Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Today is the last of our Future of Fine Crafts guest series from our friends at the Peters Valley Craft Center, which is set to celebrate its 40th anniversary as a national center for fine craft education.

Special thanks to the contributors to this series: Kristin Muller, Kathe Brannon and Susan Kornacki, as well as today’s guest blogger Julia Whitney who shares with us her assistantship experience from the last 10 weeks. All we have to say is: wow, what a list!

My name is Julia Whitney and I have lived and worked for ten weeks in the Delaware River Gap, assisting nine workshops for the Ceramic Department at Peter’s Valley Craft Center. There are student assistants for each department, chosen by applications, from all over the country.

Traveling from Alton, Illinois a small river town and suburb of St. Louis Missouri, my experience at PV has far exceeded my expectations. I work facilitating ceramic workshops, helping instructors and students, and maintaining equipment, and overall studio conditions. This includes eight to twelve hour days, six days a week. After a long days work I enjoy speeding off on my bicycle to meet fellow assistants to pick black raspberries, and swim in the eddies of the Delaware River. Afterwards we head back to our residence for long conversations at the ever-popular picnic table, or bike back to the studio to make art.

Being the final week of my assistantship at PV, I sat down to reflect on what made the experiences so worthwhile to my growth. Following is a list comprised of points that resonated with me from each workshop that I took directly out of my sketchbook. I think that each of these notations captures a little bit of the essence of the center and what it is that instructors, students and staff take back into their everyday lives.

1. Peters Valley is about educating our intuition to create more freely
2. It is about making a safe place to work, and to share
3. To think about words, and what you want to communicate
4. To express gratitude
5. To ask questions
6. PV is about working for discovery rather than product
7. To develop ideas and use fundamental building blocks to complete the work
8. It is a place to try everything, and figure out what you are doing
9. It is a place to understand when art does and does not work
10. It is a place to build around others, and in doing so, build confidence
11. To be aware of our sensitivities
12. To address concepts of form, surface, and idea
13. To balance between the physical and the visual
14. Students are pushed to ask where their sense of beauty and taste originate
15. To find beauty in organization
16. To use simple materials
17. To work hard, and see results
18. To engage in peer review, research, and discussion
19. It is a place to meet new friends, and reconnect with old acquaintances
20. It is a place to foster your love of learning
21. To practice patience with developing technique
22. To test your limits and break through boundaries
23. Peters Valley encourages engagement in the natural world
24. To make mistakes intentional
25. And to master a material
26. To disregard what you are good at and focus on what you may learn
27. It is a place to create themes, initiate and investigate
28. To build your bibliography
29. And to focus on the sweep of a bowl
30. To collect what happens beyond a photograph.
31. To be resourceful
32. To make “do-dads”
33. To be considerate
34. To heal
35. To help others
36. It is about working with the earth to become connected to the community
37. To increase your vocabulary
38. To understand what you are trying to get back to
39. To seek truths
40. To begin with an idea
41. And then stop to think
42. It is a place to understand the meaning of different
43. To be dependable and selfless
44. To take a technique and push it until it becomes your own
45. To understand an object’s story, and our own personal stories
46. To create metaphor
47. Peters Valley allows you a place to make work for you!
48. To appreciate small gestures
49. To gain inspiration
50. To see the stars
51. It is a place to continually try new things
52. It is a place to question levels of information versus wisdom
53. To focus on the details
54. To realize the full potential of a curve
55. PV is a place to create something done before, and something new
56. To capture visual breadth
57. It is about understanding how you relate to art and life
58. To play
59. To find your voice
60. To put your notes away
61. To develop a personal rhythm
62. To let go of insecurities
63. To let your competitive nature out with a healthy dose of badminton, kick ball, or basketball
64. To open your heart and mind to others
65. And to speak confidently.

I want to say thank you to Peters Valley for making this list possible, as well as to all the instructors I gained these insights from; they include: Kristin Muller, Shanna Fliegel, Joyce Michaud, Chris Staley, Jeff Oestreich, Leigh Taylor-Mickelson, John Dix, Arthur Gonzalez, and Takeshi Yasuda. Thank you to my fellow assistants, as well as the students for creating such a rich and fun learning environment! And a very special thanks to the department head of ceramics, Bruce Dehnert and his wife Kulvinder Kaur Dhew for allowing me the opportunity to grow as an artist and as a person. It has truly been a unique and invaluable experience.

