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#122 How To Create A Narrative In Your Sculptures w/ Taylor Robenalt
32 Plays3 years ago
What is up Shaping Nation on todays episode of Shaping Your Pottery I got to chat with Taylor Robenalt and we are talking about How create a narrative in your sculptures. Taylor makes some incredible sculptures with a combination of flowers and animals that depict her emotion. You learn more about Taylor by checking out her Instagram @taylorrobenalt
Top 3 Value Bombs:
1. How to create a narrative with your sculptures
2. How to get into galleries even if you have no connections
3. Finding what your end goal is so that finding your voice becomes way easier
and so much more
If you have a Full time job but still want to have time to experiment with your pottery, I put together a Free Guide to help you make time to experiment go to shapingyourpottery.com/time to get your Free Guide To Make Time To Experiment With Your Pottery
The Questions we ask will determine how our pottery will look like that's why I created a Free 15 questions to help you discover your voice template go grab it here www.shapingyourpottery.com/questions
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Transcript
Introduction & Free Guide
00:00:00
Speaker
Real quick before we get started, if you have a full time job and you would still like to try to find your own unique voice but you just don't have the time, I put together a free guide to help you manage your time so that you can experiment with your pottery and make pottery so that you can find your voice. If you would like this free guide, go to shapingyourpottery.com forward slash time to get your free guide.
00:00:27
Speaker
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.
Meet Taylor Robenol
00:00:37
Speaker
Let's get started.
00:00:40
Speaker
What is up Shaping Nation, this is Nick Torres here and on this episode of Shaping Your Pottery, I gotta interview Taylor Robenol. Taylor makes some really incredible animal sculptures that she incorporates some clusters of flowers to enact her own emotions, things that she is going through in her life.
Finding Your Artistic Voice
00:01:01
Speaker
In this episode, you'll learn how Taylor creates her sculptures and how she thinks about creating sculptures. You'll also learn how to get into galleries if you want to start getting into galleries. Finally, you'll also just learn about setting what is your end goal. You'll learn about what is your end goal and how that applies to finding your voice. Taylor, welcome to Shaping Your Pottery. And share with me, what is your hidden talent?
00:01:30
Speaker
I would say my hidden talent is that I'm pretty organized. I feel like I've got pretty much this entire year mapped out. I'm curious, how does that come back into your sculptures that you make?
00:01:47
Speaker
Well, I feel like you have to be pretty organized around how you create your work because the material that I use porcelain is really finicky. It will often crack and warp if I don't have a really mapped out schedule for it.
00:02:09
Speaker
It comes in handy because I'm very particular about how long I have to create a piece of art and then I know how long I need to let it dry and usually how long I need it to candle for and those kind of things. So being organized when it comes down to working with porcelain is a pretty good thing that you need. Like you just can't come into the studio after you haven't been there for two weeks and expect your porcelain to be ready to work
Transition to Ceramics
00:02:38
Speaker
with.
00:02:38
Speaker
Love it. So we're going to talk more about your sculptures later on. OK. Now, before so before getting into ceramics, you were getting your BFA in bronze casting and stone casting. Tell me the story how you made your way into ceramics.
00:02:55
Speaker
Sure. So love stone carving and bronze casting. Both are very expensive materials. Both of them require a lot of physical labor. And by my third year or my junior year of college, after doing these things, I kind of realized that I probably wasn't going to be able to afford to make my own art. And that if I was going to have access to some of this stuff, it was probably because I'd be working in a foundry making other people's art.
00:03:25
Speaker
And I had always kind of looked into this studio, the ceramic studio down the hall, and the material that I used the most for bronze casting was wax.
Japan Residency & Passion for Ceramics
00:03:38
Speaker
And so it has the same qualities of additive and subtractive. And so I pretty much walked into this class.
00:03:46
Speaker
classroom and the teacher at the time was Peter Biesecker and he was awesome because he was a potter and I came in and I was like, look, I don't really wanna throw pots, I just wanna make sculptures. And he kinda was like, well, I don't have any sculptures classes to offer you. And I was like, can I do like a directed study? And he's like, sure. And so he gave me a table kind of in the back of the room and checked in on me every two weeks. And so that was kind of the transition
00:04:16
Speaker
Was the grace of a really good potter letting me kind of do my own thing in the back of the room and then the final solidification was
00:04:26
Speaker
Right after undergrad, I went over to Japan and I did a residency for two months. And I lived in a ceramic producing, making town for like 900 years. And I just realized that I would never get bored. Like I could go to any country, any location in ceramics was going to be there and it was going to have a history. And I just felt that I could do clay for like the rest of
Building a Marketable Art Career
00:04:53
Speaker
my life. So that was kind of the gradual shift.
