Vol. 47 No.1 - Printing & Paperclay

Winter/Spring 2019 | Vol 47 No 1

PRINTING AND PAPER CLAY

THIS FILE IS A SAMPLE OF VOLUME 47, NUMBER 1.

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studio potter

PRINTING

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Studio Potter

Centered in studio practice, Studio Potter promotes discussion of technology, criticism, aesthetics, and history within the ceramics community. We are a non-profit organization celebrating over forty years of commitment to publishing the Studio Potter journal. We welcome hearing from potters, artists, scholars, educators, and others with special interests in writing and reporting on topics and events that matter in their personal and professional lives. 1

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Shiyuan Xu. Blue Vein #8, 2018. 15 x 8 x 15 in.

Porcelain paper clay, glaze. Photograph by Guy Nicol.

Mission

VOL 47 NO 1

PRINTING & PAPER CLAY

In this Issue

PRINTING

04 | Letter from Guest Editor

22 | The Architecture of Borderlands

06 | A Perspective on Computers & Clay 10 | Code & the Crafts

BY RICHARD BURKETT

32 | Ephemeral Materal

BY WENDY GERS WITH FRANÇOIS BRUMENT AND SONIA LAUGIER

39 | What Do You Want to Be, Clay?

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43 | X > CTRL + P

BRYAN CZIBESZ

Potting in a Digital Age

BY JONATHON KEEP

A CONVERSATION WITH RONALD RAEL

BY STACY JO SCOTT

BY TOM LAUERMAN

AN INTERVEW WITH UNFOLD

REMEMBERING

When I am working in my studio, I think about the use a pot will be put to in someone's home ... through time, we ourselves change, and thus we change the emphasis of the pot.

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Barbro Aberg. More Secrets, 2018. 19x24x5 in. Clay with perlite and paper fibers, terra sigillata, stains, oxides. Photo

by Lars Henrik Mardahl.

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Ronald Rael. Cabin of 3D-Printed Curiosities (interior), 2018.

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PAPER CLAY

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Letter from Guest Editor

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Paper Clay & 3D Printing

BY SANVER ÖZGÜVEN

WARREN MACKENZIE

LORIE NELSON

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Interviews with Three Paper Clay Artists: REBECCA HUTCHINSON JERRY BENNETT ROSETTE GAULT

62 | Wired into Paper Clay

BY GRAHAM HAY

Clay Illuminated: 66 | Paper Journey to an Exhibition

BY LORIE NELSON

Your 57 | Beginning Exploration of Fiber Clay

BY JERRY BENNETT

MacKenzie photographed

by Gerry Williams, 1990.

PAPERCLAY

studiopotter.org

EDITOR Elenor Wilson editor@studiopotter.org GUEST CO-EDITORS Bryan Czibesz Lorie Nelson ART DIRECTOR Zoe Pappenheimer zoedesignworks.com CIRCULATION Jessica Detweiler membership@studiopotter.org COPYEDITOR Faye Wolfe PROOFREADERS Hayne Bayless Mary Barringer PRINTING Penmor Lithographers PO Box 2003 Lewiston, ME 04241-2003

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INDEXING Studio Potter is indexed by Ebsco Art and Architecture Index (ebscohost.com), and distributed to Libraries digitally through Flipster (flipster.ebsco.com).

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EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Anthony Stellaccio director@studiopotter.org BOARD OF DIRECTORS Destiny Barletta Hayne Bayless Ben Eberle Bonnie D. Hellman, CPA Jonathan Kaplan Robbie Lobell David McBeth Jonathon McMillan ADVISORY COUNCIL Louise Allison Cort Leslie Ferrin Gary Hatcher Tiffany Hilton Mark Shapiro FOUNDING EDITOR Gerry Williams EDITOR EMERITA Mary Barringer INTERN Gregory Lastrapes PUBLISHING PO Box 1365 Northampton, MA 01061 413.585.5998

Volume 47, Number 1, ISSN 0091-6641. Copyright 2019 by Studio Potter.

Contents may not be reproduced without permission from Studio Potter.

Studio Potter is published semi-annually as the Winter/Spring issue and the Summer/Fall issue. For permissions, corrections, or information about digital versions of back issues and articles, please contact the editor.

The views and opinions expressed in the articles of Studio Potter journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the editor, the board of directors, or the Studio Potter organization.

WORD FROM THE EDITOR

A

s a co-editor of this issue of Studio Potter, I’m pleased to present several perspectives on digital technology in ceramics, including many that concentrate on extrusion-based 3-D printing with clay. The DIY and open-source roots of these processes are something that I have been interested in since 2013, when I built my first clay 3-D printer from scratch. I was able to do so largely because of the dissemination of open-source information by a growing online DIY 3-D printing community. This phenomenon is reassuringly congruent with the ethics of clay culture and craft traditions, even while digital processes are a disruption to direct, analog ways of hand-working.

Developing this issue has prompted me to consider the implications of what it means to print in clay. While the word printing may invoke exclusively digital 3-D printing processes to some, printing is in fact intrinsic to working in clay. Simply put, to handle clay is printing in its truest sense—to press it through various marks and movement: pinch, roll, compress, carve, coil, throw, stamp, screen, stencil, and so on; at times, employing mechanized tools.

Clay is responsive to so many ways of working, and it has an uncanny ability to reflect the present moment, from recording fingerprints to documenting contemporary culture.

Shifts in contemporary culture, including the prevalence of digital data and information, can be disorienting and difficult to situate within our analog selves, particularly when the volume of data becomes incomprehensible without the aid of computers. Should artwork reflect both tradition and our time and place? The contributions in this issue by Jonathan Keep and Tom Lauerman ask, “Why not implicate clay in this

PRINTING artists and inventors have continued to add to these resources, and a number of small companies, such as Potterbot, Lutum, and WASP, have successfully marketed high-quality, commercial, clay printers.

The territory defined by clay and digital technology has rich potential beyond the outmoded binary construct of hand versus machine. It increasingly engages a range of disciplines, such as engineering, design, material science, art, and craft, an intersection that, as Scott states in her article, “opens up other avenues of examining the multiplicity of human experience.”

In the Summer/Fall 2017 issue of Studio Potter, Martina Lantin wrote “Boundaries and borders have the capacity to constrict movement or provide protection from the unknown, but they are at their most dynamic when people are determined to cross them.” This might be emblematic of the moment. As Ron Rael states in my interview with him for this issue, it is best to consider borders as positive places rather than negative ones. They are complex places of sharing and mixing, culturally rich, and laden with potential, where languages and ideas intersect, overlap, inform, and engage each other—borderlands without walls.

Guest Co-Editor Bryan Czibesz

BIO Bryan Czibesz is an artist and educator interested in the relationships between technology, material, and object making. He is currently Associate Professor of Art in Ceramics at the State University of New York at New Paltz. bryanczibesz.com Instagram: @zibes

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As Unfold notes in their article here, as soon as one kind of aesthetic develops, it becomes widely imitated and adopted as a trend that can be hard to shake.

But this might not be anything new or unwanted. Capturing the beauty of rotational throwing marks on pots via the wheel often compels us not to alter them.

Like throwing marks, the evidence of CNC tooling and 3-D printing strata might be desired precisely because they express a new aesthetic that is derived from new tools.

These “new” tools are not all that new: CNC machines were in use by the late 1950s; 3-D printing dates at least to the early 1980s; and the plastic extrusion 3-D printers were commercialized by the 1990s. In 2005, the open-source RepRap project was conceived as “humanity’s first general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine,” one that “self-replicates by making a kit of itself” (see reprap.org).

As extrusion-printing patents expired, RepRap leveraged Internet dissemination and the decreasing cost of global manufacturing to democratize and facilitate a desktop 3-D printing revolution.

By 2009, Studio Unfold had adapted open-source 3-D printers with a mechanized syringe to extrude clay. Soon after, Jonathan Keep developed a DIY version that required only hand tools, parts ordered online, and parts from a hardware store. Because of pioneers Dries Verbruggen of Unfold and Keep, there are now vibrant online communities grounded in freely sharing this information, such as wikifactory.com. Countless

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contemporary moment?” Considering its fundamental mutability and plasticity of form and outcome, clay might be a perfect reflection of the boundary between direct manipulation and the potential of code and computation.

For decades, people have been asking what place computers have in ceramic studio practice; for example, Richard Burkett’s article in Studio Potter Volume 20, Number 2, 1992. In this 2019 issue, Burkett reflects on how the question has changed shape over time. Common computer usage for ceramists began with simply sharing recipes and conversing, but eventually included calculating glazes, image sourcing and manipulation, documentation and sharing, and the emergence of modeling and imaging.

Now the use of computers in ceramics often means digital fabrication, an integration of digital design and modeling methodologies with output to a range of different tools, from carving machines such as CNC (Computer Numeric Control) mills to additive ones, such as 3-D printers. Output in clay forces digital ephemera to exist in material form, grounding it and humanizing it, as Stacy Jo Scott writes in this issue.

Many early adopters have posited that what has become a conspicuously digital aesthetic would perhaps change as more artists adopted digital fabrication tools. It seems that this has yet to happen to a large extent, evidenced by the ubiquity of the triangular facets of 3-D digital resolution and the strata, loops, and woven textures endemic to extrusion clay 3-D printing.

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The Architecture of Borderlands

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A CONVERSATION WITH RONALD RAEL BY BRYAN CZIBESZ

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RONALD RAEL is a professor of architecture with a joint appointment in the Department of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-founded the company Emerging Objects with architect Virginia San Fratello and is the author of Earth Architecture (2008), Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the US-Mexico Boundary (2017), and Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3-D Printing (2018). I spoke with Rael over the phone. Though he lives in California, at the time of the interview, he was in southern Colorado. It was October 2018, and he told me he was making a cup of hot chocolate.

