welcoming 2023

This letter is a compromise.

I am choosing to reach out here, in your sacred inbox, rather than reaching out on social media. This email is my first action of the year with my business hat on. It is my second action of the year with my artist hat on. The importance of this distinction is paramount, I will always identify as an artist regardless of where my income is sourced. I grant the same permission to any human who feels the call to create.

I have delayed reinstalling social media on my phone as long as I can manage, and am mentally preparing to reenter the world of small squares. There is a sacred stillness in the isolation of the present moment. I feel released from any duty to inform on what I have been doing with my time or be informed with the days of others who are not in my intimate circle. We are not evolved to see the curated snap shots of so many lives thought out our day, distracting us from living our own.

Creativity is delicate, personal reflection is delicate, inspiration is delicate. All my most favorite things about being a human on this planet happen in these quiet spaces of in-between. The ever-diminishing places we label as “boredom” in an over-stimulated world of technology. I hope that with this letter, I can thread a needle: accomplishing forward movement into the new year, while staying in this welcoming space for internal answers a little longer.

Where I am-

I wish I could tell you I spent the holiday season reading every day by the fire, learning to weave on the loom that has been sitting in the box it was shipped in months ago, playing daily in the snow, journaling and painting. This was my plan after all. I wanted it more than anything else. I looked forward to it when studio days stretched into unplanned studio nights, when my voice grew hoarse and my feet sore at markets.

Instead I spent a lot of the break blasting through The White Lotus and playing video games. There were fires, candles, and some knitting. But the truth is I had many more mindless “Vegetable days” than glamorous “constructive rest days.”

In the recent past, I have learned to detach the kind of rest my body needs to my sense of worth. Vegetable days are just an other part of the process.

Still I have been tickled all break by an idea:

What would 30 days of intentional creative study and play bring me?

My shelves are filled with beautiful coffee table books I lavishly imagine indulging in, that I never sit down and read. My office holds storage containers of art supplies hidden away like buried treasure. And my brain is filled with fleeting concepts that tease me when I am busy with my to-do list, and no where to be recalled when there is time for them.

What would life feel like after 30 consecutive days of setting aside an hour a day to flip through a book or magazine I know will inspire me? To begin a painting or weaving practice? To write, to dream, to reflect. I dabble in all of these things spontaneously, but what would happen if I gave them priority and structure? Our societal systems have been poisoned by hyper-capitalistic ways of thinking. Too few adults remember how much joy, relaxation, and reflection a creative practice offers. We have been brainwashed into abandoning any hobby that can not be monetized, or monetizing any hobby that was started just to bring ourselves joy. This trap we fall into gives away alarming amounts of personal power, as it costs us that opportunity for self discovery. Maybe 2023 can be the year we reclaim it?

I would love to invite you to consider this and join me in 30 days of prioritizing an intentional hour. Flip through the art magazine you keep walking past, write a poem or journal entry, tune the instrument under your bed, pull out that yarn and pattern, sit down with paints and surrender any plan of how the product will turn out, just lead with curiosity.

I will be returning to and presenting this idea on instagram, so if you choose to participate I would love to hear about your experience, in comments, dms, or email replies.

Beginning Again.

The Following is from the Sils Newsletter- Please Subscribe to get these stories, as well as early access and other perks in your inbox 1-2 times month-

Hello dear subscribers. It has been quite some time since I have drafted a letter to you all. I hope it finds you feeling rested, hopeful, and well-loved. This email is longer than usual. In our fast-paced, attention-reducing world, it feels clunky and audacious of me to attempt to take up so much of your time. Nonetheless, I hope you feel inspired to grab a cup of something to sip, cozy up, and stay a while here with me.

We awoke early in Berlin Tuesday morning to take an eventful cab ride (awkward road rage and language barriers included) to the airport. Nearly 24 hours and 3 flights later, we stumbled home and into bed late that night in a very different timezone than our bodies were used to.

