Distancing

ByJoseph Travis

A video posted by Joseph Travis (@redfoxpottery) on Aug 16, 2015 at 4:51am PDT Recently I keep trying to write about the work of Ayumi Horie, James Gurney, Austin Kleon and so on. But every piece I write becomes torrid and dry, or it becomes a gushing piece “they are amazing”, “aren’t they creative” or “aren’t they really driving their work on”. I once wrote a piece about how annoyed I was about a particular ceramics writer always started a piece of writing about where he had come across the makers work; it became 100% about him rather than about…

Whatever happened to the painterly potter?

ByJoseph Travis

Watching Alex Shimwell throw on YouTube always reminds me of watching Kevin Millward. Kevin Millward was a visiting tutor during my final year of my Undergraduate degree, he only taught at the university one day a week for four weeks. By this point I had been watching YouTube videos for a year to help with my throwing and I was truly awful. Not only did I not know what I was doing, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had drawings of what I wanted to make which were far beyond my making abilities, so I just…

Backwards Thinking

ByJoseph Travis

  Or should that be thinking backwards. Recently I have been finding myself rediscovering older thinking and going back to earlier ideas. For a start I decided to go back to my original title for my research and for my thesis, I also found a business card on my desk that showed marks into the clay that I had recently tried and thought was a new idea for my work. The business card was from my final year at university and I stopped making the marks as a tutor told me it made the work “too busy”.

Slow Starting

ByJoseph Travis

Staggered stumbling starts words awkwardly twist not forming cohesively stopping any progress -Red Fox Poet Writing for the lending library I sat each piece on my desk, I measured it, entered the technical data. I had made each one, I knew them intimately by the time I came to the story I didn’t have to think too hard. So within a few hours I had written over ten thousand words, without much pausing to think.

Next Nurph Chat

ByJoseph Travis

Last night was the Nurph chat,thank you for everyone that came out live and watched. It was an amazing time talking to Adam Field, Paul Blais, Carole Epp and Michael Kline. There is a recording in the projects section of the website here. There will be another chat: Sunday 26th July at 9pm GMT, 5PM nurph.com/redfoxpottery The chat will be on “The Scale of Production” Guests are Amanda Barr, Corey Johnson, Joseph Travis. I hope you can come out and watch live and ask questions.