Transcript
Speaker: As visual people, we love looking at stuff.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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? 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,
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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,
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
Speaker: who has been born raised and has lived and navigated white spaces to him.
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
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
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.
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? Pottery, discovering my voice. OK, so.
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
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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? 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.
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?
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.
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.
