BIOGRAPHY
PORTFOLIO BIO EVENTS GALLERIES CONTACT HOME			My studio is in a mill building, along with about 150 other artists, which is solely for artists. It is an old long underwear factory, with lots of eyelets driven in to the floors. The floors are covered with lanolin, which has sunk in to the hardwood and stained it a very deep red. The ceilings are about 15 feet high, as I am on the top story. Luckily, there is a freight elevator, or the kickwheel would have been left on the ground floor. I am across the hall from Printmaker Scott Schneff and down the hall from painter Cappy Whelan. Downstairs is a bookbinding friend of mine named Johanna Finnegan-Topitzer. There is so much going on, it is hard not to be inspired, and occasionally shaken up when needed. I love it and am making very nice work, with more cutting and attaching on my thrown forms, and also integrating the sculptural into the primarily functionally referenced work I have been making. I am also making double walled pots, decorating both inside and out, of course. I really enjoy the difference in emphasis that making a small inside relative to the outside of a pot makes, as well as accentuating the rim to an almost ridiculous level. That rim gives me a really cool new canvas to work on, and rims pretty much define the pot, so everything else follows. It is interesting to be able to recognize the rim as the most dominant part, visually, of a small cup or bowl. I am of course still drawing in black and white, and am also starting to make more images which are pretty realistic. Not always, but sometimes. Right now I am challenged by balancing my teaching with creating. I like the teaching, and the income helps a lot, but the pressure is on to produce for the Smithsonian and CraftBoston. I really want to make the best work I am capable of for these two shows, especially the Smithsonian. I will throw a little today, and make some slab work tomorrow. Boxes, lozenge shaped vases with steel bases. Maybe some thrown jars. By the way, I bought a wood kiln. It is about 8’w x 6’h x 15’d, all hard brick, dry laid caternary arch noborigama. I think I might make some changes when I pick it up and rebuild it as a two chamber downdraft, with a bag wall in the middle to get most of the ash settling in the front. I am also trying to design a system where I can fire this kiln with wood chips from a hopper. I will fire the back with mostly saggars, but the front will allow me to make some functional pots which are just about physicality. I miss that part with the work I am making now, and I thought this would be a good way to recapture some action in my pots. I have seven or eight students, depending on the week, and they are all doing quite well. It is fun to teach people who are interested in going a little deeper into pottery than just how to make stuff. We are working on why we make things. Last week I hired a model to come in, and we sculpted her, and we are getting into drawing a little bit. I don’t know if it is what they expected when they signed up, but I think they are learning a lot and becoming much better potters. I am thrilled that last year’s intern looks like she is going to be a really really good potter. Her name is Kari Olstad. She is young, 22 I think, but is making very nice functional pottery. I think she could make anything, but right now I think she loves the idea of use, sort of a familiarity through function. I think she likes the instant connection with the people who use her work. I have a new intern starting in June. She is a student at Rhode Island School of Design, so that will be different. I think we will both learn a lot. I have not seen her work, but she works hard and has good grades and wants to be a full time artist, so the rest will come along. I started to make pots in my mother and father’s basement when I was out in Ohio for a week following a post-layoff-finding-myself fishing trip to the Florida Keys. I asked mom to teach me to throw on this old kickwheel in her basement, she showed me a few things and then went to work. When she came home that evening, I had made some cups and bowls, and a few plates. The next day, I met Phyllis Blair Clark at The Functional Ceramics conference in Wooster, OH. The event was going on, and Roberta Looney, the director of Wayne Center for the Arts, which hosted the event, encouraged me to poke my head in and watch. I did, and pretty much decided that I wanted to be a potter. I went home that night and asked my mom to show me how to make something with a lid, and the next day made some covered jars and a casserole. They were centered, but lacking in form and confidence. I went home with about 20 pots, and started painting houses until I figured out how to make a creative life for myself. I was back to Ohio to pick up the wheel and kiln a few months later, and tried to teach myself to make pots for about six minths, not really getting anywhere, but really enjoying what I knew. A potter opened a studio down the street from the two bedroom apartment that Theresa, my wife, and I shared, and I stopped in on her first day of business to inquire about classes, which I signed up for in early July, 1999. I took my first lesson with Tamsin Whitehead, and knew that I needed to be a potter. I learned more in that lesson than I had been able to teach myself in six months, and endeavored to keep that pace of progress for as long as I could. I had