January in the studio
January is a time of new beginnings, of course. But that has never felt truer for me than for the past few years.
Both of my kids were born in January: my son on New Year’s Day 2023, my daughter late in the month in 2018.
January is also my “anniversary” with ceramics. My love of clay began with a class in January, six years ago, a story for another time.
I think 2026 is going to be a year of significant change, so I wanted to document each month as it passes to see how my ceramics making evolves. And to keep things real.
Thank you for being here!
Getting settled
This January, I started going into my new studio space (the collective Studio Alexandra in Chabanel, Montreal’s garment district) in earnest after moving in late last year. While I’m still working in tech four days a week, this has been a month of studio Fridays.
And I’ve never loved ski season as much as this year! My family goes skiing every Saturday morning, and they drop me by the highway on-ramp on their way. I walk the rest of the way to the studio for bonus studio Saturdays.
This year’s themes, take 1
I’m hoping to use the creative freedom that comes from the new studio set-up to explore a few themes this year:
Big. Living in a city apartment with limited space for finished work and working with just a few storage shelves in a shared studio space means I’ve never really gotten to spread out and work on big pieces. But the few storage shelves at the new studio space are bigger (!), and I’d love to take advantage of that to make bigger painted pieces.
Flat. Painting, but with glazes. I want to push painting with glazes further on flat surfaces that act as mini canvases. I can totally imagine them up on the wall hung up with little pieces of wire! And interacting with each other to form interesting narratives or worlds.
Some sketchbook ideas for tiny ceramic paintings I’d love to bring to life.
Making some tiny “canvases” out of a slab of clay, then scratching in images to try to get glaze to stay in an area without spilling out every which way in the final fire. (Will it work??? Only one way to find out!)
3. Repetition, with variety. Personally, I prefer handmade items with some natural variation to them. Yes, I respect the technical skill needed to make nearly-identical objects over and over again. But I also think that we’ve already invented ways to make physical objects nearly identical — with machines! If a human is going to spend time making something, then I think our unique talents and advantages should be put to their best use.
At the same time, selling things, especially online, is better suited for “products”. Products that are repeated and predictable, products that can be rated and reviewed. So repetition of some sort is needed.
So where does that leave us? I don’t think this is an impossible contradiction to solve. This year, I’d like to find a few pieces that I enjoy making repeatedly but that still have some variability and an element of chance. That are looser, visibly “imperfect”. The drips, brushes, and dimple cups seem like natural candidates, but I’m curious to see what else I enjoy repeating.
Early candidates for repeated pieces. From left to right: drips cup, brushes cup, dimple cup. These are pieces that I enjoy making repeatedly and that have natural variation due to body movements, one of the marks of the “handmade” in my opinion.
On the left, drips cups get whacked with a spoon immediately after they are thrown, leaving permanent grooves and welts that are a joy to nestle fingers in and that cause glaze to pool in unpredictable ways.
On the right, brushes cups are painted with big, dramatic brushmarks captured on the surface permanently when they become vitrified in the fire.
What’s next?
Right now, I’m applying for a bunch of events for the summer. After years in academia and then at startups, I’ve long accepted you need to try a lot of things and fail at a lot of things to have some things work out.
This month I applied to a show and an event, got one rejection and one waitlisting (is that a noun?) for something very cool. And while I wait to find out about the waitlisting, I’ve been working on a batch of dimple cups, to be brushed in pinks and blues, and a batch of blue lines cups, which I cannot wait to paint.
The pieces are slowly gathering up for the first glaze fire of the year.