How to price your work

This picture shows a decision being made. We make beautiful (we think) jugs – people buy them regularly for milk or for flowers, as gifts or for themselves. We are still making them, but have had to decide not to sell them anymore in shops and galleries. We think the commission taken by owners is fair and reasonable, given the work they do in advertising, connecting with customers, displaying our work so beautifully.

However, if we sell our jugs at £45, and receive only £25 – £30, it’s not enough to cover our time, materials, firings, postage or delivery. It’s sad though as we love making and selling them, and you love to buy them.

So, this image reflects a decision. The extra work taking a piece from a vase to a jug – creating and adding a handle, cutting and inserting a spout, drying carefully to void warping or a crack in the handle, ensuring everything lines up and will pour straight (we know how important this is). So, how about we make some special little vases instead, the same shape as the jug? Still with the seatree poetry and imagery, but at a price we can afford to sell in galleries.

Stay tuned to see the finished pieces.

The way we work out pricing is by using the Scottish Artist Union artists rates, currently £42 an hour. A jug will take around half an hour to make and finish well, £21, another ten minutes of glazing, £7, a small amount for clay and glaze, say £2, a contribution towards firing, maybe £2 per jug, say £3 towards posting to a gallery. These are rough estimates, not with my notebook to hand, but gives you an idea, a rough total of £35!

 

 

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How to stop clay from cracking

Recently, I was mentoring a potter who told me that the person he was learning from had told him not to bother with exhibitions as it cost too much money. This isn’t true. Obviously, you can choose to hire a space and pay for advertising and hope people come. but mostly, you work with a gallery who curates an exhibition you have been invited to do or applied for. It made me think about how the first things you hear stick, as if they are the fundamental truth.

I was told when I started pottery that clay fresh from the bag did not need wedging. Follow on, years of pots cracking while drying…

I added a cloth above them and wrapped them in plastic. Cracked.

I dried them in a box to avoid draughts. Cracked.

I only used fresh clay to make sure it had all the fine particles in. Cracked.

I added epsom salts. Cracked.

I made them the same width all the way up instead of narrow at the top. Cracked.

I dried them upside down. And the right way up. Cracked.

I made them while the clay was softer. Cracked.

I tried new clays. Cracked.

Eventually, the clay provider (the wonderful Commercial Clays in Stoke-on-Trent) said, You are wedging the clay, aren’t you? Well yes, if I’ve recycled it…

It turns out that in the seventies, when clay started being de-aired and piped into bags, rumour spread that the clay no longer needed wedging. It was an older potter that told me this too. But it is wrong. The clay still has layers in it and the molecules need stirring up. I don’t have the scientific words. Just the relief…

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Wedding favours

Twice recently, we’ve been asked to make wedding favours. It’s not something we advertise, but often comes through connection – just the way we like it! The first request is for some ‘words to see you through the week’ – one for each guest. The brides are choosing their list of words then we will make them together. Wonderful! They have bought our work before and met us at events, so it’s a real privilege to be making these.

The second request came from some new people in the village, who we met at a village beach picnic. We are invited, with a number of other folks they met, to their wedding, as ‘future friends’. Lovely! They both experience health issues and the ‘spoon theory’ has been important to them, so each guest will receive a teeny pot of local honey (from our neighbour) with one of our little spoons attached.

We’ve never made spoons before! Not even one! So this is a fun challenge – here is one of the prototypes (it’s meant to be that teeny). I enjoyed experimenting and also researching – checking that stoneware spoons are safe to use if not glazed, which they are. So I made a little batch, although one of the brides may help make the final spoons, as she is missing pottery, depending on energy.

Do get in touch is you would like to talk to us about your wedding plans and how we might be able to help you create something special, or for us to create them to your design. We love the shared creativity.

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Engaging through making

Here at seatree, we have always tried to make art that not only responds to our context, but also digs into the grist of things. Both of us have a background working amongst excluded groups of people and feel passionate about social justice. At the same time, our decision to live and work through our creative practice was a deliberate attempt at a more sustainable lifestyle, more connected to the earth in all its beauty and brokenness. These two great justice movements- social and economic- can be seen throughout our work.

There are many dangers in making this kind of art. Firstly, it is easy to get all preachy and self righteous, so as to end up making a kind of woke propaganda.

There is also the problem of crisis trauma. Michaela read a post on FB the other day which said something like this “My desire to stay well informed about world events is fundamentally at odds with my desire to stay sane’. In other words, making art about justice issues may wear you down, even to the point of trauma.

Our son–in-law, who is also a ceramicist, spent years as an oceanographer, working in the arctic, trying to understand why the ice was melting much quicker than expected. In the end, it was making him ill. For him, the art he makes out of these experiences is healing, but staying in that place of protest can be exhausting for others.

Why do we do it then?

For us, the answer is simple. We must. In sesking to live well in a world that has so much darkness just now, we feel that we have to try to push towards something better, something more loving and more hopeful. The only way we can do this is through art- our pottery and our poetry.

In this way, art becomes a way of engaging – a way to connect with our times and context that gives some protective distance and allows room for making our objection to injustice.

Of course, with seatree pieces, it is always the poetry that comes first, and there are many poems that have never found their way onto the clay. We thought we would share one of them here.

It was written whilst Chris was working as a social worker, with families who were struggling. Beautiful children whose prospects were bleak. A societal response that seemed entirely inadequate.  This poems trys to say all of those things, whilst at the same time saying none of them.

 

Welfare State

 

The sofa split some years ago

The gas fire hisses as if

through broken teeth.

