The Bongs That Will Outlive Us All
When did you start working in ceramics?
I got into art in high school and during my senior year realized I wanted to go to art school but I got denied form a bunch of them. I was pretty bummed out but realized that I just needed to make more art and get better at creating. I ended up going to a community college that was kind of known for its ceramics program— in the area, and I was immediately hooked. So I set my mind to it and made my first body of work, I would say, that I then applied to art school with and ended up getting into KCAI which has a well known ceramics program. But the curriculum was very extreme, classic art school shit — and it was a total whirlwind to me. They basically made you choose between vessel or sculpture, so I chose vessel which then resulted in making hundreds of cups and bowls and plates. Basically learning every skill I needed to get ready to create “real work.” At the time it was all very technical, so we would throw most of what we made out. When I got to my senior year of art school, I was very excited to just have some fun, and as a result ended up making bongs and ashtrays and pipes. Just all of these disapproved objects in ceramics. The taboo of it really interested me, but I was also just a shit-head stoner, so I was like “ah this is cool, I wanna make some bongs.” I realized that I was embodying that stoner kid that would sneak bongs through the kiln and try to make wacky, funny work that excited me. So from there I really started to explore making those taboo items, which is kind of where I’m at today.
I know it’s weird talking about high school and art school in an interview about my artwork now, but it’s also a part of my life, and that’s really how I started making art and I can’t forget about that. I’ve always tried to stay away from talking about that in interviews, but I don’t know, you can do what you want with it.
I think in our society there’s an unnecessary taboo around immaturity, so we try and separate our present selves from our youth, maybe it comes with trying to contrive nobility into adulthood, but we don’t want to bring the learned and matured versions of ourselves back down to that level of youthful naivety. At the same time it’s such a formative part of all of our experiences, whether you’re a creative or not, and I think it’s odd that we actively try to disassociate ourselves from perhaps the most formative part of our lives. I mean its still us, regardless of age. Something I like about the way you utilize your medium is that you don’t omit those youthful and nostalgic qualities. The pieces remind me of being in kindergarten, playing with air dry clay. But it’s elevated because the work isn’t coming from a kindergartener.
For a long time I’ve really thought about authenticity, and what I’ve realized is that, for me, a lot of this started because I wanted to replicate objects that I either couldn’t get or that didn’t exist. Recreating Supreme accessories, or making fake merchandise from brands that didn’t exist. And I’ve found that the most genuine output when creating that is to be able to render these objects very naively. The raw output is very important to the work, that raw naivety. So it really does come down to having the ability to make something very well, a high level of craftsmanship, but still being able to use it to say different things without compromising its utility or appearance. But it’s important to me to make it look naive, I think it adds a side of humor to the work. If I were to render a lot of these objects realistically, whatever that means, so much of it would get lost, it would lose its authenticity.
I think that ties perfectly back into what we were saying about this force that is youth. Naivety is one of the more central adjectives associated with youth, and if that’s something that pulsates throughout your work, I think it’s almost necessary to confront how it plays a role in your process.
Yeah, maybe that’s it. That’s a good point. I’ve considered the many ways I could make art, but when I think about it, it’s really just about total genuine output. So I’m not really conscious when I go to the studio being like I need to embody this shit-head high school kid. I’m not thinking, “what would this guy do?” But I do think there is a level of subconscious rendering that happens when I make stuff — I know I want it to look a certain way.
I need to ask this before I forget, my sister wanted to know. How do you do the transfer of those prints onto the clay — like the horse in the middle of the ashtray?
I use two main decorating methods. One is just hand glazing, and the other is using fire-on ceramic glaze decals. So those are printed by a specialty printer that actually has china paint — you add that to the ink hoppers and then it prints out images. And for me that’s been one of the most exciting aspects of my studio practice recently, just being able to take images and memes and fire them on.
I'm obsessed with the minion ashtray.
Yeah dude. I’m obsessed. Just taking random stuff out of context and putting it on my work. For me its so fun because I have this ashtray form, a blank canvas for me to make as many pieces of fake merch that I want — an endless merch machine. One day I’ll be like minions are sick, or another day I’ll be like oh damn this Eames lounger decal is looking really fresh. Just making weird stuff — it opens up so much more for me. I do love the hand glazed look, but when you put a really crisp and clean image on a fucked up form, something happens.
Exactly. I love the contrast between those elementary pinched out vessels and the perfect decals. Something interesting about your work is that you could easily smooth all of those bumps and flaws out. You went to art school, your proficient in an abundance of ceramic techniques, but you make the conscious choice to keep it campy in a sense. And to have that tactile campiness of the clay in direct association with those computer printed decals that lack flaws is so funny and great.
I appreciate that. It’s fun because I really make everything for myself, to be honest. A lot of my studio practice is just based on random pairings. And it’s not like every time, again, I’m consciously thinking about it. But I do like to think of the notion of sympathetic magic. Do you know what that is?
I do not.
So basically it’s the idea of creating something with the idea that it’ll have an effect on the world in some way. So having a voodoo doll is a form of sympathetic magic. Another form of that is infinite pairings, bringing two totally random things together and making this random result — a one plus one equals one million kind of thing. So being able to have control over that equation is how I thrive in the studio and is one of the things I try to think about whenever I’m making my work. Which is why it does feel kind of random, because it totally is.
That idea of taking disparate elements and realizing them together through a work is very applicable to all mediums — not just ceramics. Are you considering taking that approach to projects outside of clay?
Always. A lot of my creative process involves making furniture or clothing or other home goods just as much as I’m making ceramics. Recently I made this Garfield chair. It’s like a Donald Judd Garfield chair — a flat pack pre-fab Ikea kind of thing. It’s really weird, but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping to sell these soon, they’ll all be a flat pack assemble-at-home kind of thing. So there’s this interactive element to it that I’m not able to experiment with in ceramics. Theres a permanence to ceramics. Whenever I make something I think of its life span, how long a ceramic object can last buried in the ground for thousands of years, whereas this Garfield chair will eventually disintegrate.
But that’s liberating in a weird way, it becomes less sacred.
Yeah, for real. Like these ceramic pieces could be around forever. This Minion ash tray is gonna outlive the entire world. A future civilization will find this post apocalyptic object in the ground and be like the fuck is this? What is this shitty looking Minion ash tray?
