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#335 The Poetic Intersection of Pottery and Heritage Gabby Malpas
50 Plays2 years ago
In this podcast episode, the host delves into the life and art of Gabby Melkis, a Chinese adoptee who channels her unique identity and heritage into her pottery. Gabby recounts her journey from art school to a corporate career and her return to pottery during the lockdown, using her art to navigate the complexities of personal history and transracial adoption. Her work reflects her story, combining the joy of creation with deeper messages about authenticity. Listeners are invited to explore Gabby's world through her social media and website, as she imparts wisdom on finding one's voice in art and life, emphasizing the importance of being genuine and the simple mantra, "Don't be a dickhead." Learn more about gabby by clicking here https://www.instagram.com/gabbymalpas/
Top 3 Value Bombs:
1. Embrace Your Heritage Through Art: Gabby Melkis shares the powerful connection between her Chinese heritage and her art, emphasizing the impact of personal history on creative expression. Despite the challenges of being a transracial adoptee, she channels her unique experiences into her pottery, using it as a vessel to tell her story and celebrate her identity. Her journey highlights the importance of exploring and embracing one's roots as a source of artistic inspiration and authenticity.
2. Rediscovery and Growth in Lockdown: The stillness of the 2020 lockdown provided Gabby with an opportunity to rediscover her passion for pottery, demonstrating that periods of pause and reflection can lead to personal and professional growth. Gabby's return to clay is a testament to the idea that it's never too late to revisit a former passion or craft and that such a return can reignite a sense of joy and fulfillment in one's work.
3. Don't Be a Dickhead – Simple Yet Profound: Gabby shares her simple, all-encompassing life mantra, "Don't be a dickhead," which resonates with the podcast's audience as a guiding principle for personal interactions and self-expression. This advice serves as a reminder that the way we treat others and navigate the world around us can have a significant impact on our lives and communities, reinforcing the value of kindness and authenticity in every aspect of life.
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Transcript
Introduction to Gabby Melpis
00:00:00
Speaker
As visual people, we love looking at stuff.
00:00:03
Speaker
and as we grow and as we age we find joy or we're attracted to different stuff. What is up Shaped Nation this is Nick Torres here and on this episode I got to interview Gabby Melpis. Gabby makes some really incredible design pottery with blue and white and her designs look really
Heritage and Pottery Journey
00:00:21
Speaker
incredible. In this episode you'll learn how Gabby uses the heritage from her Chinese heritage that she learned that she had to learn all on her own because she's a Chinese adoptee
00:00:32
Speaker
You also learn about how Gabi started to relearn pottery and how she had to go through those pains and struggles again. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and see you guys in there. If you love pottery and want to take your skills to the next level, you're in the right place. Find your own pottery style right here on Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres. Let's get started.
00:00:55
Speaker
Gabby, welcome to Shape Your Pottery and share with me what is something people might not know about you. I'm a Chinese adoptee. I was born in New Zealand in 1966 and I was raised by a white family.
00:01:10
Speaker
It seems a little weird, but this is my reality and it's what it does is it brings lifelong learning and challenges along with joy. But I have a very, very unique worldview. Absolutely love that. So tell me the story of how you got started making pottery.
Art School and Ceramics
00:01:31
Speaker
OK, well, I was at art school and I've got to say, hey, I'm one of the old guys. I graduated in 1986 and it was Dunedin, New Zealand. And of course, at art school, you have three years of learning. And what they do is, you know, the first year you try everything. So there was sculpture, ceramics, painting, printmaking, as well as art history and life drawing.