six months of contracts left in the painting business, and figured that if I worked at pottery eight hours a day and painted eight hours a day I should be able to sell my pots in six months. I am so glad that I didn’t know more then, as I would have felt it impossible to succeed, not only in the goal I had set for myself, but probably in the field in general. I am fortunate also that I had had a number of jobs before that left me feeling like I was missing something, and so I felt that this was probably the best fit I had ever met. Looking back, I am not sure that anything would have dissuaded me once I started working with Tamsin. Ignorance is such a comfort sometimes, and I met my goal to the day, selling work at a local natural food store down the street in late January of 2000. I started taking a class on clay sculpture from Al Jaeger, at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and it gave me some really good ideas as to how to work with clay with more in mind than function. I was making functional pottery, brightly colored and fairly simple. At the same time, I was starting to work with clay as a sculptural medium, and was accepted in to the League of NH Craftsmen and New Hampshire Art Association, both for pinchpots, the following spring (2001). My functional work also started to settle down, as Theresa joined the business and started formulating a way to make a living as a potter. That first year was very scary, as we both were working in the pottery full time and had no real safety net, besides our friends, family, and customers. But, it was working, and we both took turns being the stable and confident partner when the other was scared. We were learning and working a ton, but it was paying off. The sales were coming well, the work looked better and better, and I was winning awards for both my functional and sculptural work. It was very rewarding. We bought our house in Milton, NH, in February of 2002, the same month as I won the Currier Award from the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester, NH. It was a sculpture of four giant nightcrawlers, entitled “Worms Rising”. As soon as we moved, my studio was no longer in a 6’ x 11’ bedroom, but was in a 30’ x 30’ attached barn. My work changed. It became graphic, depicting turtles, dragonflies, pansies, whatever I felt like I wanted to attract to my life. My wheel was next to a window looking out onto the backyard, and beyond that, our stream and the woods behind. My work was still functional, but no longer abstract in its meaning., I started to feel that I needed to be very specific about what I wanted to say with my pots. I had something to say, and intuitively felt that clay was the best way I had ever found of expressing myself. I now look at that functional work as a bridge between the very traditional thrown work I was making when I was in that little studio in Newmarket, NH, and the highly specific work I make now. The jump to the black and white work came in December of 2003, right after our open studio sale, and three weeks before Christmas. I went out to the studio, looked at the list of work to be made for the stores, and felt very depressed. How was it that I left the corporate world of repetition to find myself feeling the same way in a totally different setting? I went back inside, and told Theresa that I was not going to be making all of that work that the stores were waiting for, that I understood they would be really upset, but that I felt the work lacked life, and that it lacked life because my heart wasn’t in it anymore. Of course, this was going to cost me some accounts, and in hindsight it wound up costing me all of my accounts, but the work I was doing and the way I was doing it was not sustainable. I spent the next three weeks working on five very nice and very large bowls which had been sitting on my shelf since seeing Mark Bell make gorgeous forms at the Functional Ceramics conference eight months earlier. They were graceful, made of porcelain, and very thin. I covered the surfaces with a black slip I had developed for a steel and porcelain sculpture of a crow, and started to draw through the black to get to the white clay beneath. I spent two days on each pot, and they were the best things I had ever made: specific, timeless, beautiful, and approachable. Except for the occasional panicky return to function, which never lasted more than a few days, I have been making black and white pots ever since, which is three years. I am getting better as I get deeper into this technique of sgraffito, and probably would stop if I wasn’t. I am starting to see my sculptural background seep in, as well as a renewed interest in altering. My work is narrative, specifically illustrated, sometimes spiritual, often funny, and understandable. I make pots about the times in which we live, and the challenges of living in a world in which we are divorced from the natural world around us. I make my work to be appreciated by those who know a lot or a little about pottery or art, and make it with the hopes that some of these pots will survive longer than me or the culture in which we live, and will still be as pertinent and relevant then as it is now. Download printable version of this bio   (PDF doc - 48kb).

© 2007 Tim Christensen Pottery. All rights reserved.     Tim@TimChristensenPottery.com 603.821.4171	Created: April 11, 2007         Last updated: February 2, 2008