Transcript
Speaker: Allison George had dreams of becoming an animator but found her true calling in pottery. I felt like the light bulb moment had happened of like this. So I wanted to ask Allison what is her process for figuring out what she's going to make? How can I make it look like it's defying the laws of physics? What was her biggest struggle when it came to finding her own voice?
Speaker: There was a lot of pressure to be making these as and finally what helped Allison the most with growing as an artist. I love talking to other potters about like the issues that we all have with it because what is something that has helped you the most along your pottery journey so far?
Speaker: Yeah, I think my support system has honestly been one of the biggest things for my work, my career, everything. My mom, some triplet. I have two siblings and I have a single mom and she.
Speaker: With the three of us, just fully embraced whatever any of us wanted to do. I don't need to learn math because I'm going to be an artist when I grow up. So like, count me out of that. I don't need to learn how to add, subtract. She's like, you need to learn how to count all the money you make off of selling like your paintings or whatever it is that you decide to do.
Speaker: Okay, fair enough. And I grew up in Orlando, and to kind of immerse me in the arts a little bit more, she used to take me to the galleries at the parks, and I would learn how to draw from the sketch artists, the galleries, and I would bring in my work and they would critique whatever I had brought in. And this is when I was like between like seven and 12. So I was younger.
Speaker: It was a little overwhelming sometimes, but she used to ask, what do I need to do to make sure that she's doing what she needs to have a successful career? Like, should I actually be encouraging her to do this? Like, is she actually good? So I think my mom has a huge amount to do with everything that I've done. My boyfriend, too, has
Speaker: Like, as allowed me to, like, travel around while he does his thing. So, and then teachers, I'm still close with my high school ceramics teacher, my college professors, my current professor here at the post back that I'm doing right now. I was a rower, so my coaches to supported me and. Studying this in college and studio hours and all of that. So I a lot to everybody that supported me through everything that I've done.
Speaker: Absolutely love it. Gotta love mamas. Gotta love everybody that supports you. I love it. So tell me the story how you got started making pottery.
Speaker: So I was introduced to clay in high school. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that had a really big arts department. We didn't have enough wheels and I went to a massive high school, so there was about 30 kids per class. And I don't even think he had two wheels when I was there. So we focused a lot more on sculpture, which I think ended up helping a lot more afterward when I went on to college, because I think I really knew the material and my drawing and
Speaker: attaching a lot more than how I started out with the wheel. He also pushed me a lot in like concept and like difficulty because I think he knew like I was going to end up pursuing the arts and no matter what I was going to be doing he just wanted to make sure that like I was really pushing myself in technicality and everything. But I was always kind of making work that had a little bit of like a humor kind of tinge to it like a lot of puns and stuff in high school.
Speaker: Absolutely love it. So we're gonna talk more about your pottery style and why you do this fun quirky pottery a little later, but for now Tell me the story about when you attended West Virginia University and got your BFA in strings
Speaker: Yeah, so initially I wasn't going to do ceramics when I came in. I was going to do graphic design. My high school teacher was like, they've got a really good ceramics program there. Brett Kern was a grad student there and he does the balloon dinosaurs and that kind of thing. And so I was like, oh, that's really cool. And my coach that was recruiting me.
Speaker: Knew that I did ceramics and loved my work, so he actually went on the academic tour with me and made sure that I saw the ceramic facility, which very quickly led to me switching to become a ceramics major. I had amazing professors at West Virginia, Jen Allen, Robert Boomer, Moore, and Soji Sataki, and Shilai Marsh.
Speaker: The unfortunate thing is that recently that program was cut. I could talk about why that sucks forever, but I got so. Much out of that program, we had a production facility. So I learned kind of the more like. Production industrial side and more hands on type of way than just.