00:04:56
Speaker
That's amazing. We're going to talk about your time in Japan a little later as well. But for now, so you were a long term resident at Odyssey Clayworks. What is something you learned from this time that you still use today? So that is an awesome question. So Odyssey Clayworker was the first place where I really started to learn how to market my work. Kind of prior to that, I had been
00:05:20
Speaker
In academic settings where a lot of things were provided for you, i.e. firings and materials and glazes, and so for the first time at Odyssey, I had to pay for everything and therefore I had to start really kind of understanding how I was going to sell work and what kind of work I could sell.
00:05:40
Speaker
And so it really became very clear my next chapter of life, which was to get into galleries and to sell work consistently and to have a body of work that people knew. So Odyssey was kind of like a pivotal point for me because it really was the first time I just was like, I need to figure out how to make work that I can sell in order to pay for all the things that I need to make this work.
00:06:07
Speaker
So what did you figure out like some of the techniques or tips that like helped you like sell your work?
00:06:13
Speaker
Yeah, so that one was kind of a, it was tough at first. So the first thing that I started to do was look for any shows that really kind of highlighted what I made. So either really predominantly ceramic shows or shows that were about the figure and the animal and narrative. And I just applied to anything that had those like titles in it. And that, my goal was, I guess what I understood
00:06:43
Speaker
is that in order for people to purchase my work, they needed to know that I was going to be around for a while. And so I need to build up a reputation. And so that was kind of this time in my early career where I just applied to a lot of shows. I put my work out all over the nation. I did anything I could that was like ceramic oriented, just so that I could build up this like reputation that people knew who I was. And then
00:07:12
Speaker
I applied to galleries after I did maybe like a year of just showing a lot of work. And then I got into a few galleries and I mean, I would say that I applied to like maybe 50 and got three. And then after I did that, it was like this kind of snowball effect where people knew who I was. I was curating shows and I was getting invited to shows. And so then I was just becoming part of the contemporary ceramic voice.
00:07:41
Speaker
Um, and then it was like, I finally got to a place where like, I didn't have to apply to a lot of things. A lot of things just kind of came my way. And you know, I'm kind of the person that always says yes and when it comes down to ceramics, you know, it's like, yeah, I'll, I'll definitely show with you. And yeah, like how many pieces do you think you need? That kind of stuff. So I would say that that course took maybe like five years from start to finish where I just kind of.
Narrative in Sculptures
00:08:10
Speaker
kept putting my work out there and at that point it was at my expense and then it started getting to the point where it was like I showed a lot with other people that were in the field and then people started to know me and then I started being part of the ceramic community in the way that I was showing up in like invitationals and being a part of like you know well curated ceramic shows and having galleries that then were selling my work because it was out there and people knew who I was.
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's kind of the process that I went through. I love it. Shaping Nation, if you're listening right now, sometimes it's just a numbers game. If you're trying to get your workout into shows or galleries, it's a numbers game. How many pots can you make? How many shows can you just go out and reach out to? It's a numbers game. And once one hits, it kind of just snowballs. Yes, absolutely.
00:09:01
Speaker
We will come back to your story in a little bit, but for now, can you tell me the story how you started creating your animal sculptures with a cluster of flowers on it?
00:09:10
Speaker
Sure. So a lot of my work is a narrative about my life. And so you can kind of see darker areas of my life and then lighter areas of my life. And so the animals kind of coming through the flowers was kind of this direct reference to the fact that like I was emerging. And so I'm from Florida.
00:09:36
Speaker
And if you ever come to Florida, everything here will be consumed by plants. Like it's just the way that Florida is, is like everything grows all the time. And so that was just my initial thought at first was that
00:09:48
Speaker
I was getting consumed by this idea that I wasn't gonna make it. And then I started being able to burst out of it. And so that's how the animals and the figures all started kind of emerging out of the flowers. And then it kind of snowballed into, I use certain flowers to talk about certain emotions.
