I am continuing to embed audio for your convenience if you prefer listening. (but reading comes with pictures so…) Its definitely out of my comfort zone but I think I am getting better! If the first couple of minutes sounds unbearably fast, I am sorry, it goes slower as I feel more comfortable a couple paragraphs in! Thank you for being here!
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Photo by Jeri Gravlin
As I type, I am not actually sure if I will post this… I always planned to share my proposal in its entirety for anyone interested in why I am here. At this moment, I am not sure it is a good idea. Today is the 6th of March, it is 9:49 pm in Tallinn. My body no longer identifies with the alert energy most people in my home city of Salt Lake are feeling at 12:49pm… but it is stuck somewhere in between, confused. It has been this way for days. I feel the most tired before I get in bed, and curiously awake as soon as I lay down. I do not remember taking this long to adjust to jet lag when I was younger. Is this what our bodies do as we age? Just stubbornly hold onto things? Is that stiff and achey feeling that starts to set in not a sign of aging, but rather just a body trying to hold itself in place? Protesting the way we insist it should keep producing. Is it a physical wisdom to rebel against changes it once submitted to with grace?
I wanted to pull the following piece out tonight because I am scared. A few weeks before leaving for Estonia, I confessed this fear to a friend. I was too distracted to even know it was there until it slipped out of my mouth, into the microphone on my head set where it exited out of a speaker several states away at the same time it filled my studio. My studio that was covered in hand thrown cups, because even after quitting a salaried job to prioritize making art, I still can not seem to actually prioritize my art.
-What if I get there and can’t create anything? What if the Vessel Project has left me because I abandoned it for it for so long? What if this is just like the story that jumped from Liz Gilbert to Ann Patchett because it needed life? And I wont know until I am there. There and frozen? What if it is all lost?-
There is a strange internal dance I have quietly observed the past 4 days. It’s the flashes and warmth of excitement, spiraling around a clouded numbness and dread. The photosynthesis of inspiration and empowerment traveling alone ignites in me, but in continuous conflict with the sharp vulnerability of loneliness and discomfort. Maybe it’s just the jet lag. And maybe it is the heaviness of the world… The headlines and subtitles that make my eyes sting and lead me to abandon reading more.
I move around each day on trolleys, cobblestones, buses, and snowy pathways where the shoe soles of the initial pedestrians are fossilized in ice. And I wonder if the magic and drive for the Vessel idea is gone. I have spent one day in the studio, and have created the base of a new piece, but it feels forced. It feels routine, it does not yet feel inspired. The internal dancers are substituted, replaced by comfort and concern… and the swirls continue. I feel so happy and grounded being in a studio and working with clay, and on edge that I wont achieve much meaning here in the end if the inspiration found a new host. If I do not share it, then there is no shame in it disappearing, no accountability. And I can wait for the next project to come spontaneously one day from a space of comfort.
March 7th 11:20 am. I make my way to the studio. I take a detour to pick up the textbook I need for my language course. I try to get back on track, heading to the trolley stop. The trolley comes. I am terribly confused as is going the wrong way. I get on anyway to save face. I ride it for couple stops and get off by a bus station. I step onto to a bus with a number that matches one of several numbers displayed by my phone navigation. Every step on to public transit is an act of faith. I take a seat and monitor the blue dot on my screen, making sure it gradually gets closer to where I want to go. While I ride I decide I will post the project proposal. I commit. I can not do it until I get home, but the decision is made. It is non negotiable.
Perhaps it will work like a call to the idea, it will invite the inspiration to return to me.
photos humbly snapped quickly with my phone
Project Proposal for Kirsten Schiel
Application for the ARS Ceramics Residency
Vessel
In the Spring of 2022, the concept of the “Vessel Project” was developed during a particularly intense bout of self-doubt. In my studio, I diverted from the cups and bowls that were due for a coming market, and dived with my whole mental and physical being into a hand-built vase. (See ‘Vessel 1’ in portfolio.) It is in these times of an intuitive desire to create without attachment to the outcome that I find myself fully engaged with my own inner dialogue. I have always been fascinated by this voice and what it brings to my consciousness. During the process of creating, the internal narrative and the external clay interact, like fibers woven into fabric. The final form of the ceramic vase is a physical representation of those passing thoughts. Once fired, these thoughts obtain an abstract permanence often known only by the artist, but offered to the world as a piece that might trigger similar reflections in a viewer. I decided to begin a series of Vessels, paying close attention to the dialogue that each one brings forth, and documenting that dialogue into a companion essay. I wanted to explore where the series would end up, and what ideas a large series would pull forward.
