Alexandra Ross

I come from a filthy home. I come from a home where creative production and personal leisure were valued above domestic labor. Home was filled with a mix of hand-me-down furniture, unfinished project piles, and valuable dumpster finds. Dishes crawled out of the sink along the counter and our dirty laundry was the domain of cockroaches and black widow spiders. The materiality of domestic life was at constant war with the materiality of creative production.

Other People had clean houses but We The Smiths were creatives. We were culture makers, trend setters and gifted visionaries. Other People spent their time mowing their perfect lawns and dusting their china, but We The Smiths recycled concrete sidewalks into mosaic pathways and made our own china. We didn’t have time for status makers like perfect houses or nice yards.

Creativity requires life energy. Energy to think, energy to feel, and energy to make. There is not enough energy to also spend on whether you clean the stove top after cooking.

Creativity requires space. Space to flood into the living room, kitchen and dining room table. Clean surfaces are for non-creatives.

Creativity requires you to put aside social norms and embrace a life of chaos.

The cost of creativity is domestic and personal neglect.

But if you can make yourself small in a home you can find tiny unclaimed spaces to inhabit.

Another thing I have learned: I am not a good family photographer. I am really good at taking pictures of ditches, the forest floor, and weeds growing in the sidewalks.

I am not good at taking nice pictures of humans.

When I do, they turn into a category I call the Whimsical Dark.

So be careful if you decide you want me to photograph you. It might just turn into a piece of art rather than a holiday card.

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.

“Did you mean homeschooling?” is the usual response I get when I tell people I was unschooled. No, I mean “unschooled.” With the exception of 6 months of private school in Costa Rica, I never went to school before I entered college. My parents believed that institutional education will stifle your intellect and that life will teach you everything you need to know. My sisters and I were taught to read and write, and by grade 4 we were told that we would self educate, and that “life was school.”

I did self educate. And unschooling gave me a robust sense of self in the world.

On the brink of my 11th birthday I knew who I was. I was a gymnast who knew Morse code and hieroglyphics. I was a belly dancer, bangle cat breeder, and pet sitter who could slip cast ceramic molds. I knew the first 11 elements of the periodic table along with the multiplication table up to 10 by heart. I could sing the Ancient Greek alphabet, and could skateboard to and from gymnastics. I vaccinated our cats even though I could not spell vaccine. I knew I was missing subjects but I also knew I belonged to a rarefied class of humans who had very specialized important knowledge that could be helpful to archeologists and radio communication during a war. We did not waste precious time on things regular people did, like cleaning the house, or going to school.

I was unschooled.