At a young age, I decided there was nothing of greater value I could invest my time and money into than traveling. The pages of my passport issued at 18 felt like a destiny to conquer with stamps and visas. The more effort a visa application took, the more pride I felt in its colorful stamp. They hid within the pages like badges of honor awaiting adoration. We would trade around passports in hostels, exchanging stories and recommendations with strangers. Mine always stuck out because my picture included an awkward toothy smile. I learned that smiling, especially with teeth, is a leniency granted only to US passport holders. I did not smile for my next passport, though I can’t say why. Maybe it has to do with being older.

As I have grown and matured, the way I travel has changed. My understanding of the complexities of the privilege to travel has expanded. Spending time in a foreign space, within someone else’s culture and home is no longer a goal to achieve, but a gift I accept with reverence when the opportunity arises. Theres a deep humility I did not have at a younger age, but that very humility was learned through the observation of dramatically different places I had the honor to move through.

In my 30s, I have traded a desire for adventure with a desire for perspective. What we have to gain from travel that I find most valuable is a true and complete break from routine. We receive the literal distance to observe a wider view of what our daily life is like, what is working for and against us. When we are placed physically outside our comfort zone, we make space for clarity to rush in.

When we have no one to talk to but ourselves, we move through the thoughts that have been avoided. When we have nowhere we need to be, we get to follow how we feel. When we have no tasks that must be completed, we get to paint, read, rest, write, listen, taste, watch, smell, wander, learn, and unlearn.

I titled this letter “Beginning Again” because the truth is that I allowed myself a break from running Sils during the summer months of Art Camp, and then I was too afraid and indecisive to know how to return. Depression begot self-doubt, begot procrastination, begot depression. I shared some of these thoughts on instagram shortly before departing, and was met with warm support and kindness I am immensely grateful for. It gave me hope in a place of personal sabotage and despair. That hope was channeled into motivation to come home, with a plan on how I was going to move forward as an artist with grace, discipline, and self-care.

The career-shifting clarity I received revealed itself not as a revolutionary idea, but as a permission slip. I have been waiting to act on a deep personal knowing I have carried for awhile, and I trust that now is the time to change course. Even the slightest pivots can lead us to entirely new realities.

If you are reading this letter, there is a very good chance we were connected through Instagram. This photo sharing app has been wonderful to me, it gave me a space to show my work and connect with people. It is where my supply finally found demand. It allowed me a place to learn from diverse voices, mobilize, support community organizations, and make friends. I grew as an artist through painful challenges and wonderful opportunities that would not have occurred without this app. But Instagram is changing.

The joke we say with anxious chuckles is that Insta is going through an identify crisis. It sounds reassuring, like this personified data-farm actively colonizing our attention spans will soon return to us and apologize. But we know that won’t happen. It has never happened in the nearly two decades of various “Meta” platform evolutions. Zuckerberg is no visionary, he is simply an other mediocre white guy quick to poach the ideas of his competitors, and dodge any accountability for the harm his monopoly causes. He even shamelessly and knowingly increases harm in the name of optimizing stake holder cash-out. Maybe calling him mediocre is giving him too much credit… But we all know this already, that wasn’t the clarity I am referring to.

My very simple and yet mysteriously powerful epiphany was this: As an artist, I too, am going through an identity crisis. Perhaps the overlap of crises is what has made the thought of adapting once again to the platform’s latest manipulation tactics simply intolerable. An additional insurmountable dilemma lies in the fact that the underlying theme of instagram’s crisis could be described as rapid, shallow, and excessive. The underlying theme of mine is diligence, depth, and intention.

And yes, you are correct in your guess at where this is going. We are riding this conflicting personality crisis metaphor right into its hypothetical break up announcement. It’s not a throw ‘em out, block ‘em, and forget about ‘em scenario. Rather an intentional and gradual conscious-uncoupling, if you will: celebrating and appreciating the good times, accepting that things change, and while the bridge is left intact, the intent is to move on- move forward.

This small yet mighty realization that I am moving in a completely different direction in my values and goals as an artist and human than the app that my business is nearly solely dependent on, was the simple clarity I was seeking. The permission to trust that it is time to wean off social media, and explore what a creative life without a reliance on instagram could be. To commit to chasing the ideas I have been intimidated by, because they are too large for instagram squares.