00:01:57
Speaker
And then, of course, in year two, you start narrowing down which subjects you were really interested in. I chose printmaking and ceramics. And then, of course, in year three, you choose which subject you're going to major in, and I chose ceramics. And look, I will... This is a bit embarrassing, but, you know, hey, I was 19 years old,
00:02:26
Speaker
and I thought holy shit I'm gonna make cheap Christmas presents for the rest of my life and of course that didn't really happen so what happened then was then of course you know it's your last year you get serious because this is your degree and you're working to your degree show and all of that and that's when I really thought about you know what I was making and
00:02:51
Speaker
Yeah, I'm proud of the stuff I made. I had a sellout degree show, but then it stopped. It was 1986. It was December. I graduated and I realized I can't afford to do this anymore. So I stopped and I went into work and I went into corporate for 35 years.
00:03:16
Speaker
and then switched to painting. So that's all. I loved it. Ask me some more. When was the moment you decided to get back into pottery? So what happened with my painting career? So starting from 1987, now I was back on Satan to go overseas. I left New Zealand in 1988. So I haven't been back to live in New Zealand since 1988. But of course, I go back and see friends and family.
00:03:47
Speaker
And, oh, I'm sorry, ask me the question again. It was when, when was the moment when you decided to get back into pottery?
Pandemic Pottery Revival
00:03:55
Speaker
So I'm, I'm prefacing with a big long story about what happened to me in the 35 years since leaving art school and going back into pottery, say around 2020. And I was working, I was working in an agency and agency life and you know,
00:04:17
Speaker
how long those hours are and how brutal that industry can be. So I was doing that, but I was also trying to make my name as a painter. So I moved to watercolours because I was working with majolicas and underglazes and essentially painting on parts at art school. And I also have
00:04:42
Speaker
licensing as an income stream. And while I was painting and making imagery and even at art school and before, I sort of recognized that my work had a fairly commercial bent. It's pretty
00:04:57
Speaker
it looks good on things, details, cushions, ceramics and as part of my art practice I was painting more and more ceramics. I was getting really really fascinated by the gorgeous blue and white Chinese ceramics and you know Asian ceramics specifically and I was painting lots and lots and lots of them in my paintings and then it got to around
00:05:24
Speaker
2019 and I really thought no it's really cool you like it you're making money from it you're selling work you're developing your start you know your style and developing a good audience but something missing and and then I sort of thought you know well you're painting a lot of pots you obviously haven't lost the love for ceramics so why
00:05:52
Speaker
are you doing about getting back in? And I, you know, all these years, if you're a potter that hasn't made for a number of years, it's scary, right? It's scary trying to get back into ceramics or trying to get a skill that you had once and you don't know if you've still got it. So 2020 came, the first lockdown came,
00:06:16
Speaker
And everybody in Sydney and the world was sort of casting around for what do we do? And I was staying at home a lot. And that wasn't a problem for me because I generally work at home because I paint. I have an art practice. I paint seven days a week. And there was an opening coming up at a local play studio and they were offering
00:06:42
Speaker
courses you know month six week taste of courses so I went wrong and I loved it and I wanted to go back every week and
00:06:54
Speaker
Then you learn all about that, you forget about that, you know, it was Grayson Perry who said, opening a kiln is an exercise in controlled disappointment. So you, I remembered all of that, oh my God, that's horrible, you know, look at that shit and then take it home. Actually, I quite like that. So there's all of that lovely, horrible angst-ridden stuff that goes along with ceramics.
00:07:22
Speaker
And after the first year, I just sort of was hooked. So that was 2020, June, July. It's coming up to year four. I consider myself an emerging artist with ceramics, which is really strange because I would say I'm the career for painting. So I'm sort of at the beginning of my journey for ceramics. However, I've had a bit of a head start because I majored in it.
00:07:52
Speaker
So there's sort of two things going on for me right now. My work's blowing skills still a little bit shit or in a way that I consider hasn't reached my ambition. I have big ambitions for art so what I'm trying to do at the moment is temper my ambition a bit back to match my skill set and then you pick it up and as you get better you get
00:08:20
Speaker
better and bigger and things like that. I love that. So you mentioned that you are also a painter, how does being a painter help you with your making your own pottery? Okay, well, have you ever looked at really gorgeous ceramic forms, you know, people, there's
00:08:41
Speaker
Studio pot is worldwide and we're all on Instagram and we're all looking at this gorgeous work that everybody makes, a lot of people make. And I've seen a lot of potters, the forms are absolutely outstanding, they're sensuous, they're perfectly balanced, they weight, you can guess the weight, it's probably gorgeous ratio to play, et cetera. And then they glaze it or they put something on it, they paint on it.