Speaker: learning about like how molds are made and stuff like we actually participated in making that. I had rumors more of like pottery and sculpture, gens a full -on potter, Soji does everything, Shilai does 3D printing, so I just had a whole wide range of everything that was there. How did this time help you with developing your own pottery? I mean I got a lot of advice about
Speaker: just how to make the attitude towards making different career paths after. The big thing that I think has resonated with me the most is fill your shelf, like just make a bunch of stuff. If it doesn't go all the way through the kilns, like it's fine, just fill it, edit it, take it home, live with your pots, see how they work. And then just all the different career outlets you could go to, all the different kinds of stuff you could make,
Speaker: So you mentioned the attitude towards making. Tell me more about that. So one of the things that one of the grad students specifically told me was if you want to make a career out of clay, find a way to keep making things after you graduate. Like find a way to use a kiln, find a way, a space to make work, even if it's like your dining room table and you got a sacrifice where you're going to be eating. Like find a way.
Speaker: to make work. So when I graduated, I graduated in the fall of 21, I went home for the spring and I took up a little corner on the back porch and I reached out to my high school teacher and he allowed me to fire work at the school. So kind of continuously building off of what I had done in undergrad allowed me to continue making a portfolio and expand on some of the stuff that I had been doing at the end of school.
Speaker: absolutely love that shaping nation. The more you make work and the more you just find time to make work, the better your pottery becomes. Now, what is something you learned during this time that you still use today? There isn't so much
Speaker: What else do I, I mean, I feel like each of my professors gave me little tidbits and recently I saw a workshop with Jen again and she gave me even more to like, build off of. I learned how to count compound forms for the 1st time in undergrad and that is now something that I'm using a lot as I'm making bigger figures.
Speaker: hand building, talking about your work in a defensive type of way, having an answer for why you're doing things a certain way or why you're making that. Really being able to talk about your work professionally is just a huge way to go into making, is talking about it professionally afterward to inform your princess during. I think that was one of the big things.
Speaker: Tell me more about your work. Yeah, so at the time towards the end of undergrad, I was making the figures and being able to defend like why I was making something where like it was suggesting a functional thing, like why it wasn't the main goal for it to be functional. So really being able to defend that style and why I was going for that at the time was really important because it was also my entire BFA thesis.
Speaker: So let's talk about your pottery and sculptures. Can you tell me the story how you started making your cartoon -styled pottery? Yeah, so it was a multimedia class actually in college. We had a pop -up project that we had to do. So we had to make work that we were going to take pictures of in different locations, either one piece in multiple locations or multiple pieces in multiple locations, whatever kind of you decided to do.
Speaker: And I had recently declared to be a ceramics major and I wanted to make stuff out of clay. So I was allowed to do that. And with my background being around and learning how to draw through cartoons for some reason I came up with.
Speaker: the cartoon mugs doing the different sports at the school because I was an athlete at West Virginia. So I had access to different facilities than everybody else. So I had two mugs that were wrestling each other that I took in the wrestling room. I had mugs that were gymnasts that were on the balance beam or on the floor. I had a couple of rowing mugs.
Speaker: Football, because we used to wait, lift at football. So I took it on the fields. I don't know if they actually know that I did that, but I did go onto the field with that mug. Went to the weightlifting room, had them like squatting and doing all of that. I think I had like 30 of them for that series.
Speaker: And I had made them, and I kept drawing them after. I didn't continue making them for the next semester or into the summer. But I kept drawing them, and I kept revisiting it. I just didn't keep making it for a little bit. And then finally, I clicked, this is the work that I keep showing people that I make, but I'm not actively making it. So I should probably go back to it, and I haven't veered off since.
Speaker: The functional came later actually like the more animated functional stuff is way more recent than the sculptural and I took a pause of that after undergrad actually was making the sculptural pieces. What were you feeling when you came back to these cartoon style pots?
Speaker: I felt like the light bulb moment had happened of like this is the work that I do like making. I enjoy coming into the studio. I like planning what I'm going to be doing. It was just kind of this moment where going into the studio felt a little bit like.
