Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Carla Potter . We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Carla , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

There are many things that could be considered obstacles to my success but perhaps they were different opportunities to learn other important things. Managing family life and a career was time consuming and distracting. The push and pull of their requirements were constant. I was determined to be fully engaged in most of my kids activities and needs. Ketchikan is only accessible by boat or plane so it was expensive to travel. It had a big impact on my access to contemporary exhibitions, attending workshops and making connections in my field. I think time and space constraints there did impact the scale and breadth of my exploration. Materials had to be shipped in. I have had to work outside of my field to make ends meet (I love that idiom).

Speed has never been my priority for making art which is good because I was slow! I was quick to figure out the techniques for building and glazing the work that proliferated in my mind but my work is very detailed and tedious to make. I have tried to steer away from this and work more loosely and quickly but I always find myself back with a small tool carving away details and building up textures on the surfaces of my work. A colleague taught me how to make molds to facilitate making some pieces I was working on and speed up the process. These were very useful tools that helped me make bigger and even more time consuming work. The small-scale figurative work I started working on in graduate school took me further down that path of slow meticulous making, it was inevitable I embraced it. Ironically one of the things that would have and could speed up my career is making more work.

Being outdoors, hiking, gardening and just sitting and watching the sunset are important to me. I’m passionate about cooking. Relationships, being a mother and being involved with my huge extended family are priorities for me. I’m just not willing to sacrifice or diminish those passions to concentrate solely on art and prioritizing all of the self-promotion, application and documentation processes that come with moving one’s career forward. I find them tedious and exhausting. I don’t think making less work invalidates who I am and the quality of what I make but It does limit my visibility in the artworld and opportunities to show. I get less invitations to present workshops.

Graduate school was very difficult but rewarding. The work that came out of it is difficult to make so I have a harder time getting myself to start it. It takes quite a time commitment so if a piece doesn’t work out Yikes! There goes a month or two. I consider all of these things almost daily and it’s a struggle with self-worth. Its apparent that the opinions of my peers are important to me but do they really care? I think it’s my opinion and expectations of myself that are in the driver’s seat.

I don’t take rejection very well and tend to second guess whether or not a gallery or museum will be interested in my work. This is talked about in the field (or in any career) as a character flaw but many days and times I just physically cannot make myself do it. I admit that I do feel happier and more excited when I take the prescribed steps for success.

My figurative work is harder to sell but perhaps it wouldn’t be if I made more of it and it was more broadly visible. This is all speculation. I make a line of pottery that relates to my older work that is much quicker to make and the sales are very validating. I enjoy making these and having a variety of things to work on. It helps get me get into the studio and engaged with my work. I’m not sure why I feel this other work is less than my sculptural path. I like making things that are accessible to anyone who wants it. A little joy to hold in their hands.

If I was an athlete my sport would be hurdles.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

to make work and provided a very deep source for content. I finished my undergraduate degree Making art has been a lifelong experience for me. I grew up on a remote island in SE Alaska. It was a very lush, water soaked and mysterious place. The very rainy environment there (it rains on average 160” a year) made interesting indoor activities paramount. Throughout my childhood and into college I took ballet and other dance styles which introduced me to music, human form, performance and costume it was magical and I loved it. Our advanced dance company would perform and teach in villages and towns all over SE, this required travel by ferry boat and small float planes. It was always an adventure so after high school it was an easy leap for me to jump on a jet and fly off to study dance on Long Island. Though my pursuit of a career in dance did not work out my time in New York gave me an incredible place to discover not only a very dynamic dance world but also museums, galleries and art. My educational pursuits in dance eventually brought me back to the west coast.

As I came to the realization that dance was not going to be the creative outlet and pathway to stardom (said with some truth and sarcasm) I knew I wanted to make art. I needed a creative outlet. I had not really considered studying the visual arts. As a child I tried to draw and I was very bad at it and I thought if you were an artist you could just do it. I had moved to Seattle and was taking general ed requirements at Seattle Central Community College trying to figure out what was next for me. I was in the library doing research for a paper and I came across a book of Henry Moore Sculpture. I was fascinated by his work and so inspired by the way he used the figure I enrolled in a sculpture class. I had an immediate affinity for making things and conceptualizing ideas unlike drawing I could just do it! Orchestrating forms in front of me on my terms as opposed to being at the mercy of body type, technique and the logistics of being selected for a group was very liberating. My professor was very supportive and pulled me aside and said I was very good with my hands, had good ideas and should pursue art. I had never had a professor in dance school that gave me this kind of definitive support and encouragement. It became my goal to go to art school.