Bryan Czibesz: Your appointment at UC Berkeley is in architecture but also includes environmental design and art practice; your work is obviously reflective of that, and vice versa. You work in material studies and craft disciplines, too. Can you talk a little bit about your research interests, your background, and how all these things come together in what you do?

Ronald Rael: Sure. Maybe I’ll contextualize it from my background, to start. I grew up on a small sheep and cattle ranch in Colorado, and this particular part of Colorado was the border between the U.S. and Mexico until 1848. The houses are adobe houses that have been in my family for a long time, and my family has lived in this region for eleven generations. And so it’s this landscape in particular that probably prompts all of my interests. I didn’t get into academia with a kind of intellectual interest. I was just curious about the way people make things traditionally and how, in a borderland, there are interesting juxtapositions that don’t always merge. It’s a confluence of culture, of food, of language. Sometimes they move together, and sometimes they don’t.

My interest in ceramics originates from my interest in earthen construction, as does my interest in 3-D printing. I started 3-D printing clay because I

Ronald

Rael. Cabin of 3D-Printed Curiosities (interior), 2018.

3D-printed clay, tea leaves, polylactic acid, Portland cement, sawdust, Chardonnay grape pomace powder.

Photography

by Matthew Millman.

Ronald

Rael. Cabin of 3D-Printed Curiosities (exterior), 2018.

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wanted to print mud buildings. It took me in the direction of working with lots of different materials and has now led to [designing] software and hardware, because I want more control.

The book I wrote in 2008, Earth Architecture, is the result of my curiosity about how earth is a modern material and a traditional material, and there is one little chapter in the back in which I ask, is earth a future material? And so I wrote that the future of earthen architecture is going to be 3-D printing. And then, after I wrote that, I said, “Well, I want to be the person who does that.”

France to study earthen architecture. This led me to wonder, “Okay, well, is there a future to earthen architecture?” My continued interest and training in digital ways of making and representation just led, naturally, I think, to being able to address some of those questions.

My work is grounded in borderlands, in a rural landscape. So it’s not so much born of an interest in form or an obsession with the technology, it’s more just [about developing] new ways of guiding and shaping the material, which I was familiar with from my childhood.

BC: Where did your interest in digital design and 3-D printing have its genesis?

BC: The Emerging Objects website describes the firm as a “make tank.” Can you talk about that term and your interest in object making, as opposed to architecture?

RR: It’s from my architectural training. I went to school at Columbia University in the nineties, and it was the first year of what was called the “paperless studio.” This was a radical rethinking of architecture; people were highly critical of it, saying, “Well, architects will never use computers.” We were only using computers, and people were saying, “What is happening at Columbia? This is crazy. Students are only getting jobs in Hollywood, not in architecture firms.”

It was the moment that the digital revolution was born in architecture, and I was there. And simultaneous to studying modern architecture with Kenneth Frampton, who’s a renowned historian, I was studying at Avery Library, which is the best architecture library in the world; I was exploring my own architecture traditions in Colorado and New Mexico, as well as architecture made of earth all over the world; and I had a couple of opportunities as a student to travel to West Africa and

RR: I was hanging out with this videographer today who asked me a similar question. I told him that I’m interested in the “architectural object.” Whether it is manifest in a building or a cup, I see [object making and architecture] as the same kind of study: it’s the same body of research; it’s the same interest. Most of the things we make are objects that are testing a material but that are also—have some trajectory towards a building in their form.

Three years ago, we started working on GCODE.Clay [G-code is the common name for the numeric language in which people tell computerized machine tools how to make something]. We were squiggling around [doing 3-D printing in clay], something that everybody does now. We were just playing with the behavior of the machine, because we were wondering how to make a building using this process. All those tests were intentional thinking about buildings. It was just a different scale. Working on the translation and the scale

shift between the two is an aspiration of mine: how do you jump scale?

We’re also investigating how that particular material, printed, could be an architectural component and how can a component even be an object? For example, The Cabin of Curiosities is an object covered with objects.

Any one of those objects is interesting as a piece of a larger whole, both in terms of the form and the material and what they do, their function.

BC: There’s a lot of interesting relationships too, when you think about scale. There’s the relationship between a vessel’s inside and its outside, as spaces inhabited or contained, how you enter or exit from it. All those things relate to architecture, too.

RR: I’m not a potter or trained in ceramics, so it’s been, actually, really gratifying for me to be around potters, because I realize that [ceramic vessel-making] is the same, it’s the making of space. You’re making a void. The object is the result of wanting to make space and thinking about these same issues of how something enters, how something exits. It’s often liquid or some other material, but I think it could be the body as well.

BC: Your interests in scaling 3-D printing in physical size, as well as in production, have resulted in a few pottery projects that are part of Emerging Objects. What’s happening with those right now?

RR: I’ll give a little background to it first.

I was following Danny Defelici [owner of the company Deltabots, which makes the Potterbot clay 3-D printer] on Google+ for a while, about three years ago, and at that time

BC: One of the things people champion about 3-D printing is that, unlike production from a rigid mold, which requires you to make identical things, 3-D printers don’t care about variation or shifts in scale because those changes can be made digitally. How does that play into these large production runs?

RR: Well, I think that’s true, that the printer doesn’t care. What I realize is that people care—the people who are pressing the button, that have to pack these in boxes—feel the problems. If we’re producing different things, like, let’s say, for 500 different customers, we’re gonna make 500 different things, then it’s easy to press the print button 500 times, but when you’re managing [the physical production and logistics], then it gets a little bit crazy.

We’ve done some experiments in our architectural projects that specifically looked at this issue of data management. We wanted to know how we could make something with the least

number of parts. Rather than managing 2,500 unique parts, we’re only managing four parts, and we can code them in a way that’s also part of the aesthetic of the building. Those kinds of exercises are interesting for us. They force us to think about how we might make something in a way that facilitates something that’s unique, taking advantage of what a printer can do, but also that produces objects that are not repetitive and homogeneous but have their own character.

For example, we put mass production to work on the ceramic cladding for The Cabin of Curiosities. Approximately 4,000 tiles that we printed for the cabin are all the same, but we designed it so that the printer makes unexpected errors. A flange on each tile causes every one to be unique because of the nature of the behavior of the printer. So, rather than printing 4,000 unique things that are parametric, it’s 4,000 unique things that are just based on the machine characteristics.

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BC: And the material, to a certain extent.

RR: Right, because we decided to use recycled Cone 10 clay. Sometimes there’s some iron in there, for example, so the colors and the tones are slightly different. That’s a whole other aspect of what it means to mass-customize something.

BC: So let’s get political for a little bit. Can you talk about the Bad Ombrés project?

RR: Yeah, the Bad Ombrés came about at a time when we were starting to mix materials in the laboratory. I was in Juarez when Donald Trump announced that there were “bad hombres” at the border. As a native Spanish speaker, I said, “Oh, that’s funny, he didn’t

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that means for architecture. But the pottery thing you’re asking about, The Bottery, was a test case for our thought that, “OK, well, if we have to produce lots of things, what does that mean?” So we made this software. We made this robot, and now we have, I don’t know, hundreds and hundreds of cup orders to fulfill.

That’s a whole different level of production; we’re learning what that means. The first 200 cups that we just shipped out, was like, jeez, that was not easy.

We learned about mass production, and we learned about what it means to have continuous delivery of material. We’ve gotten good at that, so I think that in the next version of The Bottery, we’ll be able to handle larger production runs a little bit more elegantly.

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I was trying to make a clay extruder, because I had these aspirations to print adobe. I wasn’t doing very well, and I thought, “This guy has the right way to do it.” I bought one of his first machines, and that’s where all this GCODE. Clay stuff came from initially.

Danny and I quickly became collaborators because I was buying a lot of these machines, and he was selling a lot of machines based on the publicity coming from our work. I guess I felt comfortable enough at one point that I said, “Hey, Danny, I have this crazy idea. I want to build a printer that can print an adobe building.” And he just said, “Well, let’s do it.”

That launched us into a whole different kind of friendship that I didn’t expect at all, because there were plenty of times I went to people and said, “Hey, do you think we could do this?”

And it was just not in their wheelhouse, or they thought I was crazy, or whatever.

I had said to Danny, “What if a machine spun around itself?” I had not yet seen the Russian printer that did that, nor did I know about the SCARA [Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm], an older type of robot.

Danny made a prototype that spun around, and it was kind of awkward, but it was actually similar to what the Italian organization WASP [World’s Advanced Saving Project, pioneers in the manufacture of 3-D printers] has built now.

Danny discovered the SCARA and said, “All the mathematics are there. This would be easy to build.” And so [our machine] is kind of an adapted SCARA. Now we have a really big one in production that we’re going to put to the test in a couple weeks.

We realized that it can print a number of objects at once or it can print a big object. It’s a robust printer, and I’m excited about what

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Ronald Rael and

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Virginia San Fratello, large-scale 3-D printed adobe, El Paso– Juárez border, 2019.

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say they were bad ‘hombres,’ he said they were bad ‘ombrés.’” And an ombré, of course, is a gradient between dark and light, and I thought, oh, that’s funny. He recognizes this gradient and culture, but he thinks it’s bad.

My aspiration was to take clay from Mexico and clay from the U.S. and produce a set of bad ombrés that have a gradient. But I had returned to California, and [using clay from Mexico] didn’t seem possible, so I used clay from the Democratic state of California and clay from the Republican state of Georgia and mixed them together. That resulted in the “Bad Ombrés.”

For a project that will be part of an exhibit in January, we’re collecting clays along the border between Juarez and El Paso.

The complexion of clays that are emerging from that landscape are really amazing. We’re making a series of vessels that are—I don’t know if I’ll call them “Bad Ombres” or not.

