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

Hi Taylor, thanks for joining us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

I don’t think I could live another lifestyle. I’ve had jobs in food service, retail, etc. It just sucks out your soul. I would LOVE a 401K, and dang, health insurance, you know, stuff like that. But I can’t imagine a life where I don’t own my own time. I get jealous of the benefits of having a real job, knowing what you’re going to make in a month. But I kind of love the ability to work harder or make different or riskier choices, and possibly be rewarded for that. And to feel like something I do is making even a small difference in people’s lives, and to get to see that firsthand… that means something to me.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hi! I’m Taylor (they/them). I’ve been in love with clay since my first class in 2019.

I built my own basement studio shortly thereafter, and once my own cabinets (and all my relatives’ cabinets!) were brimming with beginner pots, I began to sell my best work on Etsy, just so it would have somewhere to live! Eventually I graduated to my own shop, at www.backyardkiln.com, where you can buy my pots today.

I’m a voice actor in my “day job”, and my little pottery side business hopes to bring joy to “everyday folks’” lives by providing beautiful, affordable, everyday-use ceramics. Not everyone can afford a $60 mug for their morning coffee, and so I always try to have pieces that are both gorgeous and accessible to most people.

I have the luxury of not having to depend on my pottery income to live, and I love that people from the farmers’ market here can afford to put a special mug or bowl in their shopping bag alongside their local produce.

I met my partner, Sophie, in 2019, and quickly brought her into my studio to play in the dirt. She’s the resident specialist in glaze combos, and loves making BIG mugs, which our customers adore.

In my off time, I enjoy spending time with my cats, gardening, reading, tending to our many succulents and houseplants, eating great vegan food, playing music with Sophie, checking on our beehives, and keeping up with my friends on socials.

I’ve recently branched out into digital art as well, and also sell prints and stickers on my website.

If you’d like to see behind the scenes of pottery-making, choice memes, gardening, beekeeping, and cat drama, please check out my Instagram stories or Tiktok. www.instagram.com/backyardkiln

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

The hardest pottery lesson to learn is that you CANNOT get attached. Ceramics is a process with many thankless and tedious steps that the public doesn’t get to see, and if something goes wrong with just one of the steps, or even the timing of one of them, there usually isn’t a way to save the piece. You just can’t get excited about work until it’s out of the kiln and in your hands. Clay will break your heart over and over. Sometimes you can figure out why, sometimes it’s a mystery. It’s a big challenge to get a piece across the finish line, never mind making it actually GOOD.

Not to get too esoteric here–but pottery is elemental. It has this feeling of connecting you to all the elements; clay is earth, making things with it involves a lot of water, followed by air in the right doses and at the right times, and then you surrender it to the fire and hope it survives (twice!). If you’re lucky, the piece can outlive your great grandchildren.

So if I make a piece that’s mediocre, sometimes I look at it and think… is this the legacy of craft I want to leave behind? Is this good enough to last hundreds of years, and still be good art? And then sometimes I have to say “nope” and toss it into the recycle bin.

(By the way, in the early stages of making, clay can be recycled. So I think to it, “You’ll be better in your next life!”)

We have a box that’s starting to overflow in the back of the shop, full of pieces that went so wrong late in the process that they can’t even be used, much less sold. But we do find a way to repurpose them even then; we break them up and decorate our stepping stones for the garden, or smash them really fine and use them in succulent soil.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I think it’s ridiculous and hard for an artist to be expected to put in all this free labor and learn all these skill sets just to sell their work! Luckily I have a background in video and audio production, and product photography. I am lucky to have learned how to be comfortable and perform in front of camera. I’m digitally literate and somewhat understand how these online spaces work. Not every artist has or can build ALL those skill sets. And even though I have all those things, I am still not super successful at it!

Digital spaces really put pressure on you to make content that is either A) gorgeous, not just nice looking, but standing out from the rest or B) funny, or entertaining, or educational in some way, hopefully two of the three. And sometimes you just get very lucky with one stupid video. My biggest tiktok hit was a video of a jar I had made, with the caption “When something you made does exactly what it’s supposed to”. People chimed in in the comments with “Things my parents would never say,” and silly stuff like that, and it blew up to a couple thousand views.

Obviously I’m feeling pretty down about social media. I put a lot into it and can’t seem to get as much out of it as I see others can. I don’t sell out shop drops. I can’t charge $100 for a mug and have people willing to pay it, despite my meticulous work. Your work has to be SPECIAL, and then also it has to be in front of a ton of eyeballs. And it’s so hard at the beginning of learning art just to find your artistic voice, your own style. Then you gotta make content around it? Ridiculous.

That to say, I do have some tips that seem to work for me.

One is to curate your following by deleting followers who are obviously scammers of one kind or another. I investigate immediately when I am notified that I have a new follower. If the grid looks sus or gives me a weird vibe, if all the content is from the last week, if they have AI generated captions or none at all, if it’s pictures of different people all purporting to be the same “model”, if they live in a far corner of the world and don’t seem to be into art; I just hit “remove follower”. It’s a great feeling to see thousands of followers on your work, sure, but if the algorithm is only going to give a certain number of views to you for free, don’t you want them ALL to be people who care about your work and want to engage with it? So even though I have only 2000 followers, all the people who see my content are actually interested, which allows for more engagement, and ultimately more sales. And more opportunities for friendships to form. I have a few close Instagram friends who I treasure. 

Another tip I have is to be real, honest, and vulnerable in your videos and posts. My most popular post this year so far was a list of “What is ‘in’ for 2024”, where I recommended crying a lot–and loud enough to make your neighbors worried–since that’s what I had been doing since winter began. People relate to your struggles, your insecurities, your silliness, your vulnerability, your fun and play. But keep it succinct, people also have no attention span. Better to do several posts over a few days than one long one. They don’t engage with long ones.

The last tip is to spend a couple bucks on promoted reels and posts. Just do it. You can select like $1 a day, $5 a day, run it for 3-5 days. You get new eyeballs, new followers, and every time I do it my sales tick up. Just budget for that as a business expense. I would rather do that than be at the mercy of Etsy. I want to control my own digital destiny, and that includes sales.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.backyardkiln.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/backyardkiln/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/backyardkiln/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@backyardkiln?lang=en

Image Credits
Shelby Shenkman