Rejection as Redirection

an invitation to shift

Optional audio is back for this post if you prefer a listen. If you do use the audio please let me know! I am erm a little self-conscious each time I record these essays, but I personally enjoy hands-free listening options and would love to know if they are helpful.

Early November mornings bring a potent sensation that is curiously sleepy and energetic. When it is time to wake the light in our room starkly contrasts with the black sky. I let the dogs out into the darkness, and the kitchen light reflects off the frosted outdoor surfaces. The smell of icy decay of the leaves and plants in the garden, heightens my senses. I feel cozy in nostalgia. Along with this grounding sensation is an other, equally potent contradiction, created not by the earth’s tilt but by our societal traditions: the anticipation and anxiety of the Holiday season.

The end of the year is both a blessing and a curse for small businesses and artists. It is by far our most busy and lucrative quarter. For some of us, the spike in profits in the next 8 weeks sustain the business through much of the following year. Since officially beginning Sils Ceramics in 2018, this season has been filled with stress, gratitude, tears, opportunity, sleep deprivation, and hope that a life funded by my creativity is possible.

This particular season however, is going to look very different.

Patrons of the arts, lovers of the handmade, and enthusiasts of the small business market scene might not know that the season frenzy begins weeks and months before November. We are submitting applications, making connections, trading business cards, and sending emails to secure participation in these events usually before the colors of the leaves change. This season of planning was emotionally fraught and painful for me, as it was not sprinkled, but rather saturated with rejection. Rejection from markets I have financially depended on for several years. Rejection from an event I was personally invited to by the coordinator months prior. Rejection from market opportunities I did not even know I applied for, but was informed via email I hadn’t won a spot in a random draw.

This is the industry. It’s a game of chance. It’s politics, it’s luck, it’s skill, it’s wins and it’s losses. As artists we must learn to let rejection roll off our shoulders and get back into the studio. Back into the joy of curiosity. Back into the hope of finding new places that will connect us with people who connect with our work. If you can’t withstand critiques, misunderstandings, and rejections, you simply can’t be an artist. This was different though. This slew of rejection came at a time when I desperately needed to feel reassurance. I needed to feel validation. I needed to feel held by community in the midst of chronic loneliness. It came at a time when I had already been asking myself everyday if it was time to quit. The cumulating events of this past year had left my skin feeling raw and my soul vulnerable. I was trying to fathom what it means to fail at the only thing you have ever felt called to do with your life. What direction do you turn to when the Northstar you have followed since your earliest memories goes out?

I do not hide that this year has been difficult. I fear the melodramatic undertones of everything I write, but I do not know how to show up authentically when these mental emotional challenges have been such a pervasive constant I have had to dance with each day as I wait for it too to pass.

The spring residency opportunity in Estonia was sudden and abrupt. What I hoped would be a beautiful experience that would launch my professional work forward, seems to have been a beautiful experience that left me professionally unsure. The Vessel project became so large and meaningful I began to fear I could never capture it within the small containers of words and clay. I returned home and that fear became disorienting. I felt enamored by visions of installations: art you experience rather than pocket. However, I did not know how I could pivot, and self-doubt grew. Art Camps served as a distraction from an encapsulating sense of failure around the work I was truly passionate about but undeserving of. My life and body was morphing into something I no longer recognized that made me feel equal parts exhilarated and terrified. On my computer sat a document titled “The Problem with Production: A Ceramic Crisis” that remains largely unwritten because I could not find the words to organize the growing chaos of feelings in my soul. Feelings whose truth just might be condensed into an admission that I no longer wanted to be a production potter… I don’t think I ever did… it was simply safer than creating the work I really wanted to be making. The commerce of markets was simple. The commerce of creative expression was too abstract to understand and feel worthy of. Within this space of personal and artistic turmoil and insecurity, came the rejection upon rejection. The safer route I so often hid behind, the route that always felt uncomfortably adjacent to, but separate from my path, was closed to me now.

Within the despair was the smallest resilient hope: What if I wasn’t being pushed down by these closed doors, but rather pushed forward?

What if the universe herself has gotten so sick of my excuses she just removed them. It has been a continuous practice of trust, but when I can think of it this way, I am deeply moved to have received such a personal and desperately needed gift.

This is a deeply engrained pattern in my life: chasing what feels like it will be financially safe, rather than trusting what feels in alignment with my creative desires. A common dilemma for many artists in this capitalism-adoring society. For as long as I can remember, I have stood with one foot in two places. Dividing my soul between what is socially acceptable, and what I dare to dream up. Never ever fully stepping into the latter. For over a year, I have had a growing awareness that pottery and markets are distracting me from the kind of work I really want to be making… But I have felt trapped in a bind of financial dependence even as this type of creative work has not even been particularly profitable, possibly because it isn’t truly mine. I spend hours, days, and weeks, creating large batches of cups, mugs, and tumblers because they sell. Then exhausted, I realize I have once again run out of time and energy to create in a way that refills my soul: to create with playfulness, with trial and error, with the intoxicating wonder of figuring it out. I want to feel human and spiritual by crafting the pieces that feel like art-making where the value lies in its process. But fear trades that humanness for mechanics and traps me in hours that feel like craft-making where the value lies only in its product. The dream of working as a studio ceramicist was never supposed to make me feel so empty.

Without markets this season, perhaps I can finally prioritize the work that often is overlooked at those very events. The candleabras, the wonky dream jars, the serving platters, the slightly warped bookends, the vases… the pieces that few people notice, and fewer people are able to purchase. However when these pieces are seen, I feel seen. I feel like somehow, in some unexplainable way I have found a kindred spirit. There is something in our past that neither of us can identify that leads us to connect over the look, feel, and life of these pieces. Maybe its a grandmother’s garden, an old picture book, a bus ride through a foreign city, the heat of sunned sandstone, the smell of a walnut chess filled with stuffed animals, the fabric patterns on the pillows by the windowsill, the memory of light cutting through leaves above us while running our fingers through the grass. I love ceramics as a medium because of the story it invites into my world while I am creating with it. I find myself wondering if the stories were the entire point all along.

So alas, here is where I am. I guess in way this is a long winded announcement, that if you are in Salt Lake, and hoping to see me at one of the usual winter markets, I am not going to be there. While I am hoping to finish out my year with some financial solvency, I am looking forward to deprioritizing bulk production. For so many years I have been grinding myself into the ground as I perpetually have tried to grow this business on a crumbling foundation. I am genuinely excited to take a step back, and focus on the parts of my business that I so often neglect in the chase for income. This season I am trading quantities for quality. I am releasing all Holiday studio “shoulds” and creating only what brings me joy to make. I am seeking slower paced opportunities, and being selective and celebratory with how I am spending my time. I am terrified and I am trusting. This redirection is to finally walk down a path I have always avoided, a place of trusting fully that if I support my creative endeavors, my creative endeavors will support me. It is my most sincere wish that this season of rejection, will be a turning point I will forever look back on with gratitude.

As always, thank you for sharing this space with me.

With love and Awe-

Kirsten

I invite you to share this post with anyone who might resonate with or benefit from this story. Word of mouth is the best way to spread my creative work. It is so greatly appreciated.