00:09:09
Speaker
It's like, mate, that looks a bit shit. It's really, it's ceramic painting is incredibly hard and skillful in itself because you've got to start thinking about the actual 3D form. So, you know, I've got one here, you know, and this is a blue and white
00:09:40
Speaker
I've consumed it because my client broke it. This is a sort of pretty simple brush pot in a mid-fire clay and I've, you know, I've painted the pattern on it freehand quickly. So what I'm saying is my ambition and skill set after, you know, coming back to it after 30, 35, 37 years is my potting skill is not as good as I want it to be yet.
00:10:10
Speaker
But my painting, oh my God, my painting, I've got to say, is damn good. It really is. And you can tell because it's not stilted. My brushwork is flowing. It's trying to emulate that blue and white freehand brushwork we're not talking about when they discovered transfers and put on the black lines and craftspeople colored them in. No, no, the old stuff was all freehand brushwork.
00:10:40
Speaker
You've got to be really sure of your brushwork to be able to do that, because if you mess it up on a piece of clay and put it through and you think you've covered it up, no, it comes through, it shows. So I've learned that the hard way. And what I mean by my skill with painting, how it's helped is my imagery is pretty good. My brushwork is top notch.
00:11:09
Speaker
now I just need to get my potting skills to match that and I love that color too so yeah color color and and I I just yeah it's it's intuition with paint I love that shape nation if you have other skills outside of pottery maybe it's another art you can bring those skills and put it into your own pottery I love that so let so let's talk about your pottery can you tell me the story how you started making the pottery that you make today
00:11:39
Speaker
Okay, so, you know, every artist has got to have an angle, right? So a lot of my 2D work since 2014 has been sort of subliminally concentrating on my unique life experience as a transracial, as in one not growing up within her own race, Chinese adoptee,
00:12:14
Speaker
really weird nuances with being an adoptee anyway because you think about, you think about your own life, Nick. You know exactly who your parents are. You know your family lineage. You know where your ancestors came from. You know the traits of your family. You know, oh, Uncle Roger is, oh, he's always like that. That's, you know, that's that side of the family. That's a Torres Strait. You know, you have this in your family. With someone like me, I'm
00:12:31
Speaker
who has been born raised and has lived and navigated white spaces to him.
00:12:43
Speaker
blessed. I have a loving family and that's what was amazing because they really supported me to go to art school. Amazing. A lot of kids don't have that but I didn't know who I was. You grow up and you have to adapt and fit in somehow and you grow up and it's almost Stockholm syndrome is an awful term but it's sort of
00:13:12
Speaker
Do you see what I mean? You're somehow transplanted into a group of strangers and somehow you fit in. Honestly, so many people in the world have this sort of life experience. And for me, as I started telling my story,
00:13:30
Speaker
a lot of biracial folks, a lot of second, third immigration, generation immigration folks came forward and said we'll really resonate with your story because this is a lot of us, this is a lot of us brown folks living in white or western countries. We
00:13:52
Speaker
and kind of misunderstood where discrimination against systemic racism is a thing. And generations of us have experienced the discrimination, et cetera, that later migrants, later immigrants, or expats who come later may not have experienced because they haven't had the generations of trauma that we have. Or someone like me having my experiences dismissed
00:14:21
Speaker
because I was amongst people who that wasn't their worldview and that wasn't their experience. So this comes through in my art and I'm starting to make art around that in my ceramics and there's some, you know, there's some fairly heavy messages, et cetera. But the main focus of my work is joy. I want people to fall in love with it. I want people to see the joy.