Speaker: more stepping into my own space rather than going into school. I didn't have a lot of time because of all of my obligations in undergrad, but I was making the time to really come in and make projects, like make my own work outside of my designated projects. After I decided that this is something I was going to keep doing and this is what I was going to keep making, filling the shelf became easier. Making work and talking about work became easier.
Speaker: it became like this, yes, I'm going to dedicate my life to ceramics now. It's not a question now. This is my career and I'm really excited to keep doing this and like planning. When I graduate, yes, I'm gonna reach out to my high school teacher and keep firing work so I can keep making it. It made me feel so much better as an artist once I figured out that's it.
Speaker: absolutely love that now why do you like making these cartoon mugs and sculptures with
Speaker: the material and the themes of the material into it. I really do like painting and the surface design. So bringing in the animations recently with it into a functional piece has kind of fulfilled that old desire of wanting to be an animator that I used to have when I was younger. So having the physical characters
Speaker: that are painted onto the functional. And then also having the animated, it's like putting together childhood dreams of material that I really like, also fulfilling that need as somebody who works in clay to make something that somebody can get in.
Speaker: like drink their coffee out of in the morning. The expression and like the fun of all of it, being able to have the physical characters that I think get to live with you as much as you're living with them, kind of going back to that theme that my professors always like, look at your pots, test them out. And I was like, well, what if they just took up your space instead? How would you like that?
Speaker: I absolutely love that. Shaping Nation, you can add other interests outside of pottery into your own pottery and your pottery will grow from that and your sculptures as well. I love that. Something I found interesting is that your ceramic characters personify the temperamental nature of the material that often seems to have a mind of its own. Tell me more about this.
Speaker: Yeah, so I mean more recently I have made an entire body of work that's based just off of kiln failures. So I have these two pieces that look like they're almost like fused together based off of like when you put two pots like against each other in a kiln by accident and they're trying to get away from each other. They're fused, no going anywhere, conjoined twins. I recently heard them called kissing cousins. I don't know how I feel about that for them. I had one where like you didn't wipe the feet off.
Speaker: So he's stuck to the kiln shelf, a lid being fused onto a jar so he can't get it off. He's not functional anymore. I have an animation where the mug decided he wanted to run on the wheel. And he trips and falls and the spin of it is supposed to be kind of like when you lose a mug when you're trimming. And he's flopping around and he comes up and he's broken.
Speaker: So kind of hinting at and making fun of those things that I know I have messed up on, mix doing all of those things or having the clay that do that to me feel a lot better to myself and kind of just like poke fun at the material that frustrates us so much as potters. And you get a crack somewhere and you're just like, I dried that out so slow. How did that happen? Or I got an S card. I swear I compressed that so much.
Speaker: I left room in the kiln. Why did that happen? Why did it explode in a glaze kiln or a refire? So kind of hinting at those things that sometimes we have control over, but the clay is like, no, you don't. I absolutely love that. I love that way of thinking as well. Both your mugs and sculptures are very expressive. What are the steps you take when figuring out what pose or what designs are going on each piece?
Speaker: I draw stuff out so much and I look at cartoon references all the time. The animations I've made are traditional cell animations so I've drawn each character frame by frame so it kind of gives me that practice of like how it would stretch
Speaker: to jump or how would it compress when it falls? Because cartoon moves different than how actual physics does. And so trying to plan out how does clay that is a real material, how can I make it look like it's defying a laws of physics for a cartoon? So I'll try and figure out, I'll draw things with arrows to figure out where the stretch or where it needs to slim down a little bit more. I do a lot of the hands and feet are a little bit more oversized.
