In November 2025 I took part in a A-B Projects Studio Sessions with Marie Herwald Hermann. The theme of the sessions was Unspectacular Spectacular.
To sum up the premise of the sessions is that clay artists meet online, regularly for a limited number of sessions, have clay in their hands, jam and discuss things. Making in the flow of the conversation was unusual to me but proved to be a gift for self-exploration. In conversation more self-aware parts of me are distracted, and other parts come out to play. Clay also becomes container for any feelings of discomfort or anxiety. I wasn’t too attached to the results in the process of making but ended drying and firing work as we progressed thought the month, the work was asking to continue with glaze. Spending more time with the pieces also allowed to ponder on the themes and objects that emerged for just a little bit longer since conversations were potent and stimulating, yet fleeting experience.
The flow of the process revealed that arrangement of work in a kiln, on a kiln shelf, on an alumina rod, on a making board and drying shelf was an important part of my life, which seems obvious as I load kilns all the time, yet I never got to reflect on the experience, specificity of the choreography and reverence that comes with years of repetition of the same movements again and again, and the aesthetic pleasure and sometimes playfulness of arrangement.
Also, a couple of objects from my early years made a surprising appearance, opening a new direction and a nudge to keep exploring the mundane. It is fascinating to see how many new themes a consistent conversation with fellow artists that lasted about 12 hours in total can open. It felt like putting seeds into water and watching them swell with potential.
I was surprised that the sessions opened a flood gate where a need to celebrate very small unambitious but deeply symbolic objects of my daily routine, running the pottery and working with clay and kilns became very apparent. The invitation to explore the subject of attachment to day-by-day objects that are held in one’s hands most that was offered by Marie Herwald Hermann as one of the self-reflection questions was helpful in pinpointing the anger and anxiety, I felt about the set of Lidl pens I was using for several years now being down to one. Pens I use to the notes in kiln diary will have to be replaced with something else soon. It also pointed to my general fear of inevitable change and loss, the certainty that the future is uncertain to the level of the kiln diary records. Not something others want admitted by someone who looks after others artwork while it’s traveling through the unknown of the kiln alchemy vulnerable to shaking hands, mistakes, and temperature fluctuations. My job had always been reducing uncertainty to an absolute minimum for others by amassing practice-based knowledge of materials, practices, products and the varied behaviours of the five studio kilns.
The most significant objects that emerged were potter’s ribs and kidneys (types of tools), a pen, a portrait of the one I use to write down record in our Kiln Diary, and fobs. Especially studio fob.
It also returned me to the objects that threw me right back into childhood. My father’s dead black CASIO watch, my transitional object, the contemporary yellow copy of which I bought for myself in 2022 and have been wearing since. The way automatic printing of the strap of my watch into clay continued until I just made a rough sculpture of an enlarged CASIO… I left it under plastic until I figured how to print its face. Numbers. Incomprehensible notion of time. For a child. I used a photocopy of an old computer punch card to make the print on it’s face.
What it means to make something smaller of bigger was an exploration that stayed with me. And finishing the sculptures, taking them out of the kiln, showing them at the open studios at the workshop brought up to clarity the aspect that I was most curious about. When we increase the scale of objects, we and our audience are thrown back to the experience of being a child. With fragility and preciousness of ceramics we come back to looking at these large special adult things, too large for us to use comfortably, still new and just being discovered but nevertheless being allowed to hold them, and isn’t it wonderful to have that daddy’s broken watch? Multiple pieces made during the sessions came with the question of scale. And I started to note how I unconsciously enlarge key objects that speak to me of my childhood.
One of the pieces I completed right after the Sessions were over was the print on clay of a Soviet computer punch card from late 80s. When I was small disused punch cards were everywhere, my mother worked in an institute that housed large room size computers before starting a family. So, my first baby data was noted on a back of an unused punch card with a ballpoint pen, and I still have it to this day. I printed this ceramic tile from it, enlarging it… to the scale I would have experienced as a child.
What came clear and was helpful with having a studio session community, is seeing that I work in a very specific way, and that there is nothing problematic about it. The specificity of my play with the clay is what I have, and just diving deeper, and seeing more patterns emerge is satisfying for me, as they emerge into new stands of practice, sitting there, gestating, waiting for the right time to propagate into forms of fruitfulness, delight and de-tanging of trauma.
Supported by a bursary from a-n The Artists Information Company.