the making of my piece for the women’s table event at the orlando museum of art

a couple of the women on the acquisition trust of the orlando museum of art stopped by my table at one of my holiday markets last year and asked if i would be interested in a commission opportunity. at first i was a little nervous because my luck with commissions is that everything that could go wrong does lol. but when they explained that they were putting on a private event and inviting 35 women ceramicists to create a plate in honor of a women in history, i felt like this was an experience that i wouldn’t want to pass on.

so after my birthday trip to paris, i got straight to work on this piece. i had drawn up some ideas, but decided to throw a couple of places and riff from there.

the woman in history that i chose to dedicate my plate to was mary oliver, an american author whose poetry and prose have helped me sit and see for many years now. since i was a child, i have been drawn to poetry. moving metaphors around on paper has been a way for me to connect things from my inner world with the world around me.

mary’s work is filled with images from the natural world and her daily musings as she immerses herself in it, which led me to cover this piece in a piece of the natural world that speaks loudly to mean - flowers.

in her book of small essays, upstream, i read the opening piece that would ,for me, sum up for her life’s work and bring the idea of my piece to mind.

attention is the beginning of devotion.

the beauty of pottery though, is that sometimes the original idea cracks the three times you try to make it, and you end up with an idea that even more so suits the sentiment of the statement it holds :’).

i was able to salvage my flowers from the broken plates, make a bunch more, glaze them individually, and let the glaze be glue in the kiln, fusing it all together - a technique i would have never landed on if not for the cracked previous attempts.

as much as this past month of working solely on this piece was a rollercoaster of excitement, anxiety, joy, and frustration, when i paid attention, the whole process felt like art.