Probably not. Maybe I’ll call them “Good Ombres.” But we’re gonna print these objects so that they vary in color and in material characteristics, and we’re also going to start to blend the clays, as well, to express these political relationships. The exhibit is called New Cities, Future Ruins at the Border [curated by

Gavin Kroeber].

Another aspect of this exhibition is that we’ve brought an adobe maker on board. We are taking the giant printer to the border between Juarez and El Paso, and we are going to use local clay to print. Now, there’s different ways that the printing might manifest, and I’m a little bit hesitant to reveal what our main goal is, but I’m gonna do it anyway. The main goal is that there’s an adobe house at the intersection of New Mexico, Texas, and Chihuahua, where the Mexican Revolution began. It’s called Casa de Adobe, and it’s a museum. It’s also the point where the border marker number one begins, which is the point on the Rio Grande that marks the border between the United States and Mexico. From there to California, it’s a land border defined by American and Mexican surveyors in 1855.

This is an intense geographical, political, historical, and cultural landmark, so we wanted to place the printer right there.

It’s also the only place where a border wall cannot be built, because of a tristate and international agreement to have access to the Rio Grande. The printer would create a new kind of “future ruin” monument that would span the border. I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to pull that off, but we’re going out there in two weeks to try. This will be the first big thing we’ve printed, so we may just go to the University of Texas, El Paso, and try to print something big—I’m talking above six feet big— to see if that works. If that’s successful, then we will go out to the border. I don’t want to have an international disaster on my hands, an international failure.

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of 3D-Printed Curiosities, detail of ceramic Seed Stitch tile and hexagonal Planter Tiles. Photograph

by Matthew Millman.

involved]. I thought, “What is this all about, and what are the ramifications ecologically, humanistically?”

So, that’s how [the book] was born.

Virginia and I just started producing a set of, I would say, musings about what that meant. And it wasn’t about us designing walls; it was more about coming to terms or reconciling what was occurring and, also, hyperbolizing what was occurring—in a way, it was a form of documentation. I remembered that when I was in junior high, I wanted to be a political cartoonist.

The book might be considered to be illustrated with a series of political cartoons, rendered as an architect would render something, and I realized, recently, that leads to a sense of confusion. When an architect draws something, it suggests that the architect is proposing it. When I was drawing things, I wasn’t proposing them, I was reflecting on them. [It was] satire.

I was making a point about how ridiculous I thought things were. So everything from the teeter-totters to the solar wall, I think they’re different versions of ways of thinking about the wall.

For example, the teeter-totter is about the relationship with people

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RR: Yes, the 2005 Prada Marfa project. We were designing a house in Marfa—actually, two houses—and then we were hired to design Prada Marfa and to oversee its construction. I remember that very first site visit in 2005. I had gone across the border many times and been stopped many times, just because of maybe what I look like or my age. But that particular moment, when we showed up at the site of the future Prada Marfa, we were suddenly surrounded by border patrol agents. I had no idea where they came from; we were out in the middle of nowhere. They approached the truck and asked what we were doing there. And what could we say? “Oh, we’re going to build a Prada store here.”

That was just the beginning of a series of events happening after 9/11, when there was this notion that the Mexican border needed to be more secure to protect the country from terrorists, even though there were no terrorists coming in from Mexico then, and none to this day. And this heightened vigilance of the border was occurring right before the passing of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which mandated 800 miles of wall. I just became really fascinated with what was happening, and I was at ground zero; we saw the ramifications of [the wall] for people who were living there. I was also trying to reconcile what it meant for an architect to witness [its construction], which was fundamentally the largest construction project of the twenty-first century, without any architects [being

Ronald Rael. Cabin

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BC: This makes me want to talk about the border and the book, Borderwall as Architecture. From what I could tell, it had an interesting genesis—an event that you experienced on the border?

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Ronald Rael, Virginia

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San Fratello, Kent Wilson, Alex Schofield.

GCODE.Clay, 2016.

Prototypes for ceramic cladding systems for building; each assembly is hung using custom, 3-D printed hardware.

on the other side of the border. What we do on one side has consequences on the other side. The border is literally this binational fulcrum through which trade and culture occur, and—I don’t know if you have ever [had the experience of someone] jumping off a teeter-totter when you were on the other end. When you were a kid, that was the big fear. If one person screws up, the other person is screwed. And the solar wall, for example, was suggesting, “Why don’t you generate power? Why don’t you build waste-water treatment plants? Why don’t you build libraries?” Like, “What kind of other investment could occur?”

It’s maybe not until Trump appeared in the political conversation that the work became much more recognized as a critique of the wall. However, the critics [of the book], who are overwhelmingly white PhDs trying to position themselves in some kind of higher moral ground—this is a tendency of contemporary academia —always take the position that I’m designing Trump’s border walls. But Trump was elected the night that I was submitting the final chapter. I was submitting the approvals of the edits of the final chapter, so the copy editor had been through everything, and I was just signing off on it so it could go to print. I asked my editor, “Trump is president now, and he’s running on this campaign of the wall. Can I add something?” And she said, “I’ll give you one paragraph at the end. It’s all that we can take.” So I added this one paragraph at the end about Trump, only because previously I thought, “This guy’s not gonna be president.”

This misunderstanding, that I’m proposing walls, is unfortunate. I think it’s a little bit lazy. I wonder if the critics even read the book, to make assumptions about me designing walls at a time when several architects actually want to design [Trump’s] wall. And they’re very serious about it, which is also unfortunate, because I don’t condone any construction of the wall or new walls or even different walls—we’re advocating for ways to engage the whole idea of the wall. Many artists engage with [the idea of the] wall, and some

artists have even realized some of the drawings in [Borderwall as Architecture], however they do not receive the same criticisms, such as, “Oh, you’re putting pearls on a pig,” or “You can’t engage in this, because you’re perpetuating the violence of the wall.” You just have to ignore it. Many of my heroes in the art world are engaging it in a really productive way that shows that design and art can be valid forms of activism. For example, in the book, I talk about Ana Teresa Fernandez, who painted the wall to suggest its erasure.

BC: So in terms of protest and activism as an architect, what is your response to somebody seriously asking you what the wall should look like? Say, the wall has to exist, what is the best form of protest in the context of the reality of the wall?

RR: I have been approached by major 3-D printing companies who say, “Hey, let’s go in on this together to 3-D print the walls. You have the perfect credentials for that.” And my answer, of course, is no. It’s a teaching moment to say, “Look, here’s why I think it’s a bad idea.”

I’m actually very surprised that I’ve never seen a proposal to 3-D print the wall. It seems like something that would go viral on the Internet.

But thankfully, there’s never been somebody putting such a proposal forward.

Let’s say I had the opportunity to have a discussion about that. I would say what I’ve often said. I consider the wall to be an infrastructure project; it’s a security infrastructure project. In the majority of the cases that I’ve encountered, especially in Mexico, people see the wall as a kind of infrastructure no different than a highway overpass. These kinds of infrastructure are often built in contexts that take advantage of the population; highway

overpasses are always built in minority, impoverished communities, and wastewater treatment plants, the same.

These projects perpetuate violence and poverty and health problems as well, and I don’t think the answer is to not engage the spaces that those projects endanger. I think those are precisely the landscapes that need parks, need investment in education, and clean water, and connection with the community. We could simply say, “Let’s knock down the wall,” but I think you can’t stop there. You have to begin to stitch together the communities because once the wall is gone, a scar remains.

For example in San Francisco, a highway overpass was built through poor black neighborhoods and the result was violence and crime. It then fell as a result of an earthquake, and once that highway was gone, these communities started to be stitched together.

There’s a green belt where the highway used to be. So one can think about these events as opportunities. I see opportunities for architects to think about in the future, like, what is to become of these landscapes? And so, turning a blind eye on problems, such as the border wall, is unfortunate. That’s not a form of activism; activism is engaging problems head on.

BC: It’s a trope now, that 3-D printing is the next big thing, it’s the new technology that is going to save everybody. Can you help us understand that, in terms of what this company really wants to do and what your role in it is?

RR: I come to 3-D printing with a healthy degree of skepticism about its potential to save the planet. I would also say that one of my critiques of 3-D printing, and maybe what pushed me into thinking about alternative materials for 3-D printing, is that one of the biggest problems on the planet is the use of plastic. Here comes along this “world-saving” technology that perpetuates the use of plastic.

To me, there’s a problem right there. To 3-D print automobiles, for example, and to print

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Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, with Michael Elmgreen, Ingar Dragset, and Joerg Boettger. Prada Marfa, 2005. Mud-brick construction; Marfa, Texas.

BC: I think that’s a good segue into your work with WASP, an acronym that involves saving the planet. I can never remember exactly what it stands for.

RR: Let me just say, because we had such a good time talking about it one night, it’s the World’s Advanced Saving Project. And “World’s” is a possessive. It’s not plural. But I’m not directly affiliated with them—I was recently invited to speak at one of their events.

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Ronald Rael,

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Studio Potter

Virginia San Fratello, Phirak Suon, Bad Ombrés V.1 (series), 2017. 3-D printed vessel using a blend of clays.

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3-D military barracks, defies utopian ideas about “saving.” I have my skepticism, and it’s been a productive skepticism for me.

Probably every time I lecture, somebody raises their hand and says, “Can you print beautiful houses for the poor?” I think that’d be great, and I would love to be the person who does that, but it is still quite expensive— it’s not there yet. And my desires for 3-D printing with earth are not necessarily aligned with desires for low-cost housing. They’re more selfishly guided desires about material and form and architecture. I have a healthy amount of jealousy for WASP, who 3-D printed [a low-cost] house, because I would’ve liked to have done that.

