Tim Christensen

  I started to make pots in my mother and father’s basement when I was out in Ohio for a week following a post-layoff-finding-myself fishing trip to the Florida Keys.  I asked mom to teach me to throw on this old kick wheel in her basement, she showed me a few things and then went to work. When she had come home that evening, I had made some cups and bowls, and a few plates.  The next day, I had met Phyllis Blair Clark at The Functional Ceramics conference in Wooster, OH.. The Event was going on, and Roberta Looney, the director of Wayne Center for the Arts, which hosted the event, encouraged me to poke my head in and watch.  I did, and pretty much decided to be a potter.  I went home that night and asked my mom to show me to make something with a lid, and the next day made some carved jars and a casserole.  They were centered, but lacking in form and confidence.

I went home with about 20 pots, and started painting houses until I figured out how to make a creative life for myself. I was back to Ohio to pick up the wheel and kiln a few moths later, and tried to teach myself how to make pots for about six months, not really getting anywhere, but really enjoying what I knew.  A potter opened a studio down the street from the two bedroom apartment that Theresa, my wife, and I shared, and I stopped in on her first day of business to inquire about classes, which I signed up for in early July, 1999.  I took my first lesson with Tamsin Whitehead, and knew that I needed to be a potter.  I learned more in that lesson than I had been able to teach myself in six months, and endeavored to keep that pace of progress for as long as I could.

I started taking a class on clay sculpture from Al Jaeger, at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and it gave me some really good ideas as to how to work with clay with more in mind than function.  I was making functional pottery, brightly colored and fairly simple. I was starting to work with clay as a sculptural medium, and was accepted in to the League of NH Craftsmen and New Hampshire Art Association, both for pinch pots, the following spring (2001).  My functional work also started to settle down, as Theresa joined the business and started formulating a way to make a living as a potter. That first year was very scary, as we both were working in the pottery full time and had no real safety net, besides our friends, family, and customers.  But, it was working, and we both took turns being the stable and confident partner when the other was scared.  We were learning and working a ton, but it was paying of.  The sales were coming well, the work looked better and better, and I was winning awards for both my functional and sculpture work.  It was very rewarding.

The jump to the black and white work came in December of 2003, right after our open studio sale, and three weeks before Christmas.  I went out to the studio, looked at the list of work that had to be made for the stores, and felt very depressed.  How was it that I had left the corporate world of repetition to find myself feeling the same way in a totally different setting?  I went back inside, and told Theresa that I was not going to be making all that work that the stores were waiting for, that I understood that they  would be really upset, but I felt the work lacked life, and it lacked life because my heart wasn’t in it anymore.  Of course, this was going to cost me some accounts, and hindsight it wound up costing me all of my accounts, but the work that I was doing and the way I was doing it was not sustainable.  I spent the next tree weeks working on five very nice and very large bowls which had been sitting on my shelf since seeing Mark Bell make gorgeous forms at the Functional Ceramics conference eight months earlier.  They were graceful, made of porcelain, and very thin. I covered the surface with a black slip I had developed for a steel and porcelain sculpture of a crow, and started to draw through the black to get the white clay beneath. I spent two days on each pot, and they were the best things I had ever made: specific, timeless, beautiful, and approachable.  Except for the occasional panicky return of functional.  Which never lasted more than a few days, I have been making black and white pots ever since, which is three years.  I am getting better as I get deeper into the technique of sgraffito, and probably would stop if I wasn’t.  I am starting to see my sculptural background seep in, as well as a renewed interest in altering.

My work is narrative, specifically illustrated, sometimes spiritual, often funny, and understandable.  I make pots about the times in which we live, and the challenges of living in the world in which we are divorced from the natural world around us.  I make my work to be appreciated by those who know a lot or a little about pottery or art, and make it with those hopes that some of these pots will survive longer than me or the culture in which we live, and will still be as pertinent and relevant that as it is now.

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