We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gwyndolyn Wilkerson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Gwyndolyn, appreciate you joining us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your creative career?

I used to be a Chef/Restauranteur in Austin, and San Antonio. I was young in the field, I started in upscale kitchens before I even finished High school. I learned a lot but could have learned more before taking the plunge into opening my own place. My husband and I agreed to go in with business partners and open a 60 seat seasonal fare restaurant just outside of San Antonio and thats where I think I learned all my my most important business lessons. I credit my success in my art career to my failures in my restaurant career.

I had kitchens on lock. I could run a line while singing Spanish love songs and cha cha-ing down the line. I could butcher a whole pig in no time, bake a lovely croissant without a recipe and my fresh ricotta was a thing of dreams. Line cooks listened to me, and front of house staff loved my management style. My ability to stick up for myself and make business deals though was severely lacking and every time I was put in a position where I needed to know what I was doing, I flubbed. I let people walk all over me in business, and if I tried to prevent that, I just sounded like a naive kid with no idea how things worked. So many times I know I should have asked for more money to make something happen. So many times, I bent over backwards for people who held yelp reviews over my head. So many times I took less than stellar work, and pretended like everything was fine. It wasn’t fine. I was overworked, underpaid, and overwhelmed with the amount of problems I had created for myself by not being confident enough to say what I needed to say. I always let people who seemed like the authority get whatever they wanted, and it almost never, was to my benefit.

In my art career, I have done an about face. I often remind myself that people who I am doing business deals with are just people. They are getting through things as they come, finding solutions as problems arise, and are getting through life just as I am. Its comforting to know that I can make my own decisions now, and that I don’t have quite the same audience to please; but I think that I have grown a confidence and realized that I can do the hard business deals, speak with confidence to future clients, and ask the hard asks to get not only what I want, but what is fair for everyone.
I work with a lot of restaurant clients now, which makes me happy, as I do sometime miss the kitchen. The chefs I get to meet are all going through what I went through, most of the time on a much larger scale, and this time, I get to be on the other end of these conversations. I feel like I get to make a change and be the person who isn’t intimidating, or agressive in business. I get to ask for what I want, and make sure that my client gets what they want. I think that looking back on how I used to do business has helped my make those positive changes. I took a long time to reflect on lessons from my time in the industry and I think the biggest thing I learned, was to ask for what I needed, and never let my business come before my quality of life.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Growing up, I never thought my art could be a career. I was multi talented, and worked in 2d design, painting, collage, digital art as well as sculpture, sewing, and general crafts. I am a creative at heart, but never thought that being creative could make me a decent living. I used pottery as a way to get out of my career job in the culinary industry, center myself as I centered the clay and relax away from it all. I bought a wheel at a school auction for $90 and taught myself through youtube videos and endless trial and error. After leaving my career job, I floundered with what I wanted to do with my life, but pottery was always there for me and I got better and better with my work. I eventually got some work finished that I was willing to share with others and sold out of my first ever instagram drop. My husband was already pursuing his passion in the creative field and encouraged me to lean into my pottery. I had been working a part time job to get by and save some money, and we ended up taking a chance and buying a kiln with the last of our savings so that I could finish my own work and sell it. We did weekend after weekend of farmers markets and artisan markets until we built a following and were able to transfer our work online.
I am grateful for those markets as that is where I met some of my best clients, though my old career in the industry has kept (and my husband) busy. I now work with plenty of shops here in Lockhart to create specific designs and pieces for them to sell at retail and keep my schedule full of guaranteed work. I also and most notably, work with Austin restauranteurs to create barware and tiki cups as well as art installations and soon enough, service wares. I love working with bars and restaurants to make the dining experience just one more level of special with handmade cups, plates, and art as it keeps me connected to my past.

