building an online pottery studio
There was about a month-long period in July/August of 2021, that I sold my first solo collection of pottery through a shop on my website (this website, actually, albeit a very different iteration of).
For many reasons it wasn’t the right time: I wasn’t mentally stable and my capacities weren’t expansive enough to include packaging and sending and marketing and long-term consistent making-of the pottery itself, and so I took it all down, set aside my other creative projects, focused solely on the job I had at the time, and slowly found stability again.
Roughly three years later, it’s now the end of 2024 and I’m back in my garage-studio making pieces for an upcoming in-person event.
It’s an event that my mom used to do regularly (though because of life things, it had been 7-years!), where little me used to tuck herself in the corner of the room as people flowed in and out of our home, eager to admire and purchase her early pieces. And sometimes I felt brave and sold a few tiles alongside my mom’s vases—I specifically remember one really bold one with a lady bug on it, and another with a portrait of our dog at the time, Tiny Spot, holding an orange ball in his mouth.
So maybe part of my willingness to say, “yes! I’ll do it!” came from the familiarity and comfort in having been introduced to these events at such a young age. It also could have been because time had gone by and I was in between jobs and it had been awhile since I had agreed to a creative experiment as challenging as this one.
To try and better support myself long-term, I decided to document the entire process via A Home for Creating, and in those daily logs I can read into my nervousness around creating consistently again, something I now have more sympathy and admiration for because: of course I felt anxious! I hadn’t done anything like this since mid-2021, when I launched my online pottery shop, married my partner of 8-years, stopped drinking, and was experiencing rapid mood swings that eventually led me to a bipolar diagnosis, all within the span of a few months.
The parallels were too prominent to ignore, and so I did my best to work alongside them. To use my daily logs as a way to touch base with myself and my anxiety, to see how I was doing, and to remind myself that I was safe to create.
That even if I “lost” myself in the process-of, I would know how to find my way back, to begin again and again, because it was something I had been doing my entire adult life (and without access to the tools I have now). And so I kept going. I kept making and making and the Big Pottery Event happened and I got to hear why someone just had to get that piece for their sister, for themselves, for their daughter.
The experience of selling my work in-person changed my entire relationship to creating. It allowed me to move more freely and be more playful and experimental in my work, because while I will always be tempted to speculate, I will never truly know what someone will end up loving, so I might as well prioritize what I’m most excited about making, and adjust as I go.
Soon, and without even realizing it, I was reshaping my relationship to trust. To the way that I had longed to create and express myself.
That lopsided bowl with clouds on it or the mouse dish with mushrooms and strawberries, ended up being a crowd-favorite, even though I had written them off because they didn’t turn out how I had expected (as it turns out, most things never do).
This month marks one year since I started making pottery again, and within this past year, despite all of the self-doubt buzzing around inside of me, I’ve figured out how to make (roughly) 275 pieces of pottery, for 3 different events, and while turning down December’s Big Pottery Event felt necessary, it was still worrisome to be shifting our momentum so suddenly.
And while making pottery to sell online intimidates me to no end, I also know that things are different, that I am different, and that even if everything that could go wrong, went wrong, I’d slowly and gently begin begin again: begin reshaping and building and tending to.
The biggest difference is that I’m not alone: I have a copilot, someone to help map out alternate routes when difficult decisions inevitably have to be made.
To conclude: while we might not have the immediate satisfaction of selling our pieces in-person every single time we release a new collection of work, we are presented with an opportunity to make our pottery more accessible by giving those that want it, the opportunity to buy online, and in turn, maybe even taking some of the pressure off of the pressure we put on ourselves for the 3x yearly events.
It’s all one wild and wonderful experiment.
Thank you for coming along.
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The Studio, co-created by Cory (mother) & Chloe (daughter), is an online studio and shop, set to launch November, 2025.
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