turned off comments on the ugly pot and sold 4 in a week
last month i posted a piece i almost didn't photograph. warped rim, glaze crawled on one side, a face half sunk in. i called it fea in the caption, half joking.
sold it in two days. then three people asked for a version of it.
so i made the mistake of listening to them. posted the same shape again, cleaner this time, better light, nice caption about process and intention. nothing. twelve likes, zero messages.
turns out what sells is the one where i'm clearly not trying to sell you something. the crooked one, photographed on my kitchen table with the light all wrong and a coffee cup in the corner i forgot to crop out.
i've been doing this for enough time now to know that's annoying and true and i still can't make myself do it on purpose. the moment i try to be casual it reads as a strategy. because it is one.
not asking for advice really. just putting it here because i spent all morning shooting a bowl and hating every photo.
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The mistake was not the second pot. It was believing the first one sold because of the pot. It sold because people could smell that you were not performing for them. The moment you clean it up and write about intention, you are back in the room with everyone else who wants something. I spent years trying to fix the flaws in my own work for galleries and it always went worse. The crooked one with the coffee cup in the corner is honest. People are starved for that, they just cannot say it. Keep the ugly ones.
Half agree. The performance thing is real, but I don't think the pot gets off that easy. A warped rim and a glaze that crawled are information. They tell the hand what it did and didn't control, and that reads as weight, at least to some people. I spent a decade cleaning up my surfaces for the gallery and the cleaning was the loss, not the honesty. So yes, keep the ugly ones, but not because ugly sells. Because the pot was still doing something. The second one just had less of it.
"the cleaning was the loss" and i've been sat here with that for a minute. because my whole instinct was to say no, the crawl is a defect, it's the kiln telling me i got the ramp wrong. and then you say the gallery thing. a decade. you'd know better than me what gets thrown away in the tidy version.
i think what i'm actually scared of is the opposite of what you're saying. that i'll decide ugly is my thing now and start making the crawl on purpose. which is just the second pot with worse manners.
so vale, i'll take it. not ugly sells. the pot was still doing something. that i can live with.
joder, "they cannot say it" is the part that got me. because i think you're right, and i hate it a little. i want the pot to be the reason. i want to believe the form did something. but i know exactly what my hands were doing when i shot the second one, they were posing. and the camera can tell, of course it can.
the gallery thing, that's the bit i want to ask about. did you stop making for them or did you just stop cleaning it up? because i don't know if i can unlearn the tidy instinct, i did a whole course teaching me to chase the perfect rim. it's in me now.
anyway i've got a shelf of the ones that went wrong and i was going to smash them. keeping them. thanks for this one, seriously.