One of my biggest stressors when running the production was time. For years I felt like I was always behind so I always had to rush.  It was clear I was letting everyone down by making everyone wait. Hurry to make all the things, hurry to answer the email, hurry to ship the things, its holiday season GET CRACKING!!!  The people need their pieces!!  AYYYY!!!

Grateful for the orders and that I had work to ship, still, I had to make it stop. It seeped into every aspect of my life. Not only was I always behind on shipping orders, but people were consistently telling me I was terrible at time management until it became torture that I inflicted on myself. After years of that being slowly but constantly dripped on me I began to believe it and soon my days became self flogging festivals of inadequacy and shame. I have talked about this before, but jeezum crow. It was pretty ingrained.

Its been something I have been consciously trying to change.  Giving myself grace to rest and take my time when I do things, and know that things just take the time they take. It has not been easy to break the pattern without feeling guilt and hearing those people's voices in my head to hurry and be efficient and so on.  But like any practice I just kept trying, and when I noticed I was starting to spin out I would try to just slow down.  I wasn't sure it was working.

But...I noticed a shift the other day, after getting to the studio quite a bit later than originally planned. But it was fine...I didn't stress out or get frantic. I just strolled in and got to doing the things.  I worked with mindfulness and patience, dare I say JOY, even, and had fun with my studio mates in the process.  I followed the process where it led me, and did some other things I hadn't planned on.  When I started to tire I told myself I did what I could for the day, and put the rest aside for the next day. At a certain point while I was working I was just like hey...I think its working!

Most noted was my calmness, my enjoyment, and how it felt like it did when I first began in my little 10x10 studio.  I didn't have anyone's voice in my ear telling me to git 'er done.  The voice was my own, and was forgiving and kind.  I flitted from task to task, and if the clay stayed in the mold for a minute longer than it should have I just let it be so.  The pieces are handmade, after all. There will be variations. I am not a machine. There might be a little lump in the wall of that other one too, because I missed that little chunk because I forgot to sieve. Oops. Shrug.

Production and art.  Are they two sides of the same coin?  I don't know.  Maybe?  Really what I think is that art and craft (which for my purposes here are one thing...maybe they are always one thing...more on that later), and production are two very different things.  You cannot be both an artist and a producer at the same time. (By 'production' I mean making the same exact thing over and over again with as little deviation of one from the next as possible.) Being a repetitive and prolific maker of the same things over and over does not an artist make.  Yes, what I was making were things I had designed myself, but that does not make any difference.

I remember being at a gift shop in an art museum, long before I became a production maker, and looking at this little plastic doll in a package, which was designed no doubt by an artist, but they were clearly mass produced and plastic in a package with plastic and cardboard. There were many of the same on the hanger. I remember being a little confused by them, and I asked the woman who worked there about them and she just said "Well, its art."  And I remember thinking, No, it isn't.  Its commodity. The idea may have been art, but the product was not.

So, I'm not sure that commodity is art. If the production of what you design is not really that different than what is on the shelf at Target, then maybe it isn't. I guess it starts with art, but if you are making it yourself, over and over again, like a machine just repeating things verbatim, then in my experience, in the end you are just a slave to the thing being produced and the people that want it. Other people's expectations and timelines become the daily bread.

In his book on such matters, 'Art and Life', John Ruskin says of man, you either make an artist or a machine of him.  He wrote during the Renaissance when production was just becoming a thing, and he speaks elegantly about how making someone do the same thing over and over again basically steals the life out of them. Great read. And true to this day.

One of the worst consequences of the time issue came because there was no space for any new creativity. Any variation, or veering in any other direction, sent shockwaves through the system, and the main question became "Well how does that fit into our production schedule?"  And literally this sentence was said to me "If you make that special thing it will take away from your production and we will be behind and all the people will be mad".  Any time spent on exploring other designs or shapes or mediums took away from time in the production realm, which is what brought in the cashish and paid for the space and the people and the heat. 

This slowly eroded my ability to really be able to give an idea the time it needs to evolve into something worthwhile. And I knew it, but was kinda stuck on the treadmill.

Now, almost 2 years after stopping production I can feel that all the work I've been doing to learn to trust my own timelines and process is paying off.  I am not judging myself for my slowness, or my diversions. I know that they are worthwhile. I know that this is how art gets made. I am not after perfection, I am after authenticity and curiosity. I am after quirks. And weirdness. And stepping out of line. I am for trying all the things, and letting them take my time away, so that I don't realize four hours have passed while I made squiggles on paper. It is so fucking liberating I can't even tell you. I don't even have road rage anymore. Mostly...there are still plenty of idiots out there on the roads.  But I think you get my point.

So to answer my own question, no. I don't really think production making and art or craft making can exist on the same plane.  At least not for me.

Cheers to making more slow art!