I returned to Ketchikan to save money for school. While there I met and married my husband We decided to go to school in Northern California. Humboldt had an art program which included a foundry and the environment was reminiscent of home. At Cal Poly Humboldt I switched my focus from dance to sculpture. While there I started learning metal casting, welding etc. The ceramics lab was right across from that noisy, dirty, man zone and I was intrigued and signed up for a class. I quickly found that I preferred the accessibility and malleability of clay as a medium and reveled in the more peaceful environment. Though I was very interested in making pottery my aptitude for hand building was very apparent and accommodated my growing ideas. I took a lot of art history courses as a part of my undergraduate degree which included a semester abroad studying in many of the major art museums in Europe. This had an incredible impact on my desire there in 1990.

We had two children while I attended Humboldt and I felt like with clay as my primary medium I could manage making art at home while raising them. After we finished school we returned to Ketchikan. Raising 2 boys while trying to start an art career had many challenges. In Ketchikan I had the space to develop my own voice without the pressures of a larger clay community and the trends of the time. I was also given opportunities there that I otherwise may not have had. My sister was a teacher so I was pulled into the artist in schools program teaching a multitude of workshops for over a decade. I found that teaching taught me a lot about making art and I loved the interaction with students and the challenge of helping them find inspiration and an understanding of art as a language. These lessons were great for my practice as well. I was also invited to present workshops in other communities in Alaska. Ketchikan had a great art community including theater and music which provided many opportunities for personal growth. I had several mentors who pulled me into larger artist in schools and public art projects. I worked with muralist Roberto Salas converting children’s drawings into a large mural. Ray Troll, a famous local artist with a fish obsession. Invited us to assist him painting a semi-truck with the life cycle of salmon. It was a traveling science classroom. Roberto and Ray also invited me to work with them creating murals and teaching at the Monterey Bay Aquarium it was all thrilling.

The work I developed while in Ketchikan was an examination of my environment and my perspectives on religious origins and my values. I received a book on Minoan pottery as a gift and it was in so many ways. From looking at the pottery of the Minoan culture I saw how their environment was integral to their decoration. I started incorporating the landscape of my home and its flora and fauna into my work. I had found a way to combine my impulse for sculpture with hand-built pottery forms. Growing up amidst the indigenous people of Alaska I learned many of their origin stories. These stories were told on totem poles and the embellishments of their cultural objects and dwellings. I was seeing the way their culture grew out of their environment. Very much like the Minoans. The Catholic culture I was raised with incorporated no images of the place I grew up in. Those values were more focused on Heaven as an ultimate goal and diminished the glory of the earth. A person started out as a sin. At a certain point in my childhood I rejected this idea but it was welded into my being. I had a reverence for my island home so my respect for that place was reenforcing my growing environmentalist values. There was a sexy, salty aspect to the intertidal zone and the lushness of the ocean and soggy tangled rainforest. I embraced this in my work. I was seeing a relationship to abundance and tenacity of life from a different perspective and it was shifting my adherence to new cultural and religious values.

This work was garnering a lot of attention. I was exhibiting in more galleries around the state. I was selected for prestigious juried exhibitions and a solo exhibition at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. I was very proud of the level of accomplishment I had achieved in Alaska but I had a growing restlessness for expanding the reach for exhibiting my work. I was feeling a bit constrained by the ocean imagery and feared it would always define it. It did take a while for the comfort of that imagery to subside. There were many opportunities to exhibit in Alaska that I took. Eventually we moved to Anchorage which put me in closer proximity to a larger art community but the short days and long nights of winter exacerbated my depressed condition. I needed some sun that wasn’t behind clouds.

