I would just take notes.
Every single time I would wedge, finish wedging on the wall,
set the wedged clay aside, make some notes.
And these were all notes that kind of
documented my experience and my thoughts, and my uncertainties.
And it became kind of residue in and of itself,
which I then ended up transcribing into clay.
And then those clay pieces turned into a mind map
about the work and the process.
So that work, I call it preparing.
I don't know if you can see down there.
It says notes from preparing.
And then some of the notes say things like be messy, be messy,
be messy, be messy because maybe I
was having a moment where I was like,
oh, this is like-- it's too messy.
And I'm telling myself, no.
Like, it's good.
Let it go, be in the process.
Or this other one that says trust my decisions, trust clay.
All of these porcelain pieces of text
are mounted onto this kind of Blackboard topography.
And there are other things like a section on accumulation
where the language says the product is the residue,
and giving the process as much respect as the outcome,
process is entirely visible, highlighting the process,
individual versus collective, accumulation
versus singularity, attempting to record everything,
lose nothing.
Essentially, just rearranging material.
So that was actually a later version of that work.
And the original one, I made all of those pieces of text
when I was doing a residency at Ash Street Project in Portland,
Oregon, in the summer of 2019.
At the residency, it's listed directly on the wall.
It actually stretched-- the clay slabs were on the wall
so they had the same texture as the wall,
and then I mounted them directly there.
And in addition to them having that section on notes
from my preparing installation, they also
had a lot of fresh texts that recorded my thoughts
about my process and my time, and my work
while I was at Ash Street.
So they have a studio and a gallery.
I'm able to use their gallery as an extension of the studio.
So while I was working there for three weeks,
I would take my clay into the gallery space
and I would prepare my clay on the walls
for these sculptural works that I was
making called holding patterns.
And now I would make lists in clay
and in my sketchbook of different types of holding
patterns, different types of actions.
Holding patterns that are emotional or psychological,
or geologic, or environmental.
And then I would kind of task myself with making a shelf.
And the purpose of the shelf would
be to support, present, and highlight
the discarded parts of itself.
So I would stretch slabs on the wall.
That's what these larger marks are.
I would wedge, pound out my wedged clay,
and then stretch a slab.
And then when you're working with slabs,
typically you have a lot of cuts and kind
of clay that just gets put into a pile,
or put back into the bag.
Instead of doing that, I would prioritize that residue
by making it the focal point in the kind of purpose
of the shelf.
So I would fire the residue separately
and then I would glaze-fuse it to the shelf,
again, thinking about functionality.
I don't use glaze in my work very much.
I also often don't fire my work.
So here, I'm really thinking about glaze as functional,
a way to fuse and hold things together.
And I was using a lot of green glaze in direct response
to being in the Pacific Northwest.
When I installed these pieces in the gallery,
alongside all of the marks and residue from their creation,
I was really thinking about all of the elements
as kind of punctuation.
So this long strip of red clay that you see on the left side
there, by the window, was where I would wipe my hands off
after I'd worked with the clay.
And so I was thinking of that hand wiping mark,
maybe almost as like the full stop in a sentence.
So that brings me to the next generation of this work
and what I'm working on in my studio
right now that's in quite early stages.
And I would say that everything in 2020 has been slow for me,
really slow.
And I think I'm a slow worker and processor
anyway so you're getting just a glimpse
of the beginning of this.
But the work that I'm doing now is really
kind of a merging of that work I just showed from Ash Street.
So it's kind of a merging of the holding pattern, sculptures, as
well as the mind map, which I refer to as thoughts on holding
patterns.
And I'm looking at the foundational action
of rolling coils and what that can communicate,
and how line quality can become language.
The material choice for all of that is important.
And that relates to another project,
this is kind of research images from work
that I'm doing with another artist, Kate Hempel,
on the topic of hyper-local materialism.
And one of the main questions that I ask in that work
is, can we have an embodied experience of a place
through a clay body or through a material?
And then these images, I'm thinking
about all the materials that we typically filter out
of our clay bodies, and whether the removing of material
alters the possibility for us to truly
have an embodied experience of that place,
if we're not in that place.
So I'm considering how we locate ourselves.
This work, I've been calling it a ledger of locating myself
so the text is all--
sometimes I'm stamping text into the coils, sometimes I'm not.
But it's all considering how we locate ourselves,
how we locate ourselves in time, in the space,
in places, in communities, in our families, and in ourselves.
