December Meme 2014 - December 5
sperrywink asked:
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Art:
This is a very timely question, as I just hauled a bunch of fired work home from the pottery studio this evening. It was a mixed batch, some glaze-fired work, some bisqueware, and the firing results were equally mixed. It's been a while since I've fired glazed work up at the studio, so the current crew isn't used to my pieces and how they need to be handled. My processes are unique enough to cause confusion. [That is, I do things that common usage of materials says shouldn't be possible, but are. When I do them.] This means that it often takes a while before my work gets *into* the kiln, even though there is *always* room for it. For it is small and fills the wee shelf gaps left by pots. And this go-around in particular, their unfamiliarity with my work meant that people were careless with my glazed surfaces, placing some pieces face-down on the kiln shelves. Which means I have three pieces with shelf wash stuck to their fronts. I'm a little cranky about this - glazed surfaces are REALLY OBVIOUS - but mostly this tells me I need to communicate more effectively with the kiln-loaders, or load my work myself.
Operator error aside, I had one piece with some cracks in the slip, and some mixed glaze results. This is all pretty normal for a glaze firing. Well, not the cracks, but the rest.
That sounds like a lot of what *isn't* working, doesn't it? But the thing is... it's been roughly two years [at minimum] since I've worked out of the pottery studio. It's not the easiest place for me to get to - the walk home takes 30-45 minutes, and that's all downhill - and I have frankly been too poor to afford the studio fee. But the biggest hurdle was my depression. When I was in the thick of that, the studio might have been on the moon accessibility-wise.
I am super lucky, in that the studio head urged me to come back, letting me do work exchange to cover my fee. I cannot express how grateful I am for the opportunity to GET BACK TO WORK. Hands, brain and soul are all much happier when there's clay to mush. So all of the post-firing mumbling above? That's me, getting into the swing of things again, making note of the stuff that needs tweaking so the work can continue to improve.
So what's working? The process. Yeah, even the fumbles are helpful. Discovering my working rhythms again - that's working very well. I do the majority of my clay work at home; it's taken time to remember the correct proportions of focus versus distraction needed to be most effective. It helps that I'm dating an artist who is *constantly* working, and is always down for an art day.
The making itself is finally, FINALLY working again. It wasn't, for quite awhile there. The creative weather has been T's Great Creative Drought for the last few years. I had great doubt regarding my art, the clay in particular, over the last four or so years. If it wasn't for periodic polymer clay projects, there would have been *no* 3D work made at all. And that's the heartsblood of my tactile art - 3D work. Depression robbed me of both faith and desire to create. Which was terrifying, in a very hollowed-out sort of way. But I have that back now - faith and desire - which makes the doubt fall to the wayside. There aren't words to express how grateful I am. Art is a go! Life rattles along as it should! \o/
While there's always other art simmering at the edges of things, the clay is my main tactile art focus. As the backlog of work in-house is processed, more room opens up for other, non-clay projects. But I think the next thing - after holiday gifts - is re-learning how to play with my art.
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Writing:
Oh geez, SO MUCH is working here. Most of it is the original work, the set of four novels that finally pulled together into a logical set of plots in this last month's writing. I have been prodding at this Universe for *at least* seven years. Damn. I hadn't realized it had been so long. But yeah, seven years. For a goodly span of that time, all I had were scraps - characters, occasional bits of word play, tentative themes and chunks of world-building. I *knew* that it all fit together, that there was enough story to fill multiple books. That knowing was 100% solid, even though nothing else was. But I kept showing up, and KEPT SHOWING UP, and sometimes wrote Avengers fanfiction while showing up... and it finally slid into place. Of course, it took a conversation with T-Padre to really get it all flowing to proper plot-land. He's magic that way. But flow it did, and now I have the shape and partial scope of things to come. IT IS THE BEST THING EVER.
The particulars of what's working: HAVING PLOTS. :D :D Um, character flow is good - there's a great deal of interweaving of people and concepts between books, and I have a good sense of *where* the key players enter the greater story. I have a solid sense of place growing - the first three books are set in Boston, the last in New Orleans, and the historical pieces are meshing nicely with my world-building. I'm finding it easy to note places in the writing I need further research [or a latin name] and continue on, instead of getting sucked into the vicious research cycle. The nuts and bolts note-making and to do lists are working far better than they have previously. I spent an afternoon writing excerpts from scholarly journals and history books on the subject of dragons, and giggled the whole time. As you do. :)
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Things that are not currently working, but patiently waiting their turn:
Poetry
Photography
I just needed to write those down, so they wouldn't feel forgotten. I suspect the photography will re-emerge as the weather shifts.
And that is what I know about that. :)
The masterpost for the December Meme is located HERE.
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