In 2005 when my children were in their late teens I was awarded a fellowship at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena Montana, the most sought after residency in the field of ceramic arts. I was amongst the first artists to receive a prestigious Rasmusson Foundation grant that helped fund that residency. This opportunity was a great validation of my career in art. It changed the course of my life. At the Archie Bray I was suddenly immersed in a very stimulating environment centered around the ceramic medium and its history. I was able to learn so many skills that were not accessible to me before. I worked with artists who were emerging as the best in our field. There were events that brought in artists from all over the world getting to meet them was a joy and seeing their work in person was amazing. I met important collectors and gallerists with extensive connections. This exposure opened my eyes to a higher level of inquiry. After a year and a half in that immersive environment I went to graduate school at the University of Nebraska. While there I made a quick change from making the organic work I had developed before to exploring figurative ideas. Many of these ideas were an extension of my earlier work but embodied in a different form. The art history I studied in Europe and graduate school became an integral focus in my work. The limited presence of women artists in the cannon of art history became a focus and I made work where inserted myself into that history. A young girl as David conquering Goliath. A much shyer and conflicted version of Manets’ Olympia which I titled “Olympias’ Child” The taint of sexual shame and discontent with the chauvinist nature of my Catholic upbringing were apparent in these portraits. I created a humorous caricature of myself as a shirtless young Catholic girl in her first holy communion veil interacting with artists and their work throughout history. A four armed 4 legged juvenile smoking a cigarette on a knife throwing wheel “Vitruvian Miss” As a symbol of rebellion she very often has a cigarette in her hand.

My whole educational trajectory was not traditional. I had my graduate thesis show opening on my 50th birthday.

My life experiences have been very rich and varied. I seem to find very winding roads to reach my artistic goals. I’m very curious about a lot of different things. My path has never been what I expected. Many things about my upbringing did not prepare me for the adventure I have been on or given me the best skills and support I needed but apparently they were enough because here I am! A little worn out but still making art, still working out new ideas, exhibiting work and enmeshed in a rich community of makers. I am proud of the fact that I grew up in the wilds of Alaska and somehow found myself making art and attending graduate school in prestigious institutions. My work is in the collections of all of Alaska’s primary museums and private collections all over the US and in England. It’s been a good one and it’s not over yet.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

As a society we need to place more value on art education. It should be a funding priority in all of our educational institutions. Art has a critical function in cultural identity and understanding. It enriches the life of the maker and the people who experience it. Imagination expands our existence and our ability to solve problems and improve our living conditions. Making art is an inquiry, an examination of societal values and a reflection of our values. Making art is a lesson in observation, engineering, entertainment, effort, exploration, decoration and personal growth. It is a critical thinking skill. It is problem solving. It should be present in our architecture and it enriching our public spaces.

The NEA should be funded so its programs and support can serve artists and their communities. I have been the beneficiary of NEA funding of arts in small and underserved communities. That funding was not wasted on the communities it served. I have seen what happens when that funding is decreased and how museum programing was diminished.

I think the glorified myth of the starving artist needs to be debunked. What we do is hard. We love doing it but we should be compensated fairly for making it. There is a common perception that because we have creative gifts we should be happy with less. I have had experiences teaching where I was expected to give more because of my skills. Literally, people who were making 4 times the amount I was were asking me to volunteer my time. We are expected and asked to donate our skills and our art to support causes and creative institutions and I do but I shouldn’t have to. They should be funded through a government and society that values its function.

There is a growing culture of smaller art centers that offer classes, studio’s and exhibition and performance venues. These organizations have a very rich and valuable role in our communities but they are not lucrative and many times rely on a non-profit designation to survive. We are creative, we create and find ways to do what we love most.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I get to be full! My hands explore the world through touch. I get to manipulate earth and transform it through the science of recipes of clay, minerals and heat. I experience magic. I love teaching and helping students understand how they can find what interests them and that they can make things they see, transforming materials into imagery. Peoples joy at learning they can! is the best thing to share. I would have parents help in the classroom when I would teach in the schools. Almost always they would ask if they could try it and then if they could keep it. They loved making something alongside their child. Generally their child would end up being the one who would paint and glaze what they made making it a collaboration. What a delight! Clay is a transformative material. It goes from being wet and malleable to dry, dusty and easily broken. After fired it is hard and durable. Its material melted together. When coated with glaze and fired again there are so many materials and methods for transforming its surface to make it function as pottery, sculpture etc. I get to experience the delight and questions of people looking at my sculpture and hearing about the effect it has on them. Art has taken me so many amazing places and brought me into the lives of incredible people. It has brought me into the presence of people who lived centuries ago. It tells me their stories and their values. When I copy the work of a master I look so closely at what they have made and work to understand how they made the marks they made. It transports me into their perspective. I get to use a language that can be understood by anyone anywhere.

Contact Info:

• Website: carlampotter.com
• Instagram: carlapotter7919
• Facebook: Carla Marie Potter