We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eli Zemper. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eli below.
Eli, appreciate you joining us today. Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?
I don’t know if it is the FIRST dollar I earned as a creative, but it’s the first dollar I earned after I decided to make the jump from being a high school teacher (what I’ve done for the last 26 years) to helping people address their mental health by offering clay workshops. We live in a rural area and don’t have access to an art center, so creative programming is limited. I had written my business plan, I had spent the previous four months converting my garage into a studio, I had gathered all the equipment and kilns from craigslist and the public surplus auctions and I was ready to host my first class in my home studio. . . But the township ruled that I couldn’t host classes for more than four people. Not financially viable at all! I was stuck. But then, we all were, because the pandemic led to so many businesses closing or downsizing or pausing their operations. I talked with Adam Kovsky, the managing director of Robin Hills Farm, which had paused it’s educational work during the pandemic and was reinventing how it would operate when restrictions eased. Adam and I thought we could accomplish Robin Hills Farm’s educational goals and my creative community outreach goals if instead of hosting clay classes in my studio, I made my operations mobile. I loaded all the materials and tools necessary to make our very first project, fairy doors, into my van, and on March 20th, 2022, I held my first mobile clay class at Robin Hills. Because of Adam’s belief in me, our ability to imagine other scenarios beside the one we found ourselves in, I now have a mobile clay workshop business that delivers clay workshops to rural (and urban) communities within a one-hour drive (to over 750 people since last March!). I am so proud to have turned a zoning problem into creative opportunities for myself and others. I started paying my mortgage last September with the earnings from Curiouser Clay, and being able to do that makes me feel sturdy and resilient and so grateful to be surrounded by people willing to be my partner in these creative adventures!
Eli, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Like many many people, the pandemic really reframed a lot of priorities for me. During the pandemic, I taught my at-risk high school students online from an office I rented because my rural area does not have access to internet. I was parenting my then 3-year-old twins and trying to homeschool my 8 year-old because schools were closed. Everyone was so sad, and so stressed and hopeless.
I needed to make my life much more flexible for myself and to take care of my children (since all the daycare facilities were closed or had waitlists) and I needed a different way to try to help people take care of themselves and rebuild some of the mental health that they had lost.
The pandemic upended everything and posed new challenges for parenting and teaching, and managing family life. Many of the support systems were gone and talking to names in rectangles on zoom as “teaching” from an office in an industrial strip reinforced how isolated we all really were. I needed to continue my lifelong mission to help others, but it was clear to me that it was impossible to accomplish all the roles that were now necessary (full-time, non-flexible work in a school 45 minutes away, care provider and person to get kids off the bus because there is no childcare) to make everything work. To say nothing of my own rapidly deteriorating mental health. At this time, I began dreaming of little breaks where people could come together and not worry about anything. I was remembering how good it felt to be in preschool, when an adult had laid out all the materials for a project, and all you had to do was sit down and do it. It was already made for you. Your job was just to be immersed in it. This is what I was channeling when I conceived of Curiouser Clay.
Curiouser Clay provides experiential clay workshops that feel like a creative get-away. These “make-ations” are designed to provide creative vacations from the stresses of daily life and help people unplug, de-stress, and find joy. The focus of these experiential workshops is to address the nation-wide deterioration of mental health (which has worsened during the pandemic) and to “make it better” through play and experimentation with clay.
Since last March, I have brought clay workshops to over 750 people. I have facilitated office parties, conducted workshops for developmentally disabled adults, hosted a wedding shower in a greenhouse and hosted playful two-hour workshops where people have made everything from fairy doors to gnomes to license plate mugs, to pie plates. When people come together, I don’t hear talk about all the things that divide us. I hear reminiscing about clay classes in middle school. I hear laughter about how someone decided to build a part of their project, and I hear people amazed at themselves and others for what they have created. I’m proud of helping the community to co-create these little creative eddies in what is generally some turbulent times. I’m proud of people showing up for themselves and others, and I think that each of these small actions serves to rebuild ourselves and our communities.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
I think there is an AMAZING model for how communities can support artists in Minnesota, called Springboard for the Arts. Even though I am here in Michigan, I follow all the initiatives that they support and I dream of one day having a similar organization here. They have published some really handy workbooks for artists and also for community organizers, which is something that I am steadily working toward with my mobile clay workshop model. They have found a way to leverage public grant monies and private foundation support in order to do such amazing things as pilot a guaranteed wage for artists, commission local artists to design projects which invite community engagement, and then host a lending library where community members can borrow these community engagement projects. They have workshops to help artists understand better how to make a living from their art and they host fellowships like the rural regenerator fellowship which brings together artists and other culture bearers from different regions to talk about what they are doing in their communities and how they are creatively engaging their populations. I think models like this serve to legitimize the arts and break down barriers between artists to encourage more collaboration and dissemination of ideas. I think we have to get past the idea that arts are “dessert”. In my children’s schools they are referred to as “specials”. . .which they are, but in the school context it means that they are not things that happen every day. The arts are necessary. They are the main event. I would like to see more serious attention and resources directed to the work that artists do, particularly those who are involved in participatory or experiential art. I’d like to see a philosophical shift to assigning more value to having experiences in life and to support those people engaged in creating those experiences. I would love to see more community collaboration experiences and I’m working to do my part to contribute to the world I want to see.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
The most rewarding aspect of being creative is inviting others to do the same. It’s crazy the number of people who come to workshops and “I’m not creative” is the way they introduce themselves. Maybe because I’m surrounded by my kids who are still young and draw amazing (and often ridiculous) ideas without much self-critique I feel compelled to help others return to this state of imagination and wonder. Why should kids have all the fun? Who stole our moxie? How do we get it back? I love the workshops where people take a break and wander around and look at what others are making and it starts a conversation, which sometimes leads to other connections. Those connections. I want people to make them with others, but also to connect to forgotten or neglected parts of their own lives.
Contact Info:
- Website: curiouserclay.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curiouserclay/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/curiouserclay/