Speaker: It's really just so much planning. The vases especially require a lot of planning because how it's going to turn as a compound form, I have to prep that so far in advance, and it's a lot harder to make that as quickly, so I really try and plan those out a lot. Mugs are a little bit more spontaneous. I was making some last night and I told my friend,
Speaker: I'm only going to make basic sitting and standing ones this time. I'm not going to do anything crazy. And then I got bored. So obviously I made one of them touching the other one's butt and they're hugging. Sometimes when I'm bored, I think I posted it a while ago. I just had one that was flicking me off because I was just like,
Speaker: It's like, this is the last one I got to make. I need it to be entertaining. So I had it pulling up its middle finger, even though they only have three fingers. So usually the mugs are a little bit more spontaneous for me. Those are the forms I've been making the most. So I kind of know how I can play with them last minute. The vases are definitely plans very far in advance.
Speaker: I absolutely love that. I love that story. Now, why do you plan out so much for your bases? Well, especially the there was one recently that I made that is if I sat next to him, we would be the same height. So he's massive and.
Speaker: just knowing how much clay I have to use and that I'm going to be altering the piece during or right after the throwing process and I want him to bend a certain way or need him to do a certain movement because he's jumping or
Speaker: sitting a certain way. So I typically plan it out so that I can look at the sketch and then kind of match the angle of where things are going to go. For example, there was one that I made that looks like a ballerina and I knew I was going to have to be able to balance him somehow on one leg. So how was he going to bend where like the weight might be able to like handle it on one side? So not bending him too much, but kind of being able to have him straight up.
Speaker: I absolutely love it. So let's talk about discovering your voice. What would you say was your biggest obstacle when it came to finding your own voice? I think especially starting out with making the physical characters and having them hint at something so functional, there was a lot of pressure to be making these as functional as possible, even though I wanted them to be doing so much more than that.
Speaker: If I wanted a mug to be dancing or if I wanted two of them to be able to hold each other nobody's going to be able to use that. But at the time I had a lot of people wanting to be able to use them and I didn't want to sacrifice making
Speaker: the characters for the functionality. So there was a period of time where I stopped making them because I wanted to figure out how to turn them into something functional that satisfied what I wanted to be making. But I was getting kind of tired of
Speaker: Like, make like, I couldn't make them with feet anymore. Like, if people wanted to make them like, use them every day, because like, if they accidentally sit down, they break the foot off. They're kind of heavy. Like, if the. Hands were on its head a little bit more, you only have so much more of the lips to drink out of now. So.
Speaker: I want to be able to use color, but I have them as white mugs because they're kind of like this hint of this plain diner mug that you don't think anything of, but now they're characters. So, you know, they're white and boring, but they're interesting because they can do all of this stuff.
Speaker: So I moved over to functional and I finally found a way to make it satisfying with having them do things on the mugs like frolicking through a field of flowers or I have two vases that are doing like the ghost you know like the movie ghost where they're like
Speaker: you know the scene that everybody talks about so they're like on the wheel doing that. Those aren't things that somebody was going to use but they're things I wanted to make fun of with pottery so I kind of got to do that and then more recently I stepped back into making the sculptural ones because I feel like now I'm satisfying this other need to make something somebody's going to use and now I can make
Speaker: the other fun stuff. And then I started doing the animations and now they kind of all mesh together in like real life doing something and a mug that you can watch a morning cartoon with because it's got a QR code that leads to this actual video of what's going on. So there was a lot of, yeah, just trying to figure out how do I be a potter, but then how do I also be myself with it?
Speaker: I absolutely love that. Shaping Nation, sometimes the best solution is to take a pause on what you're making and then come back to it later so that all those new ideas are fresh and you're able to actually figure it out. I love that. So now, you mentioned that you still wanted to be able to make the functional pottery, but you still wanted to be yourself. How did you achieve this?
Speaker: I think I really took a break from making forms that weren't fun for me. I like making mugs. I really do, and I think I get more out of it. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was the mug form that I was going to be using.
Speaker: So I have a handle that I had a lot of trial and error with. I myself like a sturdy handle and not as like thin and strappy of a handle. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that. What was the lip going to look like? What form of the mug was going to complement the surface the most? So
Speaker: making functional things became something I could really enjoy. And I, teapots weren't working. Why was I going to keep trying to make a teapot if they weren't working for me? You know, I think something that
Speaker: I've really found is what parts of the process do I really enjoy doing? And what parts do I not? So I know that I hate glazing, so what's the least amount of glazing I can do? And what's going to complement my work with that? What forms do I actually enjoy making? And what forms do I not? What works with the surface? What doesn't?
