Part of my work to prepare for a talk like this involves piles and piles of slides. What are those, you ask? Well, when I was a wee kid at Art School, slides were how we documented our work. Galleries only took slides in those days- no websites, no digital. My, how things have changed. So needless to say, I'm editing down the selection of slides I have of work circa 1996-2002 into digital format for my presentation.
It's been fun, nostalgic, and painful. I haven't looked at these slides in ages. Some of the work makes me laugh, some of it just makes me cringe, but most of all, I'm amazed at the amount of work I produced for my BFA. I've always been on the prolific side- I'd sooner make an idea happen then sketch it or just conceptualize it. That has always been my way of 'problem solving' as a maker. It's in all these sketches that I would start being able to define and refine the work appropriately.
Fast forward to when I launched my website and started as 'dahlhaus' and my work looks so very different. Since having kids with limited time in the studio just to 'make sketches', I started with a concept and an idea, created a framework and came up with totally different work. Where as the work that I did in school has all these influences of potters I was looking at, my current work has really different influences that are outside the medium. I kind of like that- but sometimes wonder why it took me so long to think of it. We all have our journey in life, some of us just take longer to get where we need to go. At any rate, it will give me lots to talk about during my 1 hour lecture :-)!
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