This Artist Says Ambition Is a Trap

I was not ambitious at all in my earlier years and was just very happy to be teaching and making my work and not worried too much about recognition. There was a period I guess in midlife where I wanted to make sure that my work could measure up on the bigger stage of you know the national shows and now I think I'm past that I don't really need to prove anything to myself anymore. I feel like ambition can be a kind of a trap. Hard to say. Oh one big this is a beautiful web. Can you see that guy? I am Jennifer Owen. I'm a potter and a ceramics teacher. I live on Maui. I'm now retired from teaching full-time at UH Maui College. I've always enjoyed teaching and it's been as important to me as making the ceramics that I make. Maui is such a beautiful place. It just feels like an easy place to be happy. I came for a vacation to Kauai. It was because I was living in Oregon and the rain was pretty constant in the winter time there. I fell in love with two things in Hawaii. The tropical fruits which I'd never been exposed to before papayas and lilikois and mangoes and everything else and I fell in love with swimming in the ocean. I would swim in the ocean every single day. After a couple of years on Kauai, I moved to Maui. I think it was January of 81 and moving to Maui it's a friendly place. I probably had more opportunities for friendship and for employment immediately. I got a job teaching at Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center right away so it was a good a good move. I could see right from the beginning that I wasn't going to be a production potter. It's a good thing I make a living as a teacher. It's wonderful to have the freedom of not needing to sell my work. I really value the freedom that gives me. I can take my work any direction I want to. I know what it is I'm trying to make when I begin something but I also like to have the clay show me the direction. If the clay shows me an idea, I'll follow it. I've always admired artists who make political statements and comment on their times and I've rarely done that but on January 6th, I was quite upset by the protests at the Capitol and I finally made a couple of pieces that expressed a little bit of my dismay at what had gone on. The top words are we the people. The second line says better angels of our nature. Third line is a more perfect union. I only made three of these pieces and two of them have been shown and one of them even got an honorable mention in the show that it was in so that was very satisfying. In a way, I've always been a little disappointed in myself that I'm not a contemporary edgy sculptor but I really am inspired by nature. That's the root really of all my work. The texture is an imitation of the way the bamboo grows. Oh, I see a label from when I entered it in a show. I need to trim it so that it'll look as nice as possible which will reveal the spiral colors that are thrown into the clay. I want the color to show since it's going to be in my salt firing. I won't be clear glazing it. I'll be letting the salt put on what's almost like a clear glaze. I do like the excitement of unloading a kiln and not knowing exactly what you're going to see when it comes out. You set up the event for something nice to happen but you have no idea how it's going to turn out. The salt firing, the pieces aren't uniform and most people think that they're imperfect because one side is different from another so the general public isn't really open to that kind of what the Japanese call wabi-sabi where it's a little bit loose and uneven. One time I was juried out of a show with one of the most beautiful pieces I had ever made. I really had loved this piece that had gotten rejected from the show so I signed up for an interview with the juror. When he remembered my piece he just said to me oh that was unattractive and I thought how strange that a piece that I thought was so beautiful was not included in the show simply because he thought it was unattractive. I felt a little cheated. I felt like he should have been able to look beyond his personal taste and evaluate my piece for the technique and the success of my attempt at creating the form but I couldn't really argue with his subjective impression. It's so odd the idea of beauty but I have a very strong sense of what's beautiful to me. I know exactly what I love and yet it's not universal. I don't have an explanation for it. It's a mystery. You can't assume that anybody is going to appreciate what you see and what you make. It doesn't always work out that way. I think art is for the creator more than for anybody else. Now I might be able to get one of these tomatoes to ripen. There's one in there. It's got little holes in it. I don't know who made them. I might get a couple bites out of that little thing. Isn't that delicious? It does seem like potters always have an affinity for gardening as well. I do think there's a connection there. I had a student one time who actually decided to give up pottery because she said she didn't fit in with the pottery crowd because she wasn't really into gardening. This and swimming is well and potting of course as well are all kind of meditative activities and it's a good release for me. Ever since my husband was diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer's I need to stay home most of the time because I need to fix his meals and make sure he's taken care of and also he gets really lonely if I leave for long periods of time but I find that being outside is really healing for me. It's one of the best things I can do. The gifts of my students to me and the gifts that I've been able to give to my students has been the most meaningful part of my life. I didn't have children. I never wanted children and I have a desire to always give to people and being a teacher satisfied that. It was always very, very meaningful. I don't see myself as an artist first. Being an artist has allowed me to be a good teacher. I think that's more important to me than anything else. When people talk about artist block, you don't have to have an idea to begin with. Just get started working and the clay will lead you somewhere. I think also people make the mistake, I know I make the mistake, of thinking you need a whole day or you need three whole hours. You don't actually. If you just have one hour, you can still do something creative. This feels like such a lucky path that I don't, you know, I don't have any desire for a different career or a different path. My vision right now is that I will continue working in my garden and working in my studio and cooking in the kitchen for the rest of my life. Oh hey, here's another one of David Vitarelli's pots. I love being surrounded by handmade objects and using them every day. When they sit on a shelf, sure you get to look at them, but that's not the same, especially with pottery. I think that interaction is what's so unique about pottery. Living in Hawaii, I'm far from my blood relatives. I missed out on family reunions. I don't have those family connections that a lot of people do and I wish I was closer to my family, but I think this is the life I wanted. I do. Lovely. I never really valued a career where you're there to make a lot of money and drudgery, it seems like drudgery. I think freedom and creativity and, you know, maybe not the lap of luxury and lots of money, but it's the life I wanted.