Creative Play and Inspiration
An Open Letter to the Mug Clubbers...
As an other mug design from the 2023 Mug Club hit the post last week, I wanted to share with the members of the club the inspiration behind this particular design. However, it dawned on me that it might be fun and helpful to open this message up to everyone as a substack letter.
Despite some of the set-backs we have endured throughout the pilot year, operating the Mug Club has brought a lot of joy to my studio practice. It has been a delightful challenge to come up with 4 different designs to surprise members with throughout the year. Working as a studio potter, I feel a lot of tension between maintaining the Sils tried-and-true staples, while also bringing in playful and refreshing temporary designs into my work. It is a never ending-balancing act, keeping a foot in what I have found to be aesthetically minimal and timeless, and a foot in what allows my inner child to play. All while hoping each step leads me further down my path into my own authentic artistic voice.
It is my goal for each mug batch to be set apart from the one before, via its inspiration source, construction techniques, and decorative stylings. I wanted to share the inspiration behind this mug, because it is rare that inspiration comes in a package so easily traceable. Often what we create is such a mix up of distant memory, habitual muscle movements, and spontaneity, it can be hard to know exactly where the idea sprung from. Because of this, I delight in other creatives sharing the bits and pieces they pulled from life experiences, moving visuals, and textures of emotions to create something new. I also believe in the rush of technology and social media, we are seeing a crisis in creative development. Under the pressure to produce, many makers are using the word “inspired” to describe an action closer to theft. And while that topic is large and touchy and will be revisited in time, I feel like a great way start for now, is to share how inspiration can start from one place and develop into something distantly related and still entirely new.
Luckily for me, my parents had bought tickets to Helsinki prior to my application for the artist residency in Tallinn. At the end of my first month I took the 2 hour ferry ride to visit their familiar faces after a month of solitude in a reserved country. My parents met in an interior design class in college. Architecture, art, and design has alway been a gravitational force in their careers, passions, and relationship to one an other. For this reason, Helsinki is one of their favorite places to travel together, and I got to steal away a weekend there with them. (This is a huge deal for me. I am one of 5 kids.) We spent the rainy days in art museums, notable architectural feats, and walking beautifully cobbled streets to small and large design stores, both new and historical.
My mother’s love for the Finnish deign house Marimekko, permeated our existence as children. Before knowing the name or their relevance, I had an awareness of the distinct playful patterns and colors that are a nostalgic piece of my childhood. It was not until my first time in Estonia with my mother two years ago, and our quick trip to Helsinki, that I grew into a renewed appreciation of this design house. Filled with an adult reverence for the magnitude this female owned and operated design house had on post WWII Finland, and the way its playful, bold, and elegant existence rippled through the world. While the stores filled my soul with light-hearted exhilaration, it was the applied arts museums that told the history and processes of some of the iconic patterns that filled me to the brim with creative inspiration. It started with the Jokapoika shirts. (Pictured above) These stripes were painted by hand on cotton so they would be “perfectly imperfect.” The overlapping of two colors in order to assure that all the cotton was dyed created a surprise 3rd color. For decades to come, variations of colors of this timeless shirt design would grace those cobbled streets. My first thought on beholding all the examples in the museum was “I want to do this with glaze.” And the next Mug Club design began to take shape in my mind.
The only parameters I had for this mug so far were that I wanted it to be thrown on the wheel, and I wanted the color-scheme to be minimal as the last batch was hand built and had a lot of busy color play. As I chewed on the thrown shape in my head, an other Marimekko signature came to mind: The circular dress hems. I decided to try cutting the bases off the thrown shape, and adding a small circular foot to create the same silhouette in the mug. The last feature to be decided was the handle. If there was any pattern that someone who is unfamiliar with the name Marimekko would recognize, it is the iconic poppy print. Inspirations from this poppy shape have made it onto work of mine from the past… inspirations from this poppy-shape have made it all over the world. There was no going back. I wanted each handle to be a completely unique floral shape. Each one cut with a loose free-hand to be “perfectly imperfect.”
Thank you for sharing this time and space with me. The book I used to share reference images for this post is “Marimekko: The Art of Print Making” published in 2021 by Thames&Husdon Ltd, London. It is fabulous, if you need some coffee table eye candy, I recommend it. I hope it is inspiring to see the building blocks behind a design! If you are not a member of Mug Club, it is a concept I am hoping to roll into 2024. A subscription includes 4 unique and limited edition mugs made throughout the year at a discounted rate.
I am pleased to report that as Summer turns a corner into Fall I am back in my studio with regular making hours. It feels natural and wholesome getting my hands dirty each day, and awkward and clunky figuring out how I want to show up from now on. I am hoping to have an update soon which you will hear about first here on the Substack Newsletter. This update will have some rainbow tumblers, various hand-built goods, Mug Club surplus, and the final batch of Strata Mugs. After which, my goal is to return to somewhat consistent updates once or twice a month until the season is over. Thank you for your patience!
With Love and Awe-
Kirsten