What’s beautiful now is that [WASP and I] are in conversation with each other, but we

don’t have any plans to do anything in the future. I think they are doing good things, and I’m pretty sure that they were inspired by some work that we’ve done. I’m involved in a long term project with 3D Potter right now, however, that’s looking at both ends of the spectrum, 3-D printing and earthen architecture, so it is not dissimilar to what WASP has achieved. The innovation that my partner Virginia and I have achieved is within the realm of inexpensive architecture, and we do have desires about helping, particularly to help the ninety-nine percent.

One of my architectural heroes is this Egyptian architect, Hassan Fathy. He was a famous architect at the time of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, but nobody knew of him because he was in the Middle East. He

wrote a book, Architecture for the People, about creating earthen architecture for the people, that was beautiful, elegant, and inexpensive.

Fathy and his book are important motivators for me in thinking about [how to serve the ninety-nine percent].

WASP has very utopic ideas about making in the twenty-first century, and they are invested in everything from architecture to health to art.

They have followers, both employees and fans, who believe this technology has the potential to make huge changes on the planet.

I was invited to a WASP conference, which launched the construction of this adobe house that was 3-D printed. We probably didn’t talk so much about saving the world as we did about what it meant to normalize 3-D printing and construction—a really pragmatic conversation, which tells me that they, too, have a healthy skepticism. They’re willing to say, “We’re gonna save the world,” but also have this conference and say, “Let’s figure out how contractors can be more accepting of this. Let’s see how it meets codes.”

BC: Right, there’s not a single object that you can print that magically and immediately saves the world, so it’s probably good to balance the idealism of the goal with some practicality.

RR: I met this young physician who developed 3-D printed implants for infants that have a very peculiar condition where their bronchial tube collapses. He created a 3-D printed insert they can place into the bronchial tube, and it ultimately dissolves in the baby and creates a scar that firms the tube and keeps it open, allowing the child to breathe. This is the most brilliant innovation I’ve seen. He was allowed permission to try this because the FDA approves emergency tests when the baby

RR: There was one day when coral reef specialists came in and saw all the 3-D printed clay objects, and they said, “Wow, that would work as coral habitat,” because ceramic works very well for the particular parameters that coral larvae need to propagate and to feed on a substrate. Not long after that, we began to work with a group of scientists from around the world. There’s a whole consortium of scientists who asked us to design these seed pods based on parameters that they have developed over years of study into how coral can be seeded in the laboratory and in the ocean. We created five or six different types of seeding units and produced over 4,000 of them, which are now being tested all over the world. That’s pretty exciting for us, because it’s where our material research and robotic behavior research is applied in the realm of saving the planet. This is exactly what we wanted to do. I would align this project with our activism—how design can be activism.

There are several ways to be an activist, and one could abandon one’s own professional tools, let’s say, and picket and protest, but I think that one can invest in their craft to be an activist. For example, we have also been collaborating on creating artificial bird’s nests—a collaboration between a scientific organization and a ceramic

a couple of professors stay here and produce art in the landscape. I’m hoping there can be a ceramic component—maybe we could use local earthenware that is tied to the regional history.

Also, I just became full professor two days ago!

BC: Is there anything else that you have going on or are thinking about that you want to add to this conversation?

BC: It’s an honor to be talking to you while you are in Colorado, which is a beautiful part of this conversation, so thank you so much for taking the time while you’re there to do this. I hope you drank the hot chocolate you were planning to.

RR: I started this conversation talking about adobe houses here in Colorado, all made out of clay. I’ve invited individual artists and an artist collaborative called M12, to come here.

M12 runs a rural field school for art students from all over the world who can get credit through the University of Colorado. They use these houses in summer as a home base for the school. Fifteen students, some assistants, and

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BC: Congratulations.

RR: Thanks. It’s a moment to take big risks. If I can lasso earthen architecture, 3-D printing, education, and borderlands, I think that would be a nice way to move into the next phase of this career.

BC: And maybe dispel the idea that there’s a border in the first place, which seems to be what the landscape and all of your background says.

RR: And thinking of that place as a productive place, not a negative place. I think borders are often thought of as negative places. As someone who spent a lot of time in Juarez and Tijuana, I think those borderlands are exciting, interesting places because of the different cultures rubbing up against each other. We can acknowledge them and accept that these are not the fringes of a territory, these are actually the centers of a territory that is deep and thick and full of possibilities.

RR: Yeah, I did. I really appreciate you allowing me to be involved, and it was nice just talking to you.

LEARN MORE about Ronald Rael's work at rael-sanfratello.com and emergingobjects.com

Studio Potter

BC: The smaller projects—the coral larvae habitat and the auklet habitat—do you want to talk about those, maybe in the context of what you just said?

artist, Nathan Lynch. Nathan has been producing ceramic nests for the Cassin’s auklets, whose habitat has been increasingly endangered because of sea level rise. For him, producing these nests is slow; the forms are very complex, based on the scientists’ specifications. He approached us to about 3-D printing them, and what advantages that would have over hand-building. So, last year, we produced the first versions, which are now being tested, and we’ll find out how successful they are soon. Just this last week we wrapped up version two of these nests, and they’ll be taken out and tested this year. If they work, the new design can be 3-D printed as one object, [which has benefits for both the scientists and the manufacturing].

And so it’s exciting to think about how other projects like this might improve habitats.

As we were developing the technology and working with the GCODE.Clay, we realized that the nest could be scaled as a human habitat. They have interior walls; they have exterior walls; we have thermal cooling and insulation.

Because the birds need all that, we can translate that to a larger scale. We’re at the infancy of testing the hardware that can do that sort of thing using a local material.

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is going to die, and it worked. Now it’s been used several times. So I think there are ways that designers and artists and creative people can use technology for improving people’s lives and, to that end, save the world in some ways. I recognize that it will take some time.

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FULLER CRAFT MUSEUM FERTILE GROUND: HILLTOWN 6 AND THE ASPARAGUS VALLEY POTTERY TRAIL APRIL 13 - JUNE 30, 2019 Works on view from the Western Massachusetts groups Asparagus Valley Pottery Trail and Hilltown 6.

Opening reception (free with museum admission) is Saturday, April 13, 2019, 4–7p.

Pictured,clockwise from top left, works by Stephen Earp, Maya Machin, Tiffany Hilton; photographs by John Polak.

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X > CTRL+P AN INTERVIEW WITH UNFOLD

BY BRYAN CZIBESZ

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Studio Studio Potter Potter

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laire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen (pictured, this page) founded Unfold in 2002, after they graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven, in The Netherlands, to develop design projects that investigate new ways of creating, manufacturing, financing, and distributing in changing global contexts. The Antwerp-based duo have a strong multidisciplinary background in design, technology, and art. They exhibit their work internationally and often collaborate with a vast network of kindred spirits and specialists. This interview was conducted in 2018 via email for Studio Potter.

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Unfold's l'Artisan Électronique,

2010 As a virtual cylinder spins on a computer screen, the user cuts away and elaborates its shape by passing his or her hand through a laser; the digital potter's wheel is connected to a 3-D printer.

“Caliper,” from Of Instruments

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Studio Potter

and Archetypes, a project from Unfold and Kirschner3D in collaboration with Penny Webb; commissioned for the Keyshapes exhibition at Dutch Design Week 2014, and developed with the support of Creative Industries Fund, Netherlands.

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BC: I often refer to Unfold as the parent of clay 3-D printing. How would you describe your work in clay before direct clay printing, and how do you understand your relationship to the material now that you’ve been 3-D printing in clay for more than ten years?

U: 2019 is the tenth birthday of this “child,” so hopefully we can organize a little party!

(Actually, we do have two human children as well as two rabbits, two fish, and one bird.) We appreciate that people attribute the initial development of extrusion-based ceramic 3-D printing to us, but we are also standing on the shoulders of giants like the RepRap project. Just as you would a child, in the early days we had to nurture [the technology] a lot and develop many of those extruders and tools. We’re really happy that today it has grown up and it’s fully standing on its own legs in a healthy community.

We’ve always been very fond of the material world. Even though we were fascinated by the malleability and interactive nature of the digital, we rejected the notion of screens as the medium on which digital should be experienced. We love the consequences and collateral side effects of working with physical materials, their weight, smell, texture.

Brancusi said, “You cannot make what you want to make but what the material permits you to make. You cannot make out of wood what you should make out of stone, and you cannot make out of stone what you need to make out of wood.” That is often forgotten when a young design student drags a

material texture from their library onto a generic CAD model.

We especially appreciate and play with the rich heritage that many materials have.

We were doing ceramics before 3-D printing. Our relation to materials changed mostly in appreciating the depth and dedication it takes to commit to one material.

As students, we found it hard to understand how someone could spend their entire life limited to one set of materials. Today we much better understand that, although we personally are still not married to one material. We’re probably too restless for that.

On the other hand, we believe our strength also lies in not being specialists, enabling us to draw new links between initially disparate domains and not be burdened by the often-repeated mantras in specific material domains. For example, most ceramists told us initially that our prints would explode in the kiln due to trapped air (mostly those who did not understand the issues with trapped air but were being told this “rule” by their mentors). This turned out to be a non-issue, even though there are a lot of tiny crevices with trapped air in clay-printed objects.

BC: The name of your design firm, Unfold, has its genesis in a project that involved scans of the body. In considering the ways that some of your projects—l’Artisan Électronique, for example—disrupt common notions of the relationship between body and material, how does your work continue

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BC: In your article “The Digital Craftsman and His Tools,” based on the talk you gave at the All Makers Now? conference in Falmouth, England, in 2014, you mention Jan Middendorp and his argument that end users should not leave the making of tools that they use to someone else. How important is making your tools to your work?