00:14:51
Speaker
and look at something and go, wow, that's, that's really pretty. And then I'll look a little bit closer and see the message. I love that. I can't remember if I answered your question. So ask again, if you.
00:15:07
Speaker
No, you got it. It was right there. So so you are inspired by cool shit. Can you tell me more about this? Cool shit. And I write some fairly flippant responses because I wanted to talk to you about it. Look, as visual people, we we love looking at stuff. And as we grow and as we age, we find joy or we're attracted to different stuff.
00:15:36
Speaker
But it's all cool, right? Because it's cool to us. It's cool to me if I was five years old. It's cool to me at 15. It's cool to me at 28. It's cool to me at 57. So what I mean by that is, you know, there's that bug, there's the pet chicken my parents got, you know, we had bantams, there's the cat. And then outside of your home, there's, you know, there's the plants, there's nature, there's going to the beach, there's seashells,
00:16:04
Speaker
and then you start going to museums and libraries and there's books and there's magazines and there's there's culture and there's life that you get attracted to so you know when you're a kid it's all about you discovering things you're discovering things in your backyard it's discovering stuff down the road it's discovering you know when you get to go out on your bike it's discovering stuff that you think no one else in the world has seen but you know
00:16:33
Speaker
you're 12 years old down the end of your own. But you think it's cold, right? And then you get to my age of 57 and I make time to go and support other artists and go and look and look and look and see.
00:16:50
Speaker
And when I look and I take another look and you like it, you go, wow, wow, wow, what is that? That's cool. And I'm looking at something in a zoo. I'm looking at something I found on a beach on holiday. I'm looking at something in a wet market in Asia. I'm looking under the bus that somebody dropped, you know, it's cool. But it informs our work. And that's what I mean. We're seeing, we're constantly looking.
00:17:20
Speaker
We're taking it in. I love that. Shaping Nation, the most important thing is to look for things that you find interesting and you try to apply that to your own pottery. See how you can apply that to your pottery to make it look cool, make it look awesome. I love that. So let's talk about discovering your voice. Can you tell me about the moment when you knew you were heading in the right direction with your pottery?
Finding Artistic Voice
00:17:45
Speaker
Pottery, discovering my voice. OK, so.
00:17:49
Speaker
I went back and I started, you know, throwing. And I had to go through the pain again. You're throwing, you're losing more than you're finishing. You're giving a lot away because, quite frankly, they're a little shit. So, you know, we've all gone there. And yeah, that was the Christmas present phase. But along the way, I was also making pieces that
00:18:19
Speaker
go, oh yeah, yeah, that's, that's good. So a year went past and I was making stuff and what I was noticing was my shapes were getting bigger. I was starting to develop a gabbing shape and I was also really thinking about, okay, so where is this going? Why am I making potentially more landfill?
00:18:46
Speaker
things because let's be honest ceramics isn't as environmentally friendly as we'd like to think there's a lot of wastage and a lot of it will end up in landfill and can you imagine
00:18:59
Speaker
30, 30 some archaeologist is digging up this cache of ceramics from an old studio and they're uncovering, you know, all these old ashtrays and they're going, well, you know, what, what period of history was this? Oh, it was ashtray-ish. But also, well, back to why am I making it? What's the purpose of it? What's the objective?
00:19:28
Speaker
And then I also had to look back at my own art practice, and since 2014, I found my voice about adoption. And, you know, I was what? I was 15, coming up to 50s or 48.
00:19:46
Speaker
And that seems relatively old to find your voice as an artist. For me, I'm still learning. I haven't got there yet. There's so much that I don't know about adoption and just how you feel and how you process things.
00:20:02
Speaker
And also there was some some harsh messages in my work and I wanted to make sure that I was making work with love and joy and respect that rather than angry, angry work that goes out to the world and it stays there forever.