00:10:07
Speaker
But the initial one was just like me bursting out of the foliage getting out into the ceramics world feeling less consumed by the fact that I wasn't gonna be an artist and that I was beginning to like Emerge into myself as an artist and didn't feel like I was just an imposter anymore because you are Do you believe you worked at it and you became like your own voice and I love that? Absolutely
00:10:34
Speaker
So can you walk me through how you create your sculptural work and how you come up and plan on what you're sculpting? Yeah, so everything again is based off of my life. So, you know, you will see pieces where
00:10:49
Speaker
it will be two swan heads coming together and it's like creating a heart shape and that's usually when I've fallen in love. And then I'll have pieces where it's a really angry swan and that's like usually like things are going poorly in my life. Right now for maybe the last two years a lot of my work had
00:11:11
Speaker
bunnies in it and that was to represent the idea of fertility because I was trying to have a kid. And then I finally was able to have a kid and now a lot of my work has bears in it because I feel like I'm super protective around this kid. So it's like everything kind of like morphs and transforms based off of like the things that are kind of ebbing and flowing in my life.
00:11:34
Speaker
So that's like how I get to the ideas is like, well, what do I want to talk about in this piece? How can I translate it into animals and flowers and have it still have some meaning talking about that thing? And then the physical creation
00:11:49
Speaker
I don't do a lot of drawing. I'm not a fantastic drawer. I pretty much go in and I just, I'll have like a loose fuzzy idea in my mind. And then I kind of let it manifest itself as I'm creating based off of like, Hey, this composition isn't working. What can I do to switch it around?
00:12:08
Speaker
Or I need to add more stuff here because it's too much negative space or a lot of that internal dialogue around actual physical appearance on how I want this thing to look.
00:12:23
Speaker
Um, I would say like one in five, I will have like the clearest picture where it's like, it needs to have this, this, this, this, and this. And then I'll create that. Um, but then the ones in between are more of that. Like I let it kind of transform as I'm making.
00:12:42
Speaker
Um, which is a great process for me because I used to be super stifled with the idea that like every single piece had to be like, I need to know exactly what it needs to look like. Um, and that really would prevent me from getting into the studio. And so one of the things that I developed in my practice was to let go of that and just to make this art, because like, I always have ideas. I always have concepts.
00:13:07
Speaker
And sometimes I'll make a piece and like a year later I'll be like, Oh man, like this was the beginning of this feeling and I couldn't even articulate it, but it was coming out in my work. And now I know that this was about like me falling out of love or me having this like crushing thing around not being able to get pregnant or.
00:13:26
Speaker
me having just like a really beautiful time in my life where I feel like everything's flowing together and like all of the work is like lights and easy and it feels like It just is prettier to look at sometimes When it when I get angry and when I get upset it gets black it gets teeth it gets like a little more edgy so
Advice for Aspiring Sculptors
00:13:51
Speaker
I love that. So you mentioned this like thing called negative space. What do you mean by negative space? So negative space is like the air around a piece, right? Um, so sometimes I will put two pieces together and there'll be like all this negative space on the side, say like two heads coming out this way. Um, and I like, I need to fill that. Like it doesn't look right. It's too, um, open and it's too intense. And so sometimes,
00:14:20
Speaker
I'll put these heads together because they're the foundation, the architecture. And then all of a sudden I'm like, I need to put birds in here and I need to put flowers in here and those things need to connect. On one side it will be blue jays because they're sneaky and spies. And then on the other side it'll be carnals because they're protectors and that's with the bear. And so I have all these conversations around certain things that need to go as the big,
00:14:45
Speaker
pieces, like the big foundations, and then there's that negative space that I need to fill in order to kind of create you. Because the ideal goal for 3D is to be able to go all the way around it, that it doesn't have one side. And so I try a lot with my work, and I don't nail it every time, but I try a lot with my work where you're constantly moving around it and you're seeing different things
00:15:11
Speaker
And you might have a side that you like one year, and then you could rotate that piece and have another piece entirely. So I like this idea that like, I feel negative space in order to keep the eye and the viewer moving. Love it. That was a really great explanation of that. That was like, really great. So what advice would you give to someone trying to get into sculpture or add sculpture into their pottery? Okay, so
00:15:40
Speaker
I'm a big fan of like dream boards and writing and that kind of stuff to help articulate really what you want to do because one of the things that I found early in my career is that I'm an artist that likes to try a lot of things.