U: We’re often more focused on what happens in the peripheries around a subject and how that feeds and influences what happens in the center. Our work is sometimes labeled as “design about design,” and the importance of tools is definitely a recurring theme in those narratives on designing and making. Jan Middendorp’s text details the work of the Dutch typographers LettError, a very early influence on our work. LettError was one of the first [type designers] to introduce true digital native thinking in typeface design, a discipline with an age-old tradition and a set of unwritten codes—not unlike ceramics. That [field] was one of the first in the mid-eighties to benefit (economically, amongst other ways) from digitization in what is now known as the desktop publishing revolution.

Unfortunately, the creation of digital tools requires a different, more specialized programming skill set than that of traditional hand tools. Many end users have relegated their tools—the creation of creative software—to a handful of companies in Silicon Valley. That is problematic because it creates a generic language that doesn’t allow for something akin to unique toolmarks, which result from creating one’s own tools. But even when we do create our digital tools, once they are shared and used by others, there is the potential for a similarly narrow language as a result, which is also problematic. So while this might sound counterintuitive to open-sourcing tools at the user level, we feel that what makes more sense now is collaboration at every level, bringing in the expertise of others. To some extent, the community itself has grown into a tool that we’ve used in projects like the Transaction Project and Stratigraphic Manufactury. Clay 3-D printing using extrusion is a fairly basic technique, so anyone would have been able to replicate it. The building blocks are easy to acquire because of opensource projects, such as RepRap or Arduino.

BC: You champion the idea that new ways of working should warrant new aesthetic standards. Some people argue that pottery made on the wheel is dominated by the language of the tool, and that might be a limitation to understanding form, or even pottery. How do you identify new aesthetic standards in your work? The relationship between tools and outcome? Your own aesthetics developed over the last fifteen years?

Studio Potter

U: While it’s tempting to read a project like l’Artisan Électronique in a reductive way—a two-button computer game version of a pottery wheel that you don’t need to get your hands dirty to use—our intention was the opposite, to bring the digital realm more into the physical again. Making the creation of digital geometries hands-on again, as opposed to the cumbersome CAD interfaces we’re accustomed to, reopens the possibility for direct manipulation, for quirkiness with an immediateness to it, assisted by the lack of the ubiquitous “undo” command. We position 3-D printing as reconnecting the ephemeral, hard-to-hold digital realm to the body and physical reality.

This point is further emphasized when you look at another project of ours, Of Instruments and Archetypes, often described in the press as a set of analog measuring tools, such as a caliper, measuring tape, and protractor, but in truth, their method of operation is completely digital. They are battery-operated, wireless tools meant to displace their on-screen, pixelbased siblings and reclaim them as manual tools. Using the tools, measurements of physical objects can be transferred in real time to an on-screen, digital 3-D model on which the object needs to fit. Through this project, measuring becomes something without numbers but with accurate precision; measuring becomes making. These instruments can then be used in an application

where archetypical, parametric objects can be customized with exact measurements and materialized by 3-D printing. It’s rather obvious that we played with ambiguity by shaping the objects as old-school wood and brass tools. We always love to play with those blurry lines in our work. It makes people question their assumptions, I guess?

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to engage the body or question our corporeal relationship to work and material?

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 Charles

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Studio Potter

Stern, Jonathan Keep, and Unfold. The Transaction Project, 2014.

3-D printed ceramics and blown glass.

Photograph by Viktor Sjödin; copyright Charles Stern.

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U: That idea of new aesthetic standards comes from Herbert Read’s 1934 book Art and Industry, in which he states, “The real problem is not to adapt machine production to the aesthetic standards of handicraft but to think out new aesthetic standards for new methods of production.” This [idea] was a response to the Industrial Age and a tendency to imitate handicraft using mechanized production. His statement is still very relevant today, when we think about digital tools.

We believe that it is natural to have an initial fascination for the language of the tool itself; its basic parameters and quirks are fresh and intriguing at first. We’ve always pushed for the visibility of the traces of the making process, and those toolmarks have been an important theme connected to the earlier-mentioned focus on toolmaking. For example, the resolution of the virtual pottery wheel (l’Artisan Électronique) was deliberately a simple polygon, to such a degree that it did not hide the objects’ digital lineage. The same

goes for the striated print lines, the occasional clay outbursts, and the geometric imperfections resulting from the freehand digital modeling. We may have a designer approach to clay that stems from being more familiar with mold making and slip casting, and a more subtle approach to the confrontation between mold-reproduced objects and the individual object.

Today, as more and more people from different parts of the maker spectrum have embraced clay 3-D printing, we have noticed these often-recurring patterns that familiarize the toolmarks we loved in the beginning. We’re at a point where some of these techniques that are unique to ceramic 3-D printing, like the loop pattern, have been explored in very interesting ways in the past but now get reproduced almost to a bore.

I still feel we have a distinctive style, in particular, the small, intricate objects that we’re known for, but in the last year we’ve also been pushing hard in other directions.

On the one hand, going much rougher and simpler, exaggerating the coil building origins of the process and allowing the clay and glazing to have more of their own voice. On the other hand, by spending a lot of time breaking out of the “stack of 2-D planar curves,” which is essentially 3-D printing, and developing tool chains that allow for true unconstrained 3-D curves.

We see other creators in our community moving away from the initial aesthetics of the machine and blurring those screaming toolmarks away in different fascinating directions. We’ll probably see much more of that in the next years.

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 Unfold. Artifacts

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Studio Potter

of a New History, 2016. 8 x 16 x 2.5 in. Maple wood box with silkscreen print, nine 3-D printed porcelain artifacts.

Photograph by Kristof Vrancken.

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BC: You worked on a serial production project in 2017 that involved making 300 faceted cup forms. How do you approach a project like that using 3-D printing, as opposed to another way of working?

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Studio Potter

U: Our main income doesn’t come from production or sales of ceramics, but we considered the production of 300 cups an interesting challenge and experiment in economies of scale: What would it take to manufacture something in series, and how would that compare to traditional methods?

We learned a lot, especially in regard to the cost of production. It takes a lot of optimization to be competitive with casting at this scale, especially in the preparation of the clay and filling of syringes and in hand-optimizing the print file that contains the code for the printer to reproduce a specific object. These changes range from audio cues for the operator, to speed changes, to tool path changes.

Recently we were asked to produce 1,200 of these cups, and since we did not intend to repeat the serial production experiment, we turned to the community and worked with Vormvrij, a company best known as creator of the Lutum clay 3-D printer. So we collaborated and exchanged expertise, and they used four of their machines to batch-produce this order in record time. We’re more interested in this method of distributed flexible manufacturing than in producing everything centrally in our studio, although we do make a distinction between gallery-oriented output and common tableware objects.

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BC: In 2015 your essay “Back to the Future: How Tradition Inspires Contemporary Making,” was included in the catalog for the Vitra Design

Museum exhibition The Bauhaus #itsalldesign.

In the essay, you state that complexity in the way objects are manufactured leads to divisions in processes and to specialized professions. How has the democratization of DIY digital fabrication and manufacturing tools marked shifts in how things are being made?

Is digital fabrication reinforcing divisions and becoming a new specialization?

U: We agree to a large extent that digital skills are at risk of becoming another specialization, and we’ve touched on this earlier in the discussion when talking about the importance of making your own digital tools and the difficulties of doing that, especially if you had no training and needed to start from scratch with 3-D modeling, design for digital fabrication, etcetera. As expressed in the essay for the Vitra Design Museum catalog, our view is mostly from a design perspective and largely extends to other fields, such as architecture.

For most young designers, 3-D modeling is a base skill. In the last five years we’ve seen a rapid proliferation of affordable, high-quality 3-D printers (aided by very affordable print material). This has led to a shift. Where once students used 3-D printing only as an expensive tool for something special, such as a final model in a graduation project, now they’re using it extensively in the design process to iterate and test their ideas. With this change comes a shift from thinking of 3-D printing as a prototyping tool to considering it a manufacturing tool. The object is thus designed as a native 3-D-printed product.

A 2011 Guardian article by Justin McGuirk that we recently came across describes a second evolution. Design education has grown in popularity over the past years, while the

number of jobs in the traditional design industry has decreased. So the shift to more designers self-producing rather than relying on industry and its gatekeepers is to some extent also economically driven. We’re very curious to see how this evolves.

The democratization of digital manufacturing brings industry back to the scale of an individual studio, which is a bit of a reversal of the blow that industry brought against the traditional artisan.

BC: I am often suspicious of the place desktop 3-D printing may take in people’s lives, and I consider what happened with desktop paper printing as a potential predictor. Most people have inkjet or laser printers, but they tend to be everyday quality (or more often, quite poor quality), and they certainly have not replaced high-quality printing by centralized manufacturers. What do you see happening with 3-D printing in this context?

U: We fully agree and are rather skeptical of those projections in which every household will have one. The analogy with the paper printer is a fair one, and there are many more. Sewing machines are affordable, and good patterns widely available, still, very few people make their clothes. While 3-D printing is often branded as manufacturing at the press of a button, it still requires skill, insight, and dedication.

You can see this reflected in the reorientation of many of the 3-D printer brands that saw the light of day in the slipstream of the open-source RepRap and were originally oriented toward at-home fabrication. Today they market their printers toward small and large businesses, design studios, factories, schools, etcetera. Their affordable, accessible

master-apprentice type of control or a more collaborative approach. To us, that distance between an artisan and his tool is not too dissimilar from [the distance between users and their] computers or digital production tools. You can program them very tightly beforehand or leave openness and flexibility for an on-the-spot response.

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BC: Your work operates between digital and analog processes. Digital/analog, like hand/machine, and risk/certainty, are binary constructs that inherently invoke tensions. Do you agree with the idea of these constructs in your work, and if so, are they positive or negative?