00:20:22
Speaker
So I didn't want to, I didn't want to make work like that. I wanted to bring the joy out first. So going back to ceramics, that's when I started thinking, and it was too, it was the end of 20 or the beginning of 2022. But I went, you know what, I've been doing a lot of blue and white pieces because it's cute and it's, you know, I'm reclaiming my heritage, but
00:20:49
Speaker
Because of my upbringing, I don't, and because of my age, you know, I'm one of the first Chinese adoptees. I don't relate to Chinese culture. I don't relate to Confucian principles. I don't have the Chinese New Year's stories.
00:21:09
Speaker
the Lunar New Year traditions that a lot of Asians follow. I don't know this. So as part of my reclaiming my heritage, I'm making a lot up by myself. I'm making it up as I go along. So then I thought about the vessels that I was making, and I'm not a studio potter. I can't, I can't make 20 of these in two hours because that's not how I roll. I don't even measure my clay alone. I just make it.
00:21:40
Speaker
So then I really thought about, okay, so these vessels that you're making, they're almost ceremonial vessels. And, you know, I put tripod feet on them, because a lot of the Chinese ceremonial vessels you'll see in an altar or a temple.
00:22:03
Speaker
would have tripod feet. They're senses, no, they're justic senses. So my ceramics were my adaptations of traditional Chinese ceramics. And the really incredible thing is, you know, because I'm researching all the time, I'm looking at stuff. And sometimes I see motifs that I've just come up with in my head. And yeah, they echo ancient Chinese graphics.
00:22:33
Speaker
or, you know, blue and white brushworks. And that blows my mind. I love that. So now you contribute your growth as an artist to trying and failing and doing it all over again. Can you tell me more about this? A lot of artists I've seen, especially on threads, you know, and it's not age related, but it's, I call it years in. And a lot of artists, you know, they're less than 10 years into their art
00:23:03
Speaker
life or they're still working because they have to provide for their families or whatever. So I, you know, I'm in a very fortunate position. This is my job. So it's hard and people feel like they can't get there. They feel like they're failing or they're going to pause there.
00:23:32
Speaker
People feel anxious about their work, they feel like they're failing because they can't be as good as or they're not as good as the artists they see on social media. And we all know that social media, well, I'm not going to show you the broken stuff or the pile of washing or the unblocked sink or the, you know, I'm not going to
00:23:58
Speaker
We all put our brightest and best on social media. So I've seen a lot of younger, as in younger in their journeys, artists get really, really despondent about this and give up. And I think that's really sad. But also, you know, if you.
00:24:15
Speaker
dig a little deeper with someone like me. Well, I was wearing a polyester suit for 35 years and just getting by. So not all of us have had that blessed prodigy at 15 taken up by a major organizational gallery at 21. I'm still gigging and sifting around for deals at 57. And I reckon I'll probably get good around
00:24:44
Speaker
75, 80. I love that. So now what advice would you give to someone looking to discover their own unique voice with their pottery?
Advice for Pottery Enthusiasts
00:24:53
Speaker
There was that, what was that? Song in the 70s. It's really good, you know? If it don't fit, don't force it. Just relax and let it go. Just because that's how you want it, doesn't mean it has to show.
00:25:09
Speaker
I love that advice right there. Such great advice. So now, as we're coming to a close here today, what is one thing you want to hammer home with my audience today? Don't be a dickhead, dudes. I love that. Love that advice. Some excellent last party words, some advice right there. Gabby, it was so great to chat with you today. Where can my audience go and learn more about you?
00:25:30
Speaker
I just go to Gabby Malpus on Instagram or just go to GabbyMalpus.com. You'll find my email on my website and Instagram. Get in touch if you have any queries. I'm old school, you have to email me.
00:25:44
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode of Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres. If you want to start discovering your own unique voice, you must first start with the right questions. That's why I put together a free 15 question booklet for you to start discovering your own unique pottery voice. All you have to do is go to shapingyourpottery.com forward slash questions to get this free booklet.