Folks, I am not a production potter. I tell you this with great pride and a twinge of sadness. Potters are so damn cool. I am in awe of people who can develop, create, and reproduce their stunning works. I thought for a while I would try to be that. I really want to be cool and I thought I could join the ranks of hip artists.
Alas, I am made of different stuff.
The honest truth is: I just don’t care to reproduce things. It gives me deep despair when I think of making work over and over again. I will even go so far as to say I am mentally and emotionally incapable of producing the same thing. By the time I have made three of the same thing I am ready to move along.
Just so you know, I did try to produce things once. In the summer of 2019, ah those beautiful ignorant days when I thought pandemic was interchangeable with epidemic, I set out to make many of the same things with slip casting. I will save all the gory details for a Failure Friday post, but suffice it to say, it’s just not my thing.
Folks, I am a conduit of chaos. She is my mother tongue, my jam, my alma mater. I was forged under her fire in childhood and now, as I am emerging my art practice and my own visual language, she is ever at my side (please note the bandaged finger in the photo); she finds her way into my process, my materials, and consequently in my products.
So, today I am articulating something I have learned over the last few years. I am stepping into the fact that I am not a production potter. I will keep making mugs, but I will not reproduce them. I will not have a line of mugs that I make efficiently and flawlessly. Go to the cool potters if you want those. They are mighty.
What you will find from me are my experiments. I can tell you with almost absolute certainty what I make today will be different tomorrow.
And that, folks, is my Manifesto this Monday.
Alexandra Ross 