U: We strive to formulate propositions and questions that build bridges between the two or illustrate that there is a gradient between

WHILE 3-D PRINTING IS OFTEN BRANDED AS MANUFACTURING AT THE PRESS OF A BUTTON, IT STILL REQUIRES SKILL, INSIGHT, AND DEDICATION.

Studio Potter

BC: In The Nature and Art of Workmanship, published in 1968, David Pye wrote about workmanship in terms of certainty and risk. With some processes, particularly mechanization (and 3-D printing could be considered here), there is often certainty in the outcome. With working by hand and with hand tools, there is risk, and this risk is often identified as a benefit. Can you talk about the affordances of various tools in your processes and your work?

U: We still fail to experience that certainty you speak of, but maybe that is more due to our restless nature. We often pull the carpet out from under our feet when we are approaching that certainty.

Del Harrow once mentioned something while referring to our work in a talk, something along the lines of our ceramic 3-D printing work “riding on the edge of control,” and that resonated with us because it applies to so many of the things we do.

Maybe we are indeed looking for that risk, but are we looking beyond the strict domain of the physical making? From reclaiming control as designers over the entire process of design, making, financing, and distribution (something lost during the Industrial Age), to relinquishing control when we release part of our work as open source, when we collaborate with large networks of peers and act more as orchestra conductors, or when we play with algorithmic processes that have an inherited unpredictability?

On the other hand, many makers (and humans in general) can exhibit extreme mechanized computerlike behavior in their ideas and working practice, even when working “by hand.” Where do you draw the line between a tool and mechanization? The pottery wheel was invented as a mechanization of hand building, no? A glassblower never touches the hot glass directly. There’s almost always a tool between the hand and the material, and in the case of glassblowers, one of their most-used “tools” is an assistant; they rarely work alone. And the assistant needs to be instructed in some way or another. There’s discussion beforehand and hand-and-feet gestures or exercised interactions. This can be defined as a

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3-D printers are generating a silent revolution in some pockets of manufacturing, such as affordable prosthetics.

This [kind of prediction] is always the case, though, with the introduction of new technologies, especially when they are digital counterparts to formerly analog processes. Initially people imagine them taking the place of the analog original, but in the end the use-case diverts drastically. For example, when digital photo cameras came along, the camera manufacturers imagined that you could shoot quite a bit more than the thirty-six photographs film allowed, but that you’d just select the few good ones and send them to the print shop. The inkjet printer manufacturers imagined that you would print those handful of images at home on their fancy paper. Nobody imagined that you would shoot thousands of photographs and print none of them, but we share them online and have algorithms sift through them to compile narratives and prune out bad ones. We can debate if those algorithms are successful, not to mention that the piling up of huge numbers of photographs can create a certain amount of data anxiety, but it shows that shifts happen along different tangents than originally predicted.

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Studio Potter

Pioneered in 2009

by Unfold, the open source clay 3-D printer harnesses the potential of new technologies and connects with traditional methods of handeling clay. Photograph by Kristof Vrancken, 2010; copyright Z33.

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digital and analog. On a humorous note, the positioning of digital and analog as polar opposites—often heard in the discourse of people rejecting digital tools—is, in fact, a very digital way of thinking. It’s reducing something very rich and complex into a binary: 1 or 0. To throw all computer work on one pile and all handwork on another pile lacks nuance. There is a huge variety of activities in both. As creatives, we all dread having to spend too much time on email and the type of general management that comes with operating a small business, which often involves computers. And everyone dreads some of the physical labor that comes with creating things—some love to wedge clay before throwing, but how many don’t?

We fail to see how spending creative time on a computer, plotting out designs, creating scripts, and being excited if the process throws in some pleasant surprises, is any different from “handmaking” if that is what drives you creatively. In that regard, one should read Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman or Malcolm McCullough’s Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand.

We also strongly feel that our work actually softens the tension between digital and analog and shows how technology is essentially a continuation of a long tradition of making and applying tools. We strongly object to the idea that creating ceramics (or objects in other materials) using 3-D printing is just a matter of pressing CTRL+P. LEARN MORE about Unfold and their projects at http://unfold.be

PAPERCLAY

BEANNACHT (BLESSING)

I am honored to be a part of this diverse, lush, often exotic, and beautifully designed publication. I love that it offers an array of personal narratives, interviews, articles of educational and historical significance, poems and, yes, even a play called The Hawthorn Vase: A Chinese Fantasy, by Charles F. Binns, in the December 1998 issue.

In selecting articles centered around the theme of fiber and clay, commonly known as paper clay, I included a personal narrative, interviews of artists who were innovators in the medium, educational articles that introduce new technical applications, and links for readers’ further exploration. Beyond the printed page, on the Studio Potter website, you’ll find more on paper clay in the form of video storytelling. I hope this issue of SP will encourage you to experiment with this material. My wish for all of you is best expressed by the Irish poet John O’Donohue's poem, "Beannacht (Blessing)," that I keep on the wall of my studio.

LORIE NELSON

And when your eyes Freeze behind The grey window And the ghost of loss Gets into you, May a flock of colours, Indigo, red, green And azure blue, Come to awaken in you A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays In the currach of thought And a stain of ocean Blackens beneath you, May there come across the waters A path of yellow moonlight To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours, May the clarity of light be yours, May the fluency of the ocean be yours, May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow Wind work these words Of love around you, An invisible cloak To mind your life.

Studio Potter

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don’t recall which issue served as my introduction to Studio Potter. I do vividly remember my first thoughts. “This is absolutely stunning! I am looking at a literary journal centered around ceramics. How wonderful!”

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WORD FROM THE EDITOR

On the day when The weight deadens On your shoulders And you stumble, May the clay dance To balance you.

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3 3 INTERVIEWS

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WITH

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ARTISTS

PAPER CLAY I INTERVIEWED these three artists because they are all early in-

novators in paper clay as an artistic medium, independently incorporated it in their studio practices, and are teachers who are willing to share their knowledge. I did the interviews between May and October 2018 as individual phone calls, then edited them for Studio Potter.

BY LORIE NELSON

concoctions of casting slip and all these mixtures and adaptations and little recipes here and there, to see if I could get regular clay to do wet-on-dry. And lo and behold, the magic ingredient had been there all along, which was the one that was off the radar, that was so close and so far.

REBECCA HUTCHINSON: What led me was an environmental connection. I was never taught to use paper clay, and I did not read any historical texts that were written about paper clay. In the late eighties and early nineties, it was my observation on an environmental level—looking at how birds created structure and noticing that they were taking paper and other refuse in their immediate area, as well as fibrous materials, and combining it with clay, and making structures.

I started thinking about my expertise as a trained papermaker—I had apprenticed with a papermaker for two years while I was in graduate school—as well as my having a traditional ceramics background,

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ROSETTE GAULT: My story begins when I was a student [at the University of Colorado Boulder] in 1971 studying with [Professor] Betty Woodman at the Firehouse Studio. I was learning the rudiments of clay and glaze chemistry, how to mix clay bodies from raw materials, and the rationale behind the differences between a potter’s clay body recipe and a sculptor’s clay body recipe. Sculptors’ clay bodies at that time were using grog. So I started working with the grogged clay, and I wasn’t happy with it at all. I thought, There’s got to be a better clay body. And, Why can’t you work with it wet and dry? And, Why do I have to baby everything so much at every stage in the process? I yearned for expressive freedom most of all.

But of course, during those years, everyone said, “Oh, there’s no other option to the traditional rules, unless you want to use nylon as a fiber in your clay. And don’t use

paper pulp or anything like that, because it’ll just stink to high heaven, and then your clay can’t be aged.” They gave all kinds of reasons like these.

As a full-time studio potter and teacher of pottery and sculpture after grad school, I chose to use a couple of traditional porcelain and china-clay bodies consistently for tableware, as well as a terra-cotta; and also some jet-black bodies once in a while, depending on the kiln or firing process. I did that up until 1990, when, on a residency, I decided, “Oh, I’m gonna scale up and see how big I can build.” There happened to be a papermaking studio next door, with a Hollander mixer-beater for making pulp. I ended up borrowing some pulp to mix into the clay body, and then I ended up mixing my own pulp. In retrospect, there was a synchronicity during the next few days of work, as my work habits with traditional clay proved to be almost useless and working wet to dry with paper clay provided the right balance.

What led me was frustration and a whole lot of tests that didn’t work, trying all these

Studio Potter

LORIE NELSON: What references, cultural or otherwise, led you to use paper clay in your work?

53 Illustrations by Matthew Causey

PAPER CLAY

In these times, mixed media and mixed materials should not be threatening to people.

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undergraduate and graduate. I was reflecting on my expertise, and I was, like, “Oh, my gosh—I know cellulose, I know fibers, I know the construction of paper.” I started realizing that this is my expertise, and it connects to my conceptual research and looking at how other species construct form and seeing the density and hardness and the success with the combination of materials.

So it was relying on my expertise; I dared myself to combine the materials and not see them as isolated from each other. I really gave myself permission, then, to combine my materials as I was seeing within my research. And the research was truly an environmental observation.

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JERRY BENNETT: In thinking back, there was a residency that was in Banff, Canada, around 1995. A variety of artists in different disciplines got together to think about how they could increase the amount of intersection between the disciplines of art. One of the things that they were talking about is how artists might influence the overall direction of a discipline—like, can a jeweler influence ceramics? And as a general rule, I would say no to that, but in this particular case, some of the things that came out of that discussion had an influence on me.

At that time, I was an associate at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia. One of the international artists who was at the Banff event came to The Clay Studio for a residency.

She just made a very casual comment to me, like, “Oh, I just went to this really interesting event. One of the things we talked about was incorporating paper fibers into clay and what kind of impact it would have.” After that discussion, I took some toilet paper, put it in some wet clay and experimented with it, and found that it answered a lot of problems I was having at the time. I’ve been using it for the past twenty years and still find aspects of the technique that excite me.