00:15:55
Speaker
And when I tried a lot of things, I wasn't particularly good at one thing. And so narrowing my scope helped me get very good at one thing. And so sculpture was the scope. And then I had to narrow it into like the narrative and the actual things that I wanted to be in my piece.
00:16:15
Speaker
And so for me to give advice around it, it's like, well, what do you want to say? How big do you want to be? Where is your end goal to place this piece? What is going to keep you in your studio? That is often a conversation that I have with a lot of people who are creating because I'm a firm believer that you should probably create as much as you can. And that when you take long breaks, it really kind of
00:16:41
Speaker
it stops that ball from moving. So even if you're not making great art, it still should be in the active process of. So it's like, the first thing that I would say for somebody who's trying to get into sculpture specifically would be like, let's get your intentions down, you know, and it doesn't have to be like, it has to be this for the rest of your career or whatever it needs to be something that like, at least you have
00:17:11
Speaker
a clear intention about why you're going to do it. And then the second one would be a body of work. Honestly, when it comes down to selling art, you have to have a body of work. You can't sell like a one-off. I mean, every single piece of mine is a one-off, but it is in the overall scope. You look at my work and you know it's mine.
00:17:33
Speaker
And so that big thing of like creating a body of work so that you have something that somebody looks at and they will be like, Oh, okay. So this is, this is part of a bigger body of work. They're going to maybe continue to make it in this vein. Um, I'm interested in showing it because I know that they'll continue to produce this kind of stuff and that I have a market for that kind of work. Um, so those are usually the two advice that I give. I love that shaping nation for listing right now.
00:18:00
Speaker
If you have a theme for your work, then you can have multiple different one shots and different styles within that theme and people are going to be able to know that it's your work because it's your theme. It's the theme that you chose, but you can have multiple different styles within that theme. I love that you said that so much because I've been thinking about that a lot. Like how can I add a theme?
00:18:21
Speaker
more into my pottery and while still having multiple styles.
Residencies & Artistic Evolution
00:18:24
Speaker
That was really great. Let's go back to what you were saying when you went to Japan. You've had many scholarships from places like Italy, Costa Rica, and Japan. How do these experiences help push your sculptures further?
00:18:43
Speaker
I am a big fan of going abroad just because abroad has a phenomenal history that America kind of lacks. And my goal is currently is to continue to go abroad and do clay abroad because I feel like every time I go to a different country, I get influenced or I see how something else is made or I see a different technique altogether.
00:19:12
Speaker
And pretty much it's like this amazing time for me to create while being influenced by stuff that I would never have access to if I was to stay in the States. So Japan, Costa Rica, Italy I've done. I did France not too long ago. And two years ago I did Greece. And like I'm still making work from my influences in Greece. And that is like,
00:19:41
Speaker
I'm making these sparrows that have evil eyes on the back which I would never have made here because we don't have that common theme of evil eye like all over the place. But the other thing that happens for me in those contexts is I take a break from the push of making my work entirely and I let myself experiment. And those little pockets of experimentation usually facilitate like the next body of work.
00:20:09
Speaker
And it might be a small thing to a huge shift But they almost always materialize like I haven't gone to a place and not come back from it and then had something that like Triggered me over there that got me into a different way of thinking or creating So I think they're almost vital to try to do And I also am somebody who's like get scholarships because it's expensive so I
00:20:40
Speaker
As a teacher, as a professor at the college that I work at, I'm always telling my students, let's get you to a residency. Let's get you abroad. Let's figure out how we can get it funded. You're still in school. School has a lot of scholarships for these things. Let's get you situated in writing so that we can get you over there. Love it. I love that you're gaining experience from outside, literally everywhere from the world, and you bring that back into your pottery. That's really amazing.
Personal Insights & Professional Tips
00:21:09
Speaker
Something I found interesting on your website is that you, on your bio section, you refer yourself as Mrs. Robinal. Yes. Can you explain that to me? So I was married. I'm no longer a Mrs. I'm back to a Miss. So, ebbs and flows in your life, my friend. Love it. I was just curious about that. That was more like a personal question for me. Yeah.
