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.
- Peters Valley is about educating our intuition to create more freely
- It is about making a safe place to work, and to share
- To think about words, and what you want to communicate
- To express gratitude
- To ask questions
- PV is about working for discovery rather than product
- To develop ideas and use fundamental building blocks to complete the work
- It is a place to try everything, and figure out what you are doing
- It is a place to understand when art does and does not work
- It is a place to build around others, and in doing so, build confidence
- To be aware of our sensitivities
- To address concepts of form, surface, and idea
- To balance between the physical and the visual
- Students are pushed to ask where their sense of beauty and taste originate
- To find beauty in organization
- To use simple materials
- To work hard, and see results
- To engage in peer review, research, and discussion
- It is a place to meet new friends, and reconnect with old acquaintances
- It is a place to foster your love of learning
- To practice patience with developing technique
- To test your limits and break through boundaries
- Peters Valley encourages engagement in the natural world
- To make mistakes intentional
- And to master a material
- To disregard what you are good at and focus on what you may learn
- It is a place to create themes, initiate and investigate
- To build your bibliography
- And to focus on the sweep of a bowl
- To collect what happens beyond a photograph.
- To be resourceful
- To make “do-dads”
- To be considerate
- To heal
- To help others
- It is about working with the earth to become connected to the community
- To increase your vocabulary
- To understand what you are trying to get back to
- To seek truths
- To begin with an idea
- And then stop to think
- It is a place to understand the meaning of different
- To be dependable and selfless
- To take a technique and push it until it becomes your own
- To understand an object’s story, and our own personal stories
- To create metaphor
- Peters Valley allows you a place to make work for you!
- To appreciate small gestures
- To gain inspiration
- To see the stars
- It is a place to continually try new things
- It is a place to question levels of information versus wisdom
- To focus on the details
- To realize the full potential of a curve
- PV is a place to create something done before, and something new
- To capture visual breadth
- It is about understanding how you relate to art and life
- To play
- To find your voice
- To put your notes away
- To develop a personal rhythm
- To let go of insecurities
- To let your competitive nature out with a healthy dose of badminton, kick ball, or basketball
- To open your heart and mind to others
- 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.