I work entirely by myself in a renovated goat shed on my property to make hundreds of pieces at a time with local stoneware clays that are durable yet gorgeous and light in the hand. I have a passion for fun and whimsy that lends to creative and playful designs that you can see in some of my Tikis or handmade products online; at the same time that I pursure perfection in every piece and can create stunning, clean work that you wouldn’t know was from my hands. I love the dichotomy of my hand built mushroom incense holders, next to gorgeous plates glazed in mottled black and gold. I think I am well rounded, sculpting, throwing, building, drawing, painting, all of the skills I bounced around with as a child coming together to make me able to take on a wider range of projects, from tableware, to large ceramic installations. I am a problem solver at heart, I love puzzles and I love figuring out how to make things work and make them better and better as time goes on.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I tell this story all the time because I am still amazed at how calm I was.

On grand opening night of our restaurant, we had a wood fire grill that sat in the corner of our open kitchen. It was the main character of our restaurant. Unbeknownst to us, the walls hadn’t been built correctly, and due to the immense heat of our fire, a stud inside of the wall combusted, causing us to evacuate the building during our dinner rush, with critics, friends, family and the entire community in our dining room. I will never forget walking down the hallway, hearing plates clinking and people laughing and smelling something odd, looking down and seeing smoke coming out of an electrical socket. Somehow the record player got stuck on the Bruce Springsteen song where the lyrics repeat “we’re going down down down down” over and over and I realized that what we had worked towards for years, our dream, the thing we woke up every day to create and make better, was on fire.

We quickly jumped into action, cut a hole in the metal sheeting on our wall, pushed the grill out of the restaurant and extinguished the fire before first responders could arrive. I will never forget that we managed to finish cooking all of the food on the stove and plate it so that our guests could eat their food in the parking lot. Nothing was going to stop us from being the best at what we were. Problem solving and pushing through obstacles is my middle name.
Though there wasn’t major damage, the fire shut us down for six months. The embarrasment, shame and failure I felt was immense but we pulled through (with a lot of help from our friends) and made it even better the second time around. On our second grand opening, we even made a drink called “fire in the wall” that smoked when it went to the table!

My husband Justin and I joke about how nothing can ever stress us out that bad. “We ran into a burning building for beer and a bottle of wine, nothing scares us”
What I do isn’t life or death, no one dies if a deadline is missed, the studio can be rebuilt if we do happen to catch it on fire, and really nothing needs to ever put me in that place of emotional turmoil again. I chose a life where my success if defined by my ability to relax and enjoy m life without having to put out fires. I’m only further comforted by the fact that no problem is too mig for me to take a deep breath, realise the situation, maybe laugh at its absurdity, and then solve the shit out of it.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I make what many would consider a luxury product. My work isn’t priced as if you were buying from a big box store and I am a one person maker. I pay for my supplies and materials, my studio, my website my packaging and most importantly my time. Nothing that I do is automated and everything has my hands all over it. What you are getting from me is through and through hand made and the price reflects that. One coffee mug might take 2 hours of active labor, though it takes literal days of waiting, drying, firing, glazing and firing again before finishing it up, photographing it, listing it, packaging it nicely and shipping to you. Or hauling it all to a hot outdoor market, setting up a whole beautiful booth, and hawking your wares to people who have no idea who you are. There is a lot of hustle and work to be done to sell one piece. I wish that more people could see the way that a lot of things are made in order to make them “more affordable”
Sometimes, automation is a godsend and there are plenty of potteries that have made automation work for them in order to create stunning work that is less expensive (yet most of the time my pricing is still less than theirs)
I know that my product isn’t for everyone and thats okay, there are so many wonderful artists in this world that you can support that aren’t me. I do love when people buy my work though.
The other thing is that an instagram following doesn’t always equate to success, and not having many followers doesn’t mean that you aren’t someone in your field who is moving and shaking. Artists do a lot behind the scenes that you just don’t see.

Contact Info:

• Website: Hammersonco.com
• Instagram: @hammersoncraft
• Facebook: Hammerson Co

Image Credits
Gwyndolyn Wilkerson