Colin tries to stir up hope

On the Baby Belling, whilst the TV screen sucks

the kids in like flecks of dust.

 

A manufactured crisis for some pop star wannabe

Stabs out from the fat old tube.

The crowd scream – no wonder.

And Colin stares into the tangled noodles wondering

What might become of the children

For not one of them can sing.

 

But their faces, lit by cathode light

Are beautiful.

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What comes first, the poem or the pot?

We often gets asked when at fairs or pop-up shops, what comes first? The poetry or the pottery? The answer is always, it depends…

The whole style that we have developed started with the poetry, which Chris has written since he was a child. I (Michaela) started having a go at pottery, first making decorations, beads, little landscapes.. But I wanted away to put one of Chris’s poems that I really loved on display and wondered if it would be possible on clay. And it worked. And the whole thing grew..

We both do pottery now, but to start with it was just me. I would make the shape, for example a bowl, a jug, or a slab of clay for creating an artwork on, then choose a poem to put on the clay, or part of a poem. I will decide where the words will go – inside or outside, flowing around the top or down the sides, depending on how I want the words to be portrayed on the clay.

Following this comes the imagery, which can be sketched in to the clay or by adding colour and texture with underglazes or glazes playing their part too.

Hopefully, each element is equally treated and the whole thing comes together, like on this pot, with the words, will the river run forever, sparkling with the splash of light and life..?

Yesterday, a friend called in the pottery and she said I like what you are making, and I said, oh, Chris made them, I’m just putting the poetry on them, and she challenged me on that and I think she was right. It’s all an important part, in whatever order it happens.

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Art as evolution

A post from Chris, reflecting on the evolution of some of the seatree elemental pieces.   Over the past few years I have been grappling with a new craft. Even though we have run a business making pottery for about a decade, Michaela was the potter really whilst just worked around the edges, helping out with some of the donkey work. My areas of creativity were outside the use of actual clay. Then it all changed. First, I began working with a different clay body- with much more ‘grog’ mixed in (ground down fired clay.) This was much more forgiving than the white stoneware clay that Michaela loves so much, more plastic and willing to hold shape – or at least I think so. Michaela might protest. These qualities of the grogged clay mean that building bigger vessels is that bit easier, but also this kind of clay also has the capacity to cope with so much more thermal shock, meaning that alternative firing methods are possible… so I started making big old pots and trying to fire them in pits dug in the garden, with mixed success!
Then I discovered raku.   Time for a short introduction to clay firing. Most pottery is fired in kilns, either electic, gas or more rarely, wood fired. All three methods introduce variations to the process and to how the glazes in particular react, due to the conditions created, for example the degree of oxygen present during the firing. Using a purpose build kilns allows careful control of the temperature, which in the case of our electric kiln will step up around 100 degrees per hour, then cool down over a long period of time. This means that failures in the form of cracking (or even exploding) pots are minimised and colours from glazes are reliable and predictable. There are other methods however, most of which require specialist clays. These include pit firing/barrel firing, saggar firing and most drramatic of all, raku firing. Raku, meaning ‘easy” in Japanese, involves heating up a previously fired pot to 1000 degrees in an insulated container- typically a barrel or a dustbin – using a gas burner. The pot is then removed and placed in a sealed contained along with combustable materials. The oxides and glazes applied to the pot will then react in the oxygen depleted conditions to form bright colours, crackles and textures.
  The thing is about this kind of pottery, it is always shifting, changing – it never quite arrives at a destination. It is art by experiementation and evolution. Perhaps all art is like this, but let me explain what I mean. Functional pottery might be understood as the means to perfect a process in order to create a usable shape. As such, potters are developing their shapes and glazes to make their versions of archetypal forms. There is art and beauty in this that is beyond my skills. I look in wonder at many of the things that people are able to make. I hold their mugs in my hands as if they were grails. This is not what I am trying to do.
The pottery I am making is not really in puruit of shape or colour (even though both are essential elements) rather they are chasing after meaning. So when I make a pot, I am not asking if it is a ‘good’ pot, I am asking if it carrys any meaning for me. Has it told a story? Has it opened up a space or framed something that asks questions that I find important?
Let me tell you, this kind of art can drive you mad. It is rarely sarisfied and never completed. There are no real reference points for comparison, other than whether someone is prepared to pay money for it. The evolution thing I mentioned before suggests an ascendancy, in which we get ‘better’ and certainly I have learned through lots of mistakes and failures, so that I at least make different mistakes now rather than the same ones. I am also slightly more able to steer the chaos, but as I look back on some of the things I made previously, I wonder if I have gone in the wrong direction since. Perhaps I should have made more of the same?
But who am I kidding… this is not an option. The quest I am on is always after meaning, and so I have to search for these in new shapes, new ideas.
I have a secret weapon however, in that our pots use poetry. This alows me to set up an interplay between words, form and colour in such a way as to gather meaning more directly. In other words, I can cheat.
One last thing about this evolutionary quest- it is entirely addictive. There may come a time when I am done with it – music was like this for me once – but for now, if a couple of days goes by without me spending significant amounts of time in pursuit of my clay meanings, I am anxious for a fix.
In the spirit of charity, it is possible you may be interested in helping out this addict in his continuing quest. Some of our work is available in the website shop, here. Much of our larger work is simply too big for us to make available through an on-line shop – It is not really ‘postable’ after all – these are more likely to be things we take to ceramics shows or place in galleries (and we work with some fantastic galleries!) Perhaps the best way though might be to come and visit us. Drop us a line first and see what we have in our storage shed. There may well be a bargain or two to be had!
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