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Camille Beckles | Episode 718
Camille Beckles is the creative person behind Camille at the Wheel. Camille at the Wheel is a collection of handmade ceramics with a bent towards beautiful utility. Camille loves cups that fit nicely in your hand, bowls that hold just the right amount of popcorn, and mugs that are perfectly sized for morning coffee. Camille’s hope is that her work brings you joy and usefulness, in equal measure.
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So you are not a full-time potter right now, correct?
That is technically true. It doesn’t always feel that way but yes, I am not a full-time potter and it is not my 9-5 so to speak.
How much time of your life are you devoting to your ceramics?
In terms of a percentage, I go several times a week in the evening and almost every weekend day, so I am not so great at math but it’s a pretty significant chunk. Pretty much any free time that I have, if I am not spending it with my partner, I am spending it at the wheel.
So you are not able to make where you live, you have to go to a studio that is basically “rented space” by buying to time to be a part of that studio. Is that accurate?
That’s right.
Did you, when you were doing ceramics, did you see this as something that could be bigger than what the studio would allow?
I didn’t see it that way when I first started. I wanted to create something that would allow for the hobby to sustain itself financially and so my first goal was always to make work that I loved and make work that was high enough quality that I felt comfortable selling it to people. But at its core it needed to be something that I could stand behind, a design that I really loved, a form that I really loved, something to me that really showcased my skill and my dedication to being good at ceramics first and foremost. So creating things that I loved, and selling them such that I was making enough of a profit for the hobby to sustain itself. That was my initial goal. As I took on more business and more interest developed it became clear that it was going to be harder for me to meet the demand with the studio I had set up previously. I switched studios recently, and so it was difficult for me to keep up in terms of the logistics of it. Now things have changed such that I am closer to home with my studio so the travel time has diminished, which might be a bad thing actually because