The coils that you're seeing here,
I rolled them in ash that had just landed from the air
during all the wildfires that have been happening here.
And the air was just oppressively
thick with smoke for months, and it was everywhere.
So these were porcelain coils that I rolled in ash
and then fired.
So they have a very kind of tar like quality to them.
So I'm really thinking about as well,
how we locate ourselves in this moment in 2020,
in this unprecedented historic moment.
And that just brings me back, to the very end
here, to the beginning actually.
So this is another love letter that I had written to clay,
I think in 2014, but it still relates
very much to this line of thinking,
that I'm talking about in this ledger, of locating myself.
So I'm going to read it out loud to you.
And in essence, by reading it to you,
I'm making kind of a new digital version of it.
Since the Wignall is transcribing and captioning
these talks, I feel like this is like the new digital impression
of this still very relevant letter.
So I wrote, dear clay, I have moved enough times now
that there is no one place that I refer to as home.
The notion of home is always so important to me,
to my sense of self.
There were some years when this lack of identity with place
caused me a deep sense of uncertainty,
but through you, clay, I find my grounding, I find myself.
Stoic and understanding, you continue
to receive me no matter which state either of us is in.
You absorb my mark and leave your residue on my skin.
It is a moment of surface contact only,
but you remind me that fleeting occurrences like this
can have weight, mass, permanence, if need be.
No matter where I am, when you're with me,
it no longer seems to matter how certain or uncertain things may
be.
You teach me to be malleable, to accept fragility,
to have momentum.
Love always, Nicole.
Thanks, Nicole.
Absolutely.
What an amazing thing to see so much of your process
and to see past work.
We really appreciate it and feel honored.
So we'd love to have Q&A. And so if you would like Roman
or Andy, or I to read your questions,
go ahead and put them in the chat,
or you can unmute yourself and ask a question, whatever
you're most comfortable with.
Hi, I hope you don't mind I go first.
The ceramic pig here.
I loved hearing this Nicole.
It was really great.
I've known about your work but not at this depth.
And what-- there's something about ceramics,
especially if you're involved with pottery, about repetition.
And you're hitting the notes of repetition
that happen before you even make the stuff, which is really
pretty interesting.
And the thing-- also the thing I got--
I'm not sure exactly how to formulate the question
but there's a repetition.
I mean, it's how we tether the horse really and even
the words, and just not even wedging,
but the words are repetitive.
I mean, like the word 'word' is used--
whether you say it or I say it, or write it, it's word.
And so there's repetition of word,
there's incessant thoughts that we all have.
And I'm wondering how repetition--
I guess I want to know how repetition plays
on you because you're doing it self and sort of frontally,
just aargh.
It's just like not trying to avoid
it and I'm wondering if what--
I mean, it seems to me that you'd
have to get into nuance in order to be able to do it
without getting numb.
So I wonder if you could talk about that.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
I mean, I can only go on repeat like that
if I'm learning something new from it and--
I mean, I think as humans we learn through repetition.
I would say that the way that I process,
like in general in the world, is through a lot of repetition.
And I think that a lot of what I'm doing,
when I repeat a process, is very closely observing.
So I'm trying to pick up new information
from the process while I'm going through it,
and I'm trying to pay attention to the things like the marks
that the clay makes or the little crumb that
falls on the floor.
I'm trying to watch all of those moments
and all of those elements of the process,
and then respect them as potentially holding
the possibility to be the thing itself.
And so much of the meaning of my work
is derived from the process of making it.
So I'll often have an idea when I'm starting out
but then that idea always becomes deeper, broader,
more well-rounded, or different because of the process,
because of the meaning that I garner from the process.
So while-- I mean, I refer to my practice
as a conceptual practice and it's always very idea-based.
I rarely am starting with a very clear idea
because so much of the meaning of it
comes from the process of making it.
And I think that that repetition is
a lot of how I arrive at that meaning
and at that information.
But I would also say that like I can't be a production potter.
I would just be bored to tears.
I can't do it.
I mean, I think I might make more money potentially,
I don't know.
I think that's also kind of a myth.
But anyway, I can't.
I can't do it.
Like you said, it has to have nuance
or I would just be bored to tears.
I mean, it's kind of fascinating.
Like wedging is something that we overlook.
People are like, aargh, wedging, aargh I hate wedging.
People tell me like, oh, I don't even wedge my clay anymore.
But then what's been so amazing for me
is that the more I do this wedging work
and the more I talk to people about all of this meaning
that I find in wedging, and how it relates
to preparing ourselves in the world,
the more it sticks with people.