LN: What misconceptions about paper clay have you encountered in the past?

RH: Well, the main one is kind of a kneejerk reaction from very strong traditionalists about the harm it does to kiln elements. “You can’t fire that in a kiln. You can’t do that. You can’t do that.” I hear that all the time, that it’s so harmful to the kiln, but in reality, we know that there’s only harm in trapped carbon. So if there’s an enviro-vent on the kiln, or the kiln lid is cracked open for venting, all the carbon that’s burning out of the cellulose is released from the kiln.

Other misconceptions I hear concern mold, and I always quickly clarify that mold is not good and mold does create respiratory concerns, but mold can be deterred, easily, through Listerine. I use Listerine or bleach, and they completely clean it up.

Traditionalists sometimes find it threatening to not be pure, not to use just clay. There’s so much irony in how, in today’s society, some

people want distinction of materials. In these times, mixed media and mixed materials should not be threatening to people.

JB: In teaching workshops, I’ve run into people who have a very shadowy idea of what paper clay is, and have no practical experience with it. It’s really exciting to see people open up and try new things with paper clay.

Most people are very willing to try things, and like my initial experience with paper clay, it either solves problems or it doesn’t. And if it’s not solving problems, you should go back and do exactly what you’ve done before: Use regular clay, and be happy about it. But if you have these problems, for example, with making really, really large pieces, and you want to transport them into a kiln, you can put paper fibers in the clay, and it makes it much stronger and easier to move.

This is hard to explain, but I think that people are confusing technique with art.

Paper clay is a technique. In other words, it’s a means to an end, it’s not the end itself. The end—art—is a conversation of ideas, and paper clay can help you realize that, in the sense that it allows you to do almost anything you want to do with clay.

If using paper clay solves problems for what you want to do as an artist, then it’s a good thing. If it’s not, or if you don’t have anything to say, it’s not going help you make better art.

RG: There are just so many misconceptions, and I wish that I could help everybody that’s struggling with paper clay, because it’s so much darn fun to work with. I always hate when an artist gets a bad batch or one that

PAPER CLAY

JB: One of the reasons to use paper clay is that it solves problems. Paper clay won’t blow up in a kiln. It’s very common for me to fire wet work. It fits into my schedule. I can fire it without really too much concern about if it’s dry or not.

Also, paper clay can be used for repair of things. I want my students to be successful at what they’re doing, so one of the things I’ve developed over time is the ability to take something that’s broken and put it back together. Paper clay is really, really good at repairing things. In fact, I’ve got a student that throws pots on the wheel, Matthew Causey sketch of a Rosette Gault figurative sculpture.

exactly the same as regular clay, because just think about it, you add fibers to the raw clay, and after you bisque, the fibers are gone, so you’re back to the regular clay. So the paper fibers are there when they need to be, but then they’re gone, and you’re back to the regular clay.

RH: Paper clay offers me a tremendous ease in building, in drying with less cracking, and in losing some weight after it’s fired.

So, all of a sudden, you have choices that far exceed those of working with traditional clay, and you don’t have the boundaries of rigid thinking. You have unlimited choices, because you’re not concerned about scoring, you’re not concerned about drying evenly, and you’re not concerned about putting just wet clay on wet clay. You could put wet clay on dry clay. You can put wet clay on fired clay.

You can put wet paper clay on glazed clay.

You have this unlimited number of options, and I find that ever-more exhilarating, both as a maker and as a teacher, because I can help an emerging maker navigate through the choices without fear. That’s truly the hub of the advantage.

Personally, I take advantage of many extreme choices in form development. I weave with it. I use rammed-earth processes with it. I use it between sheets of paper and cut. I use it with a sewing machine. I knit, I crochet with it. I cast with it in solid masses. I dip other mixed media things with it. There’s so many choices, and that is the answer in a nutshell. It’s unlimited.

RG: First of all, there’s a wall of invisible fear, which I was completely unaware of when I

Studio Potter

LN: What are a few advantages and disadvantages of paper clay, compared to traditional clay?

like big bowls, and basically breaks them apart and takes colored paper clay slip and fits the pieces all back together.

You can do wet-on-dry application. Some of the forms I make take two weeks to make.

I start at the bottom, work to the top. I never cover it to keep it wet, just let it dry out. I don’t worry that it dries fast. I just continue working on it with wet clay. I increase the number of paper fibers, or in this case, cotton fibers in the clay, but I can move forward very easily just by adding wet clay to the already dried clay. You could go build a form, decide you don’t like the handle on it, take the handle off, put another handle on. You could go bisque it, bring it out, say, “I still don’t like this handle.” You could cut the bisque handle off, put a raw piece of clay onto the bisque, re-bisque it, and you could keep going.

Nothing is ever done until it’s the final firing, which in my case is a cone 13 porcelain firing.

With paper clay, you can work much larger than you would normally work. I have friends that make life-size sculptures. They make an armature out of paper clay, then put a skin of wet clay over the top of the armature. This way, they can build without worrying about the size at all.

You can use multiple layers of clay. You can do wet-to-wet or wet-to-dry or wet-to-bisque.

Paper clay will withstand multiple re-dampenings to make changes in the form. Paper clay will withstand forced drying, and in fact, it’s a really good idea to go out and force-dry a pot to see if the seams hold together; and if they open up, you just fix them. Paper clay allows for late-stage additions to works.

The fired results from paper clay are

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is not prepared correctly, and then the artist gets a problem with cracking, or flecks of badly prepared pulp, or something that is only due to bad batch.

And one other thing is an old way of thinking: that there was no advantage to using paper over something like nylon or any manufactured, manmade fiber. Paper in 1970 and earlier was very expensive, and pulp was, too, and we thought that it had to be “virgin” pulp.

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used traditional clay. But when I switched over to using paper clay, all of a sudden, I didn’t have any fear of cracking. All of a sudden, I didn’t have to stop and think, “Oh, blow-dry this,” or “I have to baby this because it might crack,” and “Oh, I have to have even walls,” because with paper clay you don’t have to have even walls, and you can let it air-dry or force-dry it.

And, in fact, paper clay is dynamic. When it shrinks, it’s a preview of what’s going to happen in the kiln. And when I see there’s a stressful place, a little crack, “Oh, I’ll just patch it with paper clay.” Now the crack is double-strong.

And if you need to wet it again, your form gently expands, and shrinks and expands. It’s a perfect preview of the sort of stress your wild new form will have to pass through successfully should you fire it.

Paper clay is full of life and DNA due to the cellulose fiber that pulp is made of. It moves, and those movements can be managed when you understand them. This has given me amazing freedom to work—not just with wet-dry, but with all kinds of combinations I wouldn’t have ever tried before.

The other thing is, it saved me a lot of time.

I have saved weeks and months of drying time and so much firing fuel. I do fast firings because paper clay greenware is absorbent enough to apply glaze, I hardly ever have to do two firings. It eliminated the bisque fire.

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Studio Potter

LN: What main thought about paper clay would you like to share with the arts community?

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RH: I want to share that it’s a viable, good material that more and more people are aware of. I think that there’s an opportunity for us, as a group, to educate the world about how good the material is. It doesn’t do everything everyone needs, but it does offer so many possibilities to explore and avenues for expression.

I want it not to be marginalized. I want the material to always be presented as a great choice for expression and not to be seen as a “crafty” technique or a niche material. I want it to be seen as a viable material that deserves respect.

One of the specific qualities of paper clay that I really want to highlight is scale. I can use this material with such a confidence that I’m now building room-size pieces. I’ve benefited from the monumentality of my work and the increased scale of my work—and other artists have benefitted similarly from using paper clay.

Nature has used paper clay forever and civilizations have used it to build domestic spaces. It’s a material that now makers can teach, and I’m interested in bringing it into its moment and illuminating its possibilities, rather than having it seen as just a narrow or marginalized genre.

JB: Paper clay solves problems. That’s the reason why I, at least, am interested in using paper clay. It allows me to approach the clay in a much more aggressive way than I did in the past. And the other advantage is that if you’ve got young students that are learning about clay, you can take away some of the problems, like cracking and all that kind of stuff, which really makes teaching a lot easier because you’re not worrying so much about the technical aspects of the material. My main message to the artist community would be, basically, give it a try, and if it solves problems for you, then I’d recommend you continue to use it; if not, go back to your regular material.

Paper clay in itself is a technique, a method, it’s not the art. Paper clay allows more flexibility with the materials to tell your story, make a statement!

RG: Well, let’s see. Where do we start? Well, the first thing is, get the facts; don’t rely on the Internet one hundred percent. There’s plenty of hearsay and error on there. Save yourself some heartbreak by finding someone who knows a little bit about it. Now we have all these people who do know more about it, so there’s less chance of perpetuating the misconceptions.

The second thing is, when you try paper clay, it’s not going to feel exactly the same as regular clay. If you take the time to get to know it, it extends new freedom to you. You’re going to have some unlearning or readjusting to do, especially around the way you use studio time, because you don’t need to baby it. If you are new to ceramics and you grew up with nonlinear thinking on digital devices, and you seek out the sort of teacher who understands the medium, paper clay can speed your learning curve. You’ll be cruising along with the new methods. You can spend more of your studio time refining the art with your imagination and less time fretting over the tech side of it.

Research is still needed with sustainable paper clay compounds. Imagine how paper clay–prototype pots could be tested later for filtration, incubating helpful microbes, and other medical applications. The public database of research on sustainable paper clay compounds for different purposes needs to be explored at the nanoscale, molecular level. Potters and artists are saving time and money using paper clay; maybe engineers and sustainability experts and environmental scientists could, too? Any artist feeling drawn in that direction, I couldn’t encourage you more.