Instagram stopped feeling like an inspiring space to me a long time ago. Like lovers who sit in the comfort of stale companionship until their grief is processed before they are ready to announce the break up; I had to sit with the imagining how to pursue a creative business without instagram for a long time before I was ready to try.

This newsletter is my starting point. It is a renewed commitment to sending regular letters on topics of creating and being. I have always known that words are a vital component of my creative expression. I have squeezed them into captions, stories, and 30 second reels, but imposter syndrome also led me to suppress them. As suddenly as my childhood confidence in story-telling disappeared somewhere within the hour of an AP English class, it has returned in the past few weeks. I hope to nurture them with the attention, time, and space they require to carry my creative practice further.

Within the instagram platform, there is little space for discussion, conversation, and depth, and it continues to swiftly diminish as bright colors, trending sounds, and time lapses destroy any chance at mindful engagement. In the past year, I can’t ignore that almost every scroll on instagram leaves me feeling numb, starved, and hopeless. Empty, creatively threatened, and uninspired. My hopeless addiction to it leads me to unconsciously open it again and again, even though I know that the connection/inspiration/motivation I am habitually seeking is no longer there.

We spend so much time trying to fill a void with our phones, when ironically healing is found in celebrating how delightful the world right beyond that screen is. I have found inspiration in the gift of foxes dashing in and out of view when I walk my dogs in the gully by my house, in online courses for creatives, in the pages of books, in warm coffee rituals with carefully selected mugs, in my firm belief that winter is the best season for strolling gardens as the muted colors allow plants to flaunt their stunning textures, in Estonian Craft Camps with silver-haired women wearing fabulous, bold glasses while offering advice on how to travel with knitting needles, in the way children create the most magnificent things when you give them paint and leave them alone, from seeking the pieces that are overlooked in museums, and attempts to decipher the messages in street art, in meeting up monthly with amazing humans to trade books and give candid updates on our lives and personal ambitions, in the honesty and small delights described in newsletters by creatives I look up to, podcasts that make me laugh, and activists who use their art to create the world they believe we can have: one project at a time.

These experiences are where I want to spend my life minutes. This is what I want build and share with fellow earth-dwellers. I chose again and again to move through the world: with diligence, depth and intention.

I hope to invite others who feel overwhelmed by their bind to social media to join me. I trust I will find the souls I am meant to find who have already taken this step. I know that the universe brought creative humans together long before instagram was around, and will continue to bring them together long after instagram is gone. I do not know what this path looks like, but I have faith I will know what the next step is after I take this one.

As always thank you for choosing to be here with me.

With love and awe-

Kirsten

100 Bowls Project

For some time, I haven’t felt very connected to the bowls I have been making. When I was working full time as a teacher and stealing away energy in the studio, I dreamt of having the luxury of time to explore various ways to create and decorate bowls. I wanted to try all kinds of techniques from throwing to hand-building, minimal to busy designs, shallow bowls, deep bowls, dish bowls, dessert bowls, minimal bowls, sculptural bowls, I wanted to go on a long journey that would bring me to a design that felt like something Sils could settle into, and call home for a few years.

The funny thing I am learning as I embark upon the first 6 months as a vulnerable artist, stripped of any back-up professional title and its comforts of salary and benefits… Is that it is much easier to dream about what life will be like when it is something in the distance. Now standing squarely on a point in life when I have the ability to chase some of my former day dreams, I realize that a fear creeps in when you have the chance to go for it.

so here is to feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Over the next few weeks I am going to dive into a deep creative exploration where my guiding principal is simply “what if..”

Some bowls will look similar to what I have already been making, and some will look wildly different. An exciting aspect of this project is the ability to offer pre-order slots for bowls at a hugely discounted rate. This is important to me, because as an artist it can be a tricky line to tow: having work feel accessible to a wide demographic, without devaluing my time and experience as an artist. As a patron, you can support this project by preordering a set of 2 or 4 bowls under the “100 Bowls Project” in the SHOP tab. A set is a uniform grouping of bowls that will all visually go together. They will not be identical, but they will have nearly identical shape, and unified decorative elements. Pre-ordered bowls will be available while slots last, for a rate of $25 per bowl. After this project concludes bowls will return to their rate of $45-$55 a bowl.

