My Past is Not Me

This is how my pottery season goes. In the spring I haul boxes and boxes of work up from the basement. My dad sets up shelves in the carport where my mom parks over the winter and I fill the shelves with what I have left from last season and made over the winter. I take stock and fill in any gaps. All summer I make work, pack up, go to shows, unpack, have open studios and it is a constant revolving set of work.

A box of my past.

In the fall, right about now, after the weather turns cold and I'm sure people won't want to stand in the unheated carport to look at pottery anymore, I pack up all my work, try to get organized or stay organized for the last couple shows of the year, and haul my work back to the basement so my mom can resume parking her car where it won't get frosty or snow covered.

I can't remember exactly what I ate from this one, but I loved this bowl when I made it.

The thing is, I have boxes of work and things from college in the basement that I don't look through until I have to start stacking the boxes of my current work back in the basement. I pulled up one of those boxes and went through it.

One of the few pieces that showed my more whimsical side, and it didn't do it very well.

I smiled as I went through this work and then I sighed and realized that this work looks nothing like me. I spent four years in college learning "how to be an artist." Learning the technical things about making art. And spent a lot of time losing myself. (See how I started finding myself again here.)

I remember drinking orange juice out of this one when I got sick.

I have a friend, a potter who has known me since I was in high school, and she has seen the way my work has changed over the years. The last couple of years she has told me on a couple of occasions that I'm finding the "Katlyn-ness" again, that it had been schooled out of me. She told me my work was quality work, but it wasn't me.

Blueberries and yogurt in this one.

I agree with her. Especially looking at these pieces. You can sometimes see a little bit of me trying to get out from the standard technical work I was doing, but nothing I did for 3 years really feels or looks like me. The last year of school I did try to find me again, and I'm still trying to find me.

I had pasta in this bowl many times.

I used these pieces from my first pottery class at college in my apartment. I didn't get to take pottery until I think my second semester sophomore year. And these were my breakfast yogurt bowl, pasta bowl, soup bowl, popcorn bowls, juice cup, and a little vase made from a baby bowl and a teapot spout. 

Popcorn bowl

Though I'm proud of the progress I've made since I began making pottery 16 years ago and these pieces are a step in that journey, I don't recognize the person who made these pieces. I'm not sure I know her. I don't see myself in any of these and I feel they would glaringly stand out in a line up of my pottery starting from my first little pot to my current work. I'll keep them, even if it is only an attempt to remember to be myself, and to not conform to other what other people think I should be making.

My favorite popcorn bowl, when I got down to the unpopped pieces I would trace the labyrinth with buttery fingers.