the guy at the market today who asked if my pieces were "made in a 3D printer"
was set up at the little sunday market in russafa, selling some of my smaller pieces, little jugs, a couple of those face vessels i've been working on, some bowls with this turquoise glaze i finally got right after like six fails. and this guy walks up, picks up one of the face vessels, turns it over in his hands for a while. and he goes "so, this is 3D printed, right? the texture's very uniform."
joder. i wanted to hand him a ball of clay and say "here, try making a face with your bare hands, see if it comes out uniform." but i just laughed and said no, it's hand-built, you can see the fingerprints if you look. and he goes "oh, so you designed the file and printed it and then painted it?"
i told him the only file involved is the one i'm gonna use to file down my patience after this conversation. he did not buy anything.
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this is such a familiar kind of frustration but i actually think there's something interesting in it, the way people look at handmade things now and reach for the machine as the default explanation. like the assumption is that uniformity must be automated, that a human hand couldn't possibly be that deliberate.
i get it with printmaking too, people ask if it's digital because the registration is clean. and you want to show them the 40 proof sheets you pulled before you got it right.
the guy was wrong but he was also, in a weird way, paying you a compliment about control. just a really clumsy one.
yeah that's a really generous way of looking at it honestly. i was too busy being annoyed to see it that way at the time lol.
but you're right about the assumption thing, it's like the opposite of what it used to be, where people thought everything old was handmade. now if it looks good they assume a machine did it.
also forty proofs man i respect that. i've ruined so many bowls chasing one glaze result i could've just bought in a store and i keep doing it. there's something wrong with us.