Whenever I tell people what I do for living, that I am a potter, I am often met with surprise when I go on to explain that it is our only source of income and I think this is a problem in our society. Our culture, unfortunately, puts out this idea that artists and makers should always struggle, that their arts based business should always be something that they do on the side, and not really their "actual job".
The truth is that for a teeny tiny ceramics business like ours, slip casting is our only path towards increasing our production while also maintaining the handmade nature of our pieces. Some people may have the misconception that making pottery from molds and slip is cheating or so easy that the pieces practically make themselves. But in order to do this we first had to learn the art of slip casting, you heard that right, the art of slip casting. We realized that if we were truly going to grow our pottery business that we had to incorporate slip casting into our making process.
Of course, we have certainly created and sold a ton of wheel thrown pieces, but we decided early on to focus on hand building as we felt we could gain more size consistency and sitting at a table together hand building mugs just sounded a lot more fun.Īs our business has grown we have often run into the reality that we are only two people and can thus only make a limited number of pieces either on a wheel or a through building with slabs. We had decided that we would focus on hand building our mugs from slabs rather than throwing them on a wheel as neither of us wanted to spend all of our time hunched over a pottery wheel. When Natasha and I started our little ceramics business one of the first things we did was to buy a slab roller.
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