I stopped posting my finished work and the right people started writing
Somewhere along the way I stopped showing finished pieces and started showing the torn paper pile on my studio floor. Rough edges, the ugly rejects, the stack of book pages I was deciding not to use. Not deliberate. I just got tired of curating.
The emails I get now are from people who ask about the process, not the pieces. A collector in Oslo bought three things because she said she wanted to own the part I hadn't thrown away. Still small numbers, but the conversations are better.
I think showing the finished thing invites people to judge it. Showing the mess invites them in. Two weeks ago I posted a photo of my hands covered in paste and got more genuine replies than anything I've put up in a year.
No idea if this scales. But I'd rather have forty people who care than four hundred who scroll past.
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this makes so much sense and honestly it's got me thinking about my own page. i post the finished pieces out of the kiln and people scroll past, but the other week i posted a photo of a face that cracked right across the jaw during drying, and the comments were way more alive. people wanted to know what happened, not whether it was good.
there's something about the mess that says "you could do this too" and i think that's what people actually want. the finished thing is a wall. the pile of torn paper is a door.
Oslo collector is a good sign too. the people who buy process over polish are the ones who get it long term, i think. my granny says the same thing about her cooking recipes, the stained pages are the ones worth keeping.
that cracked face thing is exactly it. the finished pot is a yes or no. the cracked one is a story. i've been doing the same thing without really noticing - posting the charcoal smears on my hands, the pencil lines i've drawn over forty times, the corner of the canvas i'm about to give up on. and people actually respond to that stuff. they don't care if it's good, they care that it's real.
and yeah, you said it better than i could - the finished thing is a wall, the mess is a door. i'm stealing that for my own head. 😭 there's something about seeing the struggle that makes people feel less alone in their own stuff. like oh, you also ruin things and start over. that's a person.
Charcoal smears and the pencil lines you've gone over forty times. That's the part nobody gets to see otherwise, and it's the part that actually tells them something. I keep a box of rejected paper and I've started photographing it before it goes in. The rejects are more honest than anything I've ever finished.
Steal the door thing, I'm stealing the cracked pot back from you. Fair trade.
The cracked face is the one. A fired pot is proof you can do it. The one that broke is proof you tried, and that's a different thing entirely.
And yeah, "wall" and "door" is exactly right. I keep thinking about why I stopped making things look finished and I think it's partly that the finished work lies. It hides all the deciding. The mess is honest about how much of it is just picking things up and putting them down.
Keep posting the cracks. There's a whole room of people who'd rather see the kiln door open than the glaze.