And then I get these wonderful text messages from people
like, I was wedging my clay today
and I was thinking about you, or look at this mark
that my wedge made today.
Thomas Orr, who runs the Ash Street Project,
texted me like, look, it's like a figure.
It was like a self-portrait of himself
through this mark in the wedging.
And I know people who wedge their clay more now.
So I think that--
yeah, I mean, it's a good and interesting question.
I mean, I have long worked in multiple as well.
But I think that it's really--
it is quite essential to a lot of my work.
And I think that I am able to ask more questions
and learn more through the accumulation,
through the repetition.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, cool.
Nicole, if I could piggy back a little bit.
I mean, thinking about like your use of text in your work,
there's a real poetic quality how watchful and searching
you are in your work, and there's a meditative quality.
To me, it seems really tied to a spiritual practice of sorts.
I don't know if you feel that way personally,
but it just strikes me.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I mean, I've definitely been honing my meditation practice
in 2020, I will say that.
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's like what those love letters.
Like I feel very present when I'm
working in clay, very present of the material and very present
with myself, especially if I can kind of get
in the zone a little bit.
But I think that in meditation, like you
talk a lot about, quieting things so that you can listen.
And I think that that is a lot of what's
happening in the process when I'm really
looking and listening to the clay,
and I'm following the clay, and seeing
where kind of its actions resonate with my own.
I mean, when I teach ceramics, especially like an intro class,
I will start out telling students
that one of the things I find amazing about clay
is the reciprocal relationship that we have with it.
You take a lump of clay, you press your finger into it,
it receives you, it receives your mark.
Therefore it proves like I exist, I am real,
I just changed that form.
And you pull your finger away and you too are marked by it.
And it's just this constant reciprocal back and forth
relationship of marking each other
and kind of collaborating with each other.
And clay, sometimes it has a mind of its own,
like it wants to do what it wants to do.
Sometimes you are not going to be
able to make it do what you want it to do.
So a lot of it is about listening to the material
and figuring out what those resonances are
with the human experience.
From [? Shaley, ?] they ask, Nicole, have you ever
thought of your shadow platforms for displaying your clay,
which you made from traced paper,
as a sort of topographical map?
Yeah, totally.
I think of it a lot as a topographical map.
And then it starts to get really interesting
when it's like local clay bodies and thinking
about different locations.
But I think it also relates to really old work that I did.
I used to-- when I lived in Chicago,
I did this project where I would trace puddles.
I would go on a looping walk in my neighborhood
and I would trace a puddle in sidewalk chalk.
And then I would go on this walk and then
when I got back to that same puddle, I would trace it again.
And some of the water would have evaporated,
and I would just go on this looping walk, tracing
the same puddle over and over.
So I was creating these kind of documents and recordings
of something that was there that is no longer there.
And when I started making the--
I mean, that first drawing that I showed you, really was just
like using it as a tool to make the base and then being like,
wow, I really like this drawing actually.
But also realizing like that's a lot,
like my puddle tracing drawings, which are also very much
kind of temporary topographical maps.
So I mean, there you go, Stan.
It just keep on repeat.
We've got another in the chat from [? Yaslin. ?]
Who exposed you to clay and why have you stuck with it?
That's a great question.
I first started working in clay when I was about 14.
A really good family friend of ours, Marge Taylor,
she is a British potter and I also think she's a designer.
I think she just calls herself a potter
but I think of her as both.
At that time, I was living in the Netherlands.
I was born in D.C. but we moved to the Netherlands
when I was almost 12.
I also hated moving there.
It was a horrible age to move so that
was part of why I was encouraged to start taking lessons
with Marge.
Give me something to do.
Yeah.
So I started working with this artist one on one in her studio
in high school, which was a huge privilege.
And I loved it.
I just loved the material.
And I-- why have I stuck with it?
I think part of what I didn't mention,
when I decided in grad school that I was going to quit clay,
because by the time I went to grad school,
I'd been working with clay for a while
and I thought like, this isn't going to be my thing.
Like, I'm going to go further than this.
I don't want to be pigeonholed.
But when I kind of came crawling back to clay, that was also
when I realized like, I am a ceramic artist.
And it might be actually more radical
to say I am a ceramic artist because that
means that I can define it how I want it to be seen,
how I want it to be understood.
This is what a ceramic practice is,
this is what is a ceramic practice is to me.