Please visit the Peters Valley Craft Center website for complete information about the center, including their workshops, craft fair and store.

Welcome to the Future of Fine Crafts Mondays! Peters Valley Craft Center (a Dodge grantee), getting set to celebrate its 40th anniversary, is a national center for fine craft education where people’s lives are enriched through the exploration and execution of fine craft.

Located in the Delaware Water Gap, Peters Valley offers 2- to 5-day workshops in blacksmithing, ceramics, fibers, fine metals, photography, wood and special topics including printmaking books & paper, drawing, and glass. The Center provides immersion experiences that appeal to anyone who wants to be a part of a creative, learning, and solutions-seeking community. We will follow four artist-students during the month of July as they reflect on their experience, art medium, skill development and works of art created during recent classes at Peters Valley Craft Center.

Our first story comes from Kristin Muller, Executive Director at the Center who is an artist in her own right and was drawn to Pat Hickman’s workshop on Tensile Translucence.

Pat Hickman

On Friday evenings at 7:30, visiting instructors and students convene in the Bevan’s Church for an evening slide presentation. It is my favorite time of the week because I get to introduce our summer studio assistants who, in turn, introduce our visiting instructors with a brief bio. Each instructor presents images of their work and a ten minute lecture. Depending on the week, we have anywhere from 4 to 8 instructors presenting what they make and why they make.

Time seems to fly as you listen and see art history in the making. Our fabulous instructors come from all walks of life. They are teachers, makers, inventors, and innovators who work in mediums such as clay, fine metals, wood, fiber, photography, glass, encaustic, polymer, basketry, found objects and more. It is a treat to hear people speak about what has inspired a specific direction in their work.

Pat Hickman’s presentation of her knotted and stretched work simply blew my mind and here is why. She ventured to Alaska, curious about how the native people live and work and the materials they use. She shared what she discovered, a raincoat on display that was translucent, light weight and totally water proof made of walrus gut. Yes—walrus gut. The raincoat was very elegant and had an ephemeral quality about it. During her time in Alaska, Pat managed to learn more about how gut is processed and what it required to be worked.

Pat Hickman’s work with hog gut

Upon her return from the Alaskan adventure, she proceeded to investigate hog gut (common sausage casing) to see how it could be worked. Pat has developed an impressive body of work from wall installations to sculptural vessels, to architectural installations made of hog gut. I admit to feeling a bit squeamish about the subject but I was so taken by the delicate translucency that I approached Pat after the presentations and told her about a series of ceramic sculptures I had made two years ago. It was a breakthrough series for me. They are ceramic shapes that are very organic, almost cocoon like, that I call my ‘Papoose Series’. I had hoped to incorporate mixed media into them and was looking for a proper material to lace or close up the space left open in the forming process. I shared with Pat this spark of curiosity about the hog gut. She kindly invited me to join her class the following day.

I joined the group on Saturday afternoon and then again on Sunday because during the night I was seeing sculptures in my dreams. Pat set me up with a needle and a section of clean gut and showed me how to sew with it and how to stretch it. Students were using basketry materials to make shapes and incorporate knotted gut and stretched gut to the forms. In addition people were making pages for books, coloring the gut and making things such as jewelry to abstract sculptures. The group seemed entranced with the material. They had raided the metal scrap pile outside the blacksmithing studio and were redefining objects as they transformed into dancing tools with gut, and lace and paper.

What fascinated me the most was the simplicity of the membrane and it’s responsiveness. Most craft mediums are defined by a tradition. In clay for example there is a linear process through which one learns to manipulate clay on the potter’s wheel. There is a rich history to support certain aspects of the learning, but with hog gut, aside from the Native Alaskan traditions, there really isn’t an art tradition. Pat Hickman has been an innovator of sorts. Therefore the investigation took on a very free and abstract exploration.

Papoose by Kristin Muller

On the last day of class, during the final critique, I was simply stunned. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Six women had each made at least three significant, interesting, profound works.

Peters Valley students’ work

Every student seemed to have found new directions to continue investigating on their own. I for one have had dreams in which I see new work that incorporated the hog gut, and I was so grateful for the generosity from the instructor and the students who shared their materials, their support and their feedback with me.

As the Executive Director I spend most of my time in the office, on the phone, the computer or meeting with people. Sharing in this experience was a gift and an affirmation that Peters Valley Craft Center is a very special place. It is a place where you may be surprised at what will inspire you.