Speaker: Absolutely love that shaping nation. It's so important to know what you like But also know what you don't like so you can head in the right direction with your pottery. I love that So now you contribute growth as an artist to being around people and having conversations about your work Can you tell me more about this?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think, again, hinting at clay being this material that sometimes feels like it hates us. I love talking to other potters about the issues that we all have with it because then I kind of get an idea on what's the next little joke I can make.
Speaker: The other post back here, we were talking 1 day and I moved to New Mexico and I was like, I need a damn box. It's so dry here. Stuff is just drying out so fast. I can't keep up with it. And then, because of that conversation is like, I need to make.
Speaker: some type of animation or a mug or something that's like the mugs in a sauna, but the sauna is a damp box. What? There's just been like little jokes that come up through a conversation because of it or towards the end of one of my opportunities. I was like, you know what? I really
Speaker: I hint at the mugs being involved in our spaces and I want to be able to have something for myself at the end of each of these moves, these opportunities that I do. So I started having the mugs be in the locations that I was at. So I have one that's at the Bryce studio because I was a studio assistant there. I have one that was like the road trip out to New Mexico. I don't know what I'll do for the next one, but I'm excited to figure it out. And usually,
Speaker: Like, it happens with whatever I think is the most interesting thing that happened there. Or what was something that I was continuously doing? What was the big picture kind of moment? What stood out at those locations? So that's been really fun to kind of figure out. And also, like, they come up out of nowhere. Like, you never know what kind of conversation you're going to have with somebody about your work or their work and how it's going to affect yours.
Speaker: absolutely love that. Shaping Nation, the more you have conversations around your work or other people's work, the better ideas and new ideas you start to come up with. So now, what advice would you give to someone looking to discover their own unique voice with their potter? Don't be afraid to be really
Speaker: risky kind of with it or for me it was also kind of I with being from the Disney area and stuff I didn't want to be kind of typecast as like somebody who is making ship from Beauty and the Beast more recently I've gotten other cartoons that people think it relates to I think make work that you might be a little bit scared of trying out whether it be like you're scared of that building method maybe you've been on the wheel so much you're in a stock spot try hand building
Speaker: Alter the pieces off of the wheel, whatever you kind of find yourself, maybe investigating more. I think. I really, like, for me, it was stepping away and coming back to the thing I kept exploring. Even if you fail at it, you might come back and do it again. You might find a different way to make it finding the process that you think works for you.
Speaker: along with the work itself is very important. It's not just about the look, you have to enjoy how you're making it too. I absolutely love that and definitely agree some excellent advice right there. Allison, it has been so great champs today and as we come to a close here, what is one thing you want to hammer home with my listeners today?
Speaker: I think supporting yourself with people that you can talk about your work with. I think trying a bunch of things, like finding your voice and making unique work is great, but being happy with what you're making and getting something out of it, being able to enjoy your time in the studio is so important. There was somebody once that told me, if you don't get excited about what you're going to be making that day, it's not what you should be making.
Speaker: Absolutely agree. Some excellent parting words of advice. Alison, it's been so great chat today. Where can my listeners go and learn more about you? So I have my Instagram play underscore by underscore Alison. I also have a website, Alison George ceramics. And that's where people can see my stuff. And hopefully this kind of gives them more insight into why I'm making that too.
Speaker: Hey thanks for listening to this episode of Shaping Your Potter with Nick Torres. On May 31st I'm doing a virtual workshop with guest artist Mike Serv all about how to hand build a goblet cup. There are only 8 more spots available so if you want to save your spot before all the spots are gone, click the link in the description so you can attend this workshop. There will be recordings of this workshop if you can't make it. Hope to see you guys there.
