We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sage Gonzalez Velazquez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sage, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The most meaningful project I’ve participated in is creating House of Dirt with my partner Ezra Schweitzer. In 2022, we moved to Puerto Rico to live closer to my family and make a living from our joint love of ceramics, community, and teaching people how to safely have a ceramics practice. I was born in Puerto Rico in 1996. In 2004, when I was 8, my family moved to Jacksonville, FL. When we moved, I experienced being a minority for the first time. I was placed in what was then called ESL. In this program, I was constantly bullied by my teachers, telling me that the only way I was ever going to learn English was to stop speaking Spanish, my native tongue, in school and at home. From then on, I had my two lives. My home life was where I felt love, connection, community, and where I spoke Spanish. Then I had my school/outside life where my goal was to assimilate: act girly, do my work, and go home. The disconnect grew more and more. It always seemed like I had no place where I could just be me and not be bullied. At some point, when I was in my early teens, I walked into a clay class, and I could just create whatever I wanted. I fell in love with the feeling of creating something from nothing and how it made me feel, so I made it my mission to learn ceramics and go to Alfred University. While in Alfred, I met Ezra and saw in them the same love and passion for creating well-crafted objects and spaces that worked well. I have always wanted to come back to where I came from, to reclaim a little space and create somewhere where a younger me would be happy to be. A space where a sensitive person who has a hard time socializing can go, create, learn, and be themselves in a safe environment. Doing this with my partner, who also shares the same passion and ethics as I, makes the hard times all worth it.

Sage, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a queer/trans human. My pronouns are He/Him and They/ Them. I grew up between cultures. I had opposing narratives be told to me; opposing cultures tell me the other was bad and or weird. I fit in enough in both, but always passed as the other. I came to ceramics out of privilege. I chose it, and my family always provided me with the opportunity to practice it. To me, creating ceramics was the first time I experienced inner peace, and the first time I could create the reality in my head. I finally got to decide what I wanted to do. I’ve had many teachers throughout the past 15ish years who have all created a safe space for me to make and expand my knowledge. With ceramics, I made friends and built community in a way I had never been able to. With House of Dirt, it is a business, but both Ezra and I do it out of love for the material and the way it brings people together. We chose to do it in Puerto Rico because I wanted to be near family, learn from the many amazing artists that live here and are not recognized, and bring back the knowledge/experiences Ezra and I have to the land, people, and society I have felt the most physically safe with. We offer 8-week classes, private lessons, glaze mixing, kiln firing services, workshops, and are distributors of L&L kilns in Puerto Rico.

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

To create a thriving creative ecosystem, there is a need for people to support local makers and local businesses that have ethical practices; people who are not just in it for the money. We need to work collectively to make sure that we, as a society, are not unknowingly or knowingly supporting corporations and or people that, at the end of the day, are just doing their thing without consideration for how it affects their overall ecological, financial, emotional, and creative ecosystem. I also believe in building upon collective knowledge as makers, so that not every individual needs to do everything from the beginning. Making it possible to be independently successful, but also be a stepping stone for others in our communities.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I’ve had to unlearn that to be successful, I need to do it all alone. After working in and co-creating communal making spaces, I’ve learned to do better not just for myself but for the community that is being built. I’ve learned that I love using the knowledge I learned in higher education to give people a more accessible way to the knowledge that was gifted to me. Facilitating a space where I’m a part of a community that collectively creates a wealth of knowledge that benefits us all at the end of the day, gives me a reason to keep going because it feels like I’m helping others while making a living.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.houseofdirtstudio.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/houseofdirtstudio/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063913878371

Image Credits

Ezra Schweitzer