Why I make distressing pottery

When I first started making weird pottery, it was really a reaction to watching the Pottery Throwdown. Each week, Keith and Rich (the judges) would talk about the challenge to make some thing, with a twist that it needs to be decorated with stories about your childhood trauma, or made out of some strange material, but they’d always say “and of course it has to be fit for purpose.” Like: yeah it’s a soup tureen that has a drawing of your favorite friends on it and what you like to do with them, but it also needs to be able to hold soup and stuff. And as someone who suffers from demand avoidance, when you tell me to make a thing that does something, I will say, “I would prefer not to.” My spouse at this point has learned to not recommend books to me, even if I would love them. Even if I know I would love them, I still often cannot overcome the resistance of reading a thing someone told me to read (this made school quite a challenge - one time I fabricated an entire novel for a book report; got an A on it, but never read anything but the title). So the idea of a thing that looks like a bowl, but cannot actually be used as such, intrigues me. Mugs you can’t drink out of. They can’t be just broken, no fair putting a hole at the bottom. But you also can’t really use them.

I’m also kind of fascinated by the idea of hostile architecture, the point where I also talk about user-hostile objects. These are benches you can’t sleep on, railings you can’t slide down, ledges pigeons cannot sit on. We build stuff to do thing X, but it also could do thing Y, and thing Y is not in the interest of capital, so we change the conformance of the thing so it prevents Y (and usually makes X worse, if you’ve ever tried sitting on benches that you can’t sleep on).

But the thing is, I’m interested in more than just user hostile objects. Or at least, I like thinking about stuff that’s not just “haha, fooled you into thinking this is a mug”. No, I also like the really weird stuff.

I love it when people ask me, “but what is it for?” and I have no particular answer. Really the answer is: that. It’s for making you feel a little uncomfortable. It’s for making you think about pottery and the purpose of an object, and it’s for making you say, “um, no thank you”. It’s for helping you understand how I feel all the time. Have you ever looked at a fire door, read the sign on it that says “Fire Door must be kept closed at all times”, and thought “well, if it’s closed at all times, it’s a lousy door, the sign probably should say, ‘do not keep this door propped open, close it after you use it, as it is important to keep fire from spreading in the event of fire, and also have you thought about how likely a serious fire is right now, I mean it’s not that likely but still here’s this door reminding you that on the other side if it could be an incinerating inferno so maybe you’d better keep it closed at all times just to be safe’" well, no that’s a big sign and I’m sure normal people who read that understand it implicitly”?

No? You’ve never thought that? I think it probably two or three times a day, every time I see a fire door. It is my blessing and my curse - I’m always thinking. I’m always worrying too, but that’s just the anxiety. The thing is: human society is filled to the brim with weird shit nobody seems to notice or care about, and I’m always getting stopped in my (mental) track to consider meaning or wonder why someone said the thing they said. Me creating these bowls with spikes is trying to get you to stop and experience the kind of mental vertical blanking interval that happens to me pretty regularly. At least that’s one way to think about it. The other way is: I just like putting teeth on things.