00:21:38
Speaker
When you were trying to, no, sorry, what would you do today if you had no connections to get your sculptures out into shows? Okay, so when I help people facilitate that early career, the first thing that I do is like go to Ceramic Monthly, go to Clay Network, go to any place that actually is posting shows.
00:22:06
Speaker
because that will be the first place where you'll see shows that are coming up in the next three months. Usually when we start looking for shows, I already have facilitated those artists with having a CV, having a bio, having at least 10 images of work, and then we find shows for them to apply to.
00:22:27
Speaker
Does it mean that they get in? Not necessarily, but it's the beginning of that push. And then the next thing that I usually will say is, okay, so we've got you applying to shows now. Now let's start looking for galleries that you think your work would be applicable in. And so there's two routes that I usually do for this when I'm telling students. One of them is,
00:22:52
Speaker
get on the internet, type in what you think your art looks like, and see what galleries pop up with those kind of tagged words. And then the second one is find artists that you like, that you feel like your work is close to or similar. Go to their CV and see where they show. And then we go and find those places and then try to apply. Because I feel like
00:23:21
Speaker
Throwing, having more of like a linear direction around it is really important. I think people get super overwhelmed at this. They've got the work, now how do we get it out? And so I like to always
00:23:34
Speaker
have like some sort of like really like, here's the guideline. Let's see if we can get anything from those. And if you still have nothing after that, then it's like, okay, maybe we need to go back to the drawing board. Maybe we need to come up with a different body of work and then we need to go back again. Cause like the one thing that I would say is a hundred percent true about art is that you might not get a lot, but you'll get something if you stay.
00:24:02
Speaker
So it's like you have to keep pushing your career and yourself because nobody else will in order to get to that next level. And I literally have like bucket list. You know what I mean? Like when I first got into it, it was like getting into galleries. And then the second thing on my bucket list was to be invited to things. And now that I'm doing that,
00:24:23
Speaker
it was museums and i'm beginning to do that and now it's like there's very high end galleries that i want to get into and it's like the bar keeps moving because it can you know um and i feel like it will be like the rest of my life i'll keep striving for these things that i want to achieve um
00:24:41
Speaker
And it's just, you know, like you get some accolades and then there's some ones above it, you know? So I'm a big fan of like, let's get you out there. Let's keep trying. If it's not working, it's not you. You know, it's it's something that is just your work isn't something that people feel like they can sell. And so let's try to see if you can make work that can, if that is your goal.
00:25:05
Speaker
So yeah, it's definitely nerve-wracking and I was really frustrated. I would say right after grad school was a really dark time where I was just trying to figure out how to branch into the world of selling and making art. I love it. I love how much detail you put into that. That was some really great advice for people looking to get into shows.
00:25:30
Speaker
Let's talk about finding your voice. In your opinion, what does it mean to find your voice?
00:25:36
Speaker
So for me finding my voice was to find a narrative and like a topic that I could explore for a while because one of the things that I did very early on in my career is I would get inspired by something and then I would make a body of work around it and then
00:26:03
Speaker
It was over. Like the body of work was for this idea.
00:26:08
Speaker
but it didn't like inspire me to continue to make more in that line because it was like such a specific topic that I felt like I wasn't interested in making work about burlesque women for the rest of my life. So that was kind of the first learning lesson I had was I made work for these topics and I was really specific about it. And then I was like, I need to open this up and I need to come up with some ideas and some topic
00:26:36
Speaker
and narrative that I can explore forever. And so that's kind of when I stumbled into, I want to make work about a lot of the things that are going on in me, but I don't want everyone to know that. I want it to be something that has like a lot of symbols and a lot of metaphors. And if you read my artist statement, you know, but if not, it might be just a beautiful piece.
00:27:01
Speaker
And there was a lot of artists who do that and so I just kind of like followed some of them and I kept looking at their work and how they transformed and stuff like that. So finding your voice for me was to define something that I could do for a while instead of it being these like one-off groups of work that then I didn't want to explore anymore.
00:27:21
Speaker
And I would say that I'm in a place right now where I'm about to probably shift my forms.