When purchasing you have the option of selecting the number of bowls you would like in your set. (Quite straightforward) and if you would like a thrown of hand-built set. (Not so straight forward so I will explain quickly here) Thrown bowls create the aesthetic most of us think of when we picture hand made pottery. “Thrown” means that it is made on a potter’s wheel and the spinning motion allows a potter to create perfectly symmetrical and smooth work. Hand built can mean many things, though for me I will be exploring using slabs, drape molds, and coil building to create hand-built bowls. Hand-built work tends to, in my opinion, harbor more character and as there is a deeper sense of a Maker’s presence. It tends to have more play, which I have personally found to draw in some people and repel others based on their personal preferences!

Thank you so much for taking this chance on me and supporting this creative dream!

Strike Back

I remember distinctly the first time I started painting snakes on tumblers.

In the early summer of 2019, with an other newly appointed, conservative (quite arguably misogynistic) justice on the Supreme Court, conservative law makers across the country began their quiet attacks on women’s rights. Strategizing ways to restrict and choke off access to abortions and women’s clinics. It was yet an other personal attack in the Trump Era, a renewed stark reminder that this nation is built on a foundational lie: that it is a Democracy. A reminder that the rich white man still retains the power to make decisions they will never understand the magnitude of, nor experience the consequence of. Such a feeling takes a physical toll on the body. The overwhelm and fear that the actions taking place in Alabama will spread like a virus through the nation, from one red state the the next. The sorrow for women in need who are already feeling the impacts of manipulative policies. These feelings are often followed by rage and determination. I remember following the news podcast, I opened my social media, and was flooded with images and messaging about the current issue. Story image after story image. Artists, activists, mothers, teachers, women who recognized the impact of recent events, feminists who stood in solidarity, who stood up for one an other and themselves. And there it is, the most beautiful irony in our country’s history: that We the People, have grasped on to lie that our country is a Democracy with such conviction, that we force change. We do not hold equal power of voice or choice in this country, and it is against the raging current of patriarchal white supremacy, but still we progress.

I looked at my work table, with tumblers and mugs waiting to be painted with undecided images. I thought of the many hypocrisies of the conservative parties. The most glaring, the demand of “Don’t Tread on Me”. A cry against government overreach, while at the same time could feel a tight grip of old wrinkly male white hands around my own uterus. And the first and last small batch of snake tumblers came into the world.

A little over a year later, the snake design has made known its desire to come into the world again. While throwing tumblers, my mind flooded with feelings and memories of my own unplanned pregnancy. The words I desire to tell others. The story I hope to share in depth on day. The way that experience has forever changed how I see the world, and the women around me. I set aside 5 tumblers to be adorned with snakes. It seems like a small personal twist of destiny, that a morning spent preparing this post would be followed by an evening announcement of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

I was surprised at the magnitude of my reaction to the news. The tears that fell freely and abundantly, for a woman I had never met. I felt the loss of a protector. I felt the loss of a woman who truly, fully encapsulated how powerful women are, in a way that transcends the false narrative and limited boxes the patriarchy has designed and delivered to us from the time our small hands can clasp a barbie doll. She is an idol, and I refuse to mourn her death in despair of the future. She has now passed the torch to all of us. She has given her example and we must emulate it and keep moving against that current, standing up for what we believe in.

I believe in protecting a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body.

I am prochoice because I find it insulting that men in power assume a woman does not have the mental and emotional capacity to decide for herself what qualifies as terminating a life.

I am prochoice because only people who have not experienced the sensation of your past life crashing down around you, believe that abortion is an easy scapegoat from a consequence of “sinful” actions. These same people will never know the immensity of making this choice, because a woman would never share such a vulnerable and painful life experience with a cold critical heart.