Aesthetically, the Vessel Project feels like a homecoming. As artists pursuing an education in ceramics, we spend hours, months, and years, learning how to master the clay. We seek perfection by forcing it into mechanical shapes of perfect symmetry. We attempt to decorate it with elaborate layers and flashy colors. The measure of success within ceramic institutions is often based upon how far an artist transforms their work from the original lump of mud. How unrecognizable can we make the finished product from where it began? Like many young artists, I enjoyed the challenge of this chase for mastery. It took several years after University to unlearn that deep desire to master to impress. Today when I work with clay, it is not to trick it into behaving like a material it is not, but rather to collaborate with it. To create pieces that maintain and accentuate the organic textures, colors, and movement of the clay body itself. As an artist, there is a conscious surrender that I practice, as the piece takes form. I begin the process with an idea of what I want the form to look like and let clay guide the evolution to the finished product. I am fascinated with the way clay holds memory. This is my favorite principle of clay, as it is the most life-like property the medium possesses. The sculptures aim to achieve a balance between artistic manipulation, while honoring the natural tendency clay has to stretch, compress, bend, and warp on its own, out of a desire to return to how it felt before it was acted upon. While sculpting, I embrace the imperfections this memory creates in the finished piece, as I believe it serves as a reminder to find beauty where there is authenticity.
The artistic concept of the Vessel Project is the symbolic relationship between a ceramic form as a vessel designed to hold space, and the human body as a vessel designed to hold the human experience. The creation process of each piece goes in tandem with a mental exploration of personal life experiences and how our bodies serve as a container that both allow our souls access to the human experience, but at the same time, limit them to only the human physique. The vases made in 2022 explore mental health, societal pressure on the female form, the evolving relationship between self and body, and political violence on bodily sovereignty.
During my time at the ARS, I plan for the project to focus on the loss of heritage and culture, as experienced through the migration of body. In 1944, my grandmother fled The Occupation of Soviet forces in Estonia. Ilse and her sister relocated to Germany where she met my grandfather, a young Latvian living in Germany. They married and began a family. They utilized their refugee status as citizens without a state to enter a visa lottery that would place them in Australia, South Africa, or the United States. They ultimately relocated to the United States shortly before my father was born.
The culture of America is one of assimilation. To fully achieve the American dream, there is an unspoken contract one enters without a conscious thought to the cost. One must abandon attachment to one’s previous culture. My father engaged in this contract, speaking perfect American English in school and German at home. His parents preserved German as a family language, spoke Russian with one an other when the conversation was to be kept from the children, and only Latvian or Estonian with family members whom they managed to keep contact with. As a second-generation American, I reflect on the richness of languages once spoken within my father’s household and feel deep remorse and shame that, like so many second generation Americans, only English was offered to me.
In recent years, I have felt a yearning for Estonian culture. My father’s mother is the only grandparent I never had the honor of knowing in this life. As a child with a step-grandmother, I was unaware something was missing. With age, I came to understand better the sacred role matriarchs play in a family unit. They are the keepers of tradition: they are the force that creates the gravity that the rest of the family orbits around. Without her, my father’s siblings drifted far apart, and family traditions ended. This awareness and reflection has been paired with grief, as I try to imagine and cope with an unknowable amount of loss. A loss of language, of culture, of tradition. As I move into a phase in life where I am preparing to start a family of my own, I am captivated by the curiosity of whether or not it is possible to mend the broken familial connection to my Estonian language and culture. Is it possible for someone to reclaim what one’s grandparents lost fleeing political violence two generations later? Is it possible to reclaim traditions to share with my own children? What do familial and cultural traditions look like when the person who would have passed them down, was never given the chance? Is it possible to still achieve an organic closeness to a culture in my soul without the grandmother who genetically passed it to me within my human body? Is it possible to achieve a closeness to a grandmother I never knew, through her culture?
My project for the time spent at ARS is to continue making large organic abstract vessels, and explore the way they are influenced by my personal journey of reconnection. I am intrigued by the how the project might grow with pieces created during my time in the country that represents a separation and loss from a deep ancestral line in my own physical body. During my time at ARS, I aim to create between five to eight new sculptures to be added to the Vessel series that will be interwoven with the processing of the generational losses and gains that come with migration. In addition to this, I hope to explore several smaller pieces inspired by daily life in Tallinn. I would be delighted to work in your studio, a short distance from the last house known to our family as their last Estonian Home. I would be so honored to get to achieve this chapter of the Vessel Project at the ARS.
Vessel 1
It is March 8th at 11:44 am.
The call worked. The concept for the first vessel cam
e to me yesterday. I am eager to head back there today to continue pulling it forward, building it into a physical existence. But first I open this document. I finish it. I record it. I schedule its publication. Fingers crossed. Everyday is just an act of faith.
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