Illustration by Matthew Causey

PARTICLE & WAVE: PAPERCLAY ILLUMINATED 2ND ANNUAL FINGER LAKES POTTERY TOUR

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PAPERCLAY Paola Paronetto.

Cartocci, 2018.

Paper clay. Bottle height approx. 24 in. Photograph by Studio Auber.

PAPERCLAY ILLUMINATED: JOURNEY TO AN EXHIBITION

By Lorie Nelson

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Studio Potter

“Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.”

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as supports. The clay was really floppy, but it dried quickly and was very strong once dry. I was amazed when I knocked over one of the sculptures and it didn’t break. I managed to break off the head and arms of a figure I was being particularly brutal with but discovered that I could easily put it back together with a little water. In the end, I had several paper clay poem-sculptures. I was impressed by how flexible this material was and wanted to find out more about it.

I turned to books, articles, and websites. I bought a book by Rosette Gault about paper clay and continued to experiment.

A year later, I attended a few workshops. During one of them, Studio Potter

home and experiment with it.

At the time, I was taking a poetry workshop. My assignment was to write five simple poems and create a collage for each on the adjoining page. As I reviewed my poems, I wondered, “What if this page became animated, lifted out of the book, and transformed itself into a sculpture representing the poem? What would that look like?”

I hauled the paper clay out of my closet and went to work. I rolled out a slab the same size as the page in my book. Then, I asked the clay to become the poem and began working. I had no idea how this material would behave. I was grabbing different objects on my worktable to use

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XPERIMENTING with materials has always been an important part of my studio art-making practice. I often hunt for interesting materials in various stores, looking for electronic parts, unusual packaging material, and in general, anything that may be tucked away in a corner, just waiting for me to discover. Eleven years ago, when I was wandering down a dimly lit aisle at Rocky Mountain Clay in Denver, I noticed a plain-looking, hazy plastic bag of clay that had obviously been relabeled with a Magic Marker. The label simply read “paper clay.” I decided to bring it

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1 Metta Maya Gregerson.

Stalactites and Stalagmites, 2018. 20 x 13 x 8 in. Paper clay.

Photograph by Lars Bay. 2 Shiyuan Xu. Blue Vein #8, 2018. 15 x 8 x 15 in. Porcelain paper clay, glaze. Photograph

by Guy Nicol.

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3 Francoise Joris. Red Waves 2. Paper clay. 10 x 7 in. Photograph by Jean-Claude Pierloot.

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BIO Lorie Nelson enjoyed numerous occupations, including artist (collage, bricolage, textile, and ceramics), coloratura soprano, actress, activist, theatrical director, writer, teacher, scientist, database specialist, and grandmother to six grandchildren. She is an avid ceramics collector and supporter of the arts in Denver, Colorado.

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Studio Potter

paperclayilluminated.com

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I heard about a paper clay–sculpture symposium scheduled to take place at the International Ceramic Studio (ICS), in Kecskemét, Hungary.

The more I read about the symposium, the more felt I had to be there.

I applied and started making plans to attend. As I sat at my desk looking out a fogged-up window in my home in Portland, Oregon, I wondered how this was going to happen, given that I had just started a new job. I wanted to be there more than anything. After some negotiations at work, I was granted a short leave of absence, and I ran for it!

From the time I arrived in Budapest, I experienced a profound feeling of connection with the people there. My feelings of connection intensified when I arrived at ICS and met the other artists. Each artist at the symposium had a different story—several stories, in fact. Their stories translated into the works they created with variations of fiber to clay mixes, plastic clay, and casting slip. Likewise, each variation in my work lent itself to using multiple techniques that allowed me not only to solve technical problems but to push the boundaries of the material to what seemed like infinite possibilities.

I believe that the common visual

language and the connection to creative energy that exists among artists is critical to creating balance in our world. Not until this symposium in September 2012, however, did I start to really feel the impact, the importance, and a sense of urgency to share in some tangible way this intangible experience of connection to each other and the creative force that is within each of us. I wanted to find a way to share my experience, in the hope that others would find a connection and be inspired as I was.

After returning to Portland, I chose to quit my job and move back to Denver. Before eventually landing in Denver in 2013, I took a shortterm contract in Minneapolis. On my second night in that city, I went to a performance of the luminary Dr. Maya Angelou, at the State Theater on Hennepin Avenue. I sat all by myself in the front row of a small mezzanine box to the right of the stage, so close that it seemed I could have jumped to the stage with little effort. When the performance began, Dr. Angelou didn’t just enter the stage, she occupied the theater. There was silence, then she began to sing, “When it looked like the sun wasn’t gonna shine anymore, God

put a rainbow in the clouds.” Like a skillful weaver, she threaded her weft of stories and poems in and out through her song. I didn’t realize it until the applause started that I had been sitting on the edge of my seat, leaning against the railing the entire time. It was as though she had reached out to hold me and would not let go until she had said all that she had come to say. I felt as if she were talking directly to me when she told us what her mother had said to her many years ago, “You may have something in you that is of value, not just to you but to someone else.” We are all rainbows in someone’s sky, and she was mine that night. The thought that I might also have something in me that was of value to someone else gave me the courage to take action on an idea about an exhibition that had been brewing for some time.

The next day I called Jerry Bennett, whom I have called my brother since I met him at the symposium. I told him that I wanted to create a touring exhibition featuring international paper clay artists. I spoke about some of my ideas and where they came from and asked him what he thought.

He was very supportive and spent time bouncing ideas back and forth

same time, I could already envision it completed. I saw myself creating a space where ideas can flow and artists can participate while preserving the original ideas and intent of the exhibition.

There have been many artists who have been my “rainbow in the clouds,” inspiring me and supporting me during the development process. I have received several donations from artists that helped to keep the project going along the way. These donations made it possible for me to hire the exhibition curator, Peter Held. Held has an impressive three-decade career as a museum director and contemporary-art curator. He has received three of the highest accolades possible, from the Friends of Contemporary Ceramics, the Smithsonian’s James Renwick Alliance, and the National Council for Education on the Ceramic Arts. Held has served as a trustee for the American Craft Council, and he was a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts (1974-75). His contribution provided a major boost towards making the project a reality.

Particle & Wave — Paper Clay Illuminated will be the first traveling exhibition to feature international

artists who are creating innovative work using cellulose fiber and clay.

The first stop on the tour is the Arizona State University Art Museum, with an opening date of June 22, 2019.

The tour is expected to run through 2021, with exhibitions at several institutions in the United States, including the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, the first museum to recognize its importance and offer to host the exhibition.

Featured will be the works of fortyfive artists from sixteen countries, such as Mette Maya Gregersen (Denmark), Francoise Joris (Belgium), Barbro Aberg (Sweden), Hsu Yunghsu (Taiwan), Paola Paronetto (Italy), Susan Robey (Australia), and Shiyuan Xu (China/United States). This exhibition is not about technique alone; rather, the participating artists address issues of sustainability, social engagement, environmental concerns, and other global issues of contemporary culture. It will provide historical information about the evolution of paper clay media, as well as showcase the amazing diversity of form and expression in today’s growing global community of artists using this medium.

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with me. He was also the first artist to join what later became my artist advisory team for the exhibition. By November 2012, I had put my ideas into a formal presentation that included the concept, the title, and a description of what the exhibition would look like.

That was how the exhibition Particle & Wave — Paper Clay Illuminated began.

Its mission is to stimulate a conversation that explores innovation, creativity, and connectiveness by sharing the breadth of work being created internationally by artists who are incorporating cellulose-based fibers in clay as part of their studio practice. My intent is to inspire other artists to be limitless in their creative processes by showing the versatility of paper clay as a material enabling one to push the boundaries of traditional ceramics, and to encourage experimentation with other new materials.

Like many worthwhile projects, this exhibition did not come together overnight. There are several stories within this story about the development of this project that might be told at another time. When I started this exhibition, I had no idea how or when it would happen. I made an agreement with myself to take it one day at a time, placing one foot in front of the other. At the

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Coming Up VOL. 47, NO. 2

SUMMER/FALL 2019

SP ANNOUNCES GRANTS UP TO:

$10,000

Anthology

Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2019.

VOL. 48, NO. 1

WINTER/SPRING 2020

Col·lect / (käl΄ekt΄) v. -ing n. Col·lec·tions n. Col·lec·tive n. Col·lec·tor As an SP reader, you are likely a collector of pots; you may be a part of a potters’ collective; your work may be a part of a private or public collection. Contributions to this issue exploring the base term, to collect, and any of its suffixes are welcome.

Deadline for submissions: October 1, 2019.

CONTACT editor@studiopotter.org for questions or to discuss your contribution.

GRANT PROGRAM MISSION STATEMENT

John Glick (right) and Melissa Vaughn (left) rebuild Glick's soda Kiln, 2004.

The podium is yours. For this issue, SP welcomes contributions on any ceramicsrelated subjects in any style—interviews, first-person narratives, historical essays, reports on technical research, or others.

Established in 2019 and funded by an anonymous donor, Studio Potter’s Grants for Apprenticeships program supports emerging artists who want to become fulltime studio potters and, mentor-potters who wish to take on an apprentice.

APPLICATION BASICS The Grants for Apprenticeships program offers annual grants of up to $10,000 to support apprenticeships in studio pottery; both apprentices and their mentor-potters may apply.

The application period opens April 1 and closes June 1 of every year, with notification of award by July 1 for apprenticeships beginning within one year of notification (before July 1 of the following year).

INFORMATION & APPLICATIONS studiopotter.org/apprenticeship-grants Email: apprenticeships@studiopotter.org

On the cover: Ronald Rael. Cabin of 3D-Printed Curiosities (exterior), 2018.