I am prochoice because men get to walk away from this story, unscathed, without societal shame, when every single unwanted pregnancy is the result of a man’s thoughtless, reckless, and selfish ejaculation.

I am prochoice because while I carried to term and placed, I recognized the compilation of privileges that allowed such a path. I could defer my college scholarship, I could lean on parental financial support, an aunt and uncle graciously let me live with them during the months of my physical changes so I could be free from the glaring eyes and mormon gossip until I was sure-footed enough to face it. These are just some of many, and I am aware there are more that remain invisible to me. Who would I be, to force my decision onto someone with less?

I am prochoice, because I know a terror that kavanaugh, mcmonnell, and trump will never experience. (yep, the don’t deserve to be capitalized) I know the free fall of a point of no return. And I know that having all my choices, and that they were my own, gave me power again to regain control of my story.

I am prochoice, because I am tired of republicans touting their pro life opinions for meaningless virtue signaling. To be pro life is to care about the lives currently on earth who are suffering. They would care about poverty, and oppression, the refugees flooding into Greece, and the horrific violence against women and children at the boarder. If they really believed life began at conception, they would be more concerned about the left over IVF eggs that are not in a woman’s body.

I am prochoice because reproductive rights, including abortion, are basic women’s health care, which is a human right. Late term abortions are nearly exclusively a life-saving procedure for the pregnant woman due to a birth defect or complication in which the baby would not survive to thrive, and the woman’s life would be threatened if she carried to term. Women are worthy of this right to live.

I am prochoice because some of the most magnificent, compassionate, and loving women I have the honor of knowing have confided in me their abortions. I know the personal pain and grief some of them carry. The secret they must keep from loved ones who would not understand, and how it weighs on them. And I want to keep fighting for the day when these women can be celebrated for their bravery and compassion, rather than shamed because of lingering societal standards around an abstract concept that cannot be measured.

I am prochoice because I was raised Mormon. And from a young age I learned that free agency was the basis of The Plan of Salvation. Protecting a woman’s right to choose gives her the power to decide for herself what terminating a pregnancy means as it relates to her personal spiritual journey. If you believe abortion is murder, I support you not having one. I do not support any person, especially a man, forcing their religious or spiritual beliefs on the body of an other woman.

To every woman who has felt the fear, grief and indescribable loneliness of being alone and pregnant in a time of your life that cannot support an other person. I see you. If you parent alone, you are strong and valuable and worthy. If you carry to term and place, you are strong and valuable and worthy. If you abort, you are strong and valuable and worthy. I love you. I celebrate you and your beautiful strength and grace as you move through this trial, and I will forever stand and fight for your right to choose which trial is right for your heart.

Here is my torch. (One of them.) Carry it on and keep fighting. We will not let the passing of RBG set us back. May it motivate us to stand together and fight ever harder.

The Process

I always knew I wanted to have a blogging page when I got to the long awaited day I would have a website for my work. There is so much to say, and nothing at all. Leaving it here to be lost or found seems like a good way to accomplish both.

There are countless aspects of a creative life. So many thoughts looking to be expressed, words seeking a page. I keep most of these musings to myself. Some are fleeting, and some stay with me for day or years to be developed. If I cross paths with an other person who shares an understanding, these words spill out of me. It is like an uncontrollable sentience, excited to receive a new audience. It leaves me feeling a release, an elevated energy, a gratitude for connection, and bashful that I talked someone’s ear off.

So here we are, at the start of the “Process” page. Here I will share thoughts about my ceramic process: sourcing, techniques, firing, selling…

However this process goes far beyond clay. Our process is our history. It is the steps we took and the barriers we have over come. It is the dance between our curiosity and inspiration that expands our minds. It is a practice. It harnesses that growing creativity into a habit, which sculpts into a creative life. We learn, tinker, and refine with materials to physically process our experiences into a product. And with a product, our process is our future. It transcends the piece when it is received by others. It connects maker to collector, like stitches that knit together community. When it inspires the life of others, its influence becomes immeasurable.

The process is more than I will ever be able to encapsulate with words. As words limit most extraordinary things. But I can try.