Hi hi!

So it turns out that the holiday season is absolutely crazy if you’re a ceramic artist - I am preparing for 3 markets right now and it’s whimsical winter whirlwind

I’ll keep this one brief, with 3 thoughts and one pottery topic:

1. Love is the divine force, but we can’t use it to love the divine because we don’t understand what the divine is, so we have to use it to love each other (also animals, plants, and objects).
2. Challenges lead to growth, so we should be grateful for challenges, but we also can’t know which challenges will lead to the most growth, so it doesn’t make sense to seek out discomfort or suffering on purpose.
3. Watching the sunset with other people is a beautiful activity, and it’s free – so why do we almost never do it?

Pottery topic:

I’ve been reading about people pots - a global pottery tradition of decorating vessels with faces or entire human figures. It seems that clay artists around the world feel this desire to mold clay into their own likeness or a human likeness more generally.

Face jugs are a popular ceramic form in the American Southeast. Some of the first face jugs were made by slaves in South Carolina in the 1860s. It is possible these face jugs have African roots, as several Central and West African traditions included portrait pots, but not necessarily. White potters in the American Southeast also made face jugs. Only, the tone of their jugs is more playful, while the Black potters’ pieces seem more like nonverbal protests against enslavement.

Please let me know if there are any pottery topics you’d like me to research, and here are photos of some work I’ll be showing at my next few shows!

If you are in the Atlanta area, please come to this!!!

Thanks for reading,

All the best,

Liliana