That's also what I do with my gallery
and why I show the work that I show,
and I lead the programming that I lead,
because it's all with the goal of really wanting
to change the way the general public sees ceramics
or what someone thinks of when they think,
oh, a ceramic artist.
So I think that part of why I stuck with it
because it felt powerful.
Like not only do I love clay, but I can change clay.
Like I can-- it's a small field that I
am incredibly passionate about and I
can make an impact in that by saying
that I am a ceramic artist, because I believe deeply
in that and I'm so passionate about it.
Also, I don't know, I just love clay.
Nicole, is there an artist or artists
whose work you'd like to amplify and recommend
that we take a look at?
I'm sure there's many.
I will just recommend that you all
go to the A-B Project's website and look at the artists
that I have shown, I believe really deeply in all of them.
I think they're all really at the forefront of ceramics
and pushing things in broader and new directions.
The show that's up right now wasn't
supposed to be up this long.
It's by Phoebe Cummings.
She's a British artist.
So if you are into being out in the world,
then you can still see it through the gallery window.
Yeah, that would be my answer to that.
Go to the website, please.
Check out what A-B Project is doing.
Do we have any other questions from the gallery?
I have another comment, if I could.
Please.
Well, a couple of things.
One, and back to that reputation.
And Rebecca, you brought up the thing of spirituality.
Tibetan Buddhism is all based on monumentally mind numbing
repetition of mantras and frustrations.
I mean, the whole thing is about just breaking you down.
And so I find that interesting that they'll use that
as sort of a way of using repetition
to break down numbness, which is really interesting.
But that's just a comment.
The other thing is I wanted--
the other comment is that a lot of times
that people use conceptual work, and it's just clever
and it has no heart to it.
What's wonderful about yours is it's really connecting and very
poetic.
And the way you think about it, is that way too.
I wouldn't call it conceptual.
I call it very, very body and heart-centered,
even though it is very, very intelligent.
So anyway, I just want to throw that out there,
that a lot of conceptual work leaves me really numb,
just because there's no heart to it.
it's clever for clever sake and this is really--
this says something.
It has some substance.
It has a lot of substance, it has a lot of clay to it,
it as a lot of substance.
A lot of body.
Yeah, a lot of body.
I appreciate that.
Yeah.
I think I attribute a lot of that to the clay as well.
This is part of the power of the material of clay and--
yeah, I mean, I think that's at the heart of it for me,
is its metaphoric potential to convey
meaning through its materiality and through its process.
Well, and also how it's affected you
and how you've become an advocate,
like an unapologetic about being a clay
artist because that really is the--
what do you call it?
That it's sort of like looked down upon so much.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, in the hierarchy of fine arts
and in the hierarchy of materials,
it's a relatively lowly material.
Although, we could debate whether it's
creeping up the chain of order at the moment.
But yeah, I mean, I think that's right,
that's it, being unapologetic for it, which is something
that we all need to learn to be more of in a lot of ways
about our beliefs.
But yeah, I mean, that's part of the power,
like I said, of saying, I am a ceramic artist.
This is what it means to me, this is how I see it,
and this is how I want other people to see it.
That's awesome.
It's so-- I guess empowering but also proactive, I guess.
There's such a-- like when I was in grad school in LA,
there was such a heavy bias against it.
It was more I couldn't talk about my work,
I just had to talk about how come I was using that material.
And no one else had to answer that question, just
the ceramic people.
Yeah.
I can tell a lot about what programs
people have been through for their education
based on some of their answers.
Like in the interviews for a tech position
once, I think I was asking a really simple softball
questions like, what do you like about clay?
And one person's answer was like, well,
everybody always asks me why does
it have to be clay, why should it be made out of clay,
and I just--
I really like clay.
And I was like, whoa, OK.
I totally-- I mean, I won't--
And they went to Claremont Graduate University
where they just rag on clay.
They're like, you've got to be a painter.
That's the high brow thing.
I'm like, I know who you've worked [INAUDIBLE] just
chill out.
It's all like-- yeah.
It's still a thing but I think we're breaking that down more
and more, and we're seeing more and more ceramics
in more and more places.
And it really is becoming a pluralized field.
And I think that part of my goal is just
to keep on nudging it in that direction.
Thank you so much, Nicole, for your generosity today.
We really appreciate it.
And thank you all for being here with us as a community.
It's really wonderful.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's been great to share from a slightly different perspective
than I typically share my work.
So thanks for the opportunity.
Excellent.
Thanks so much.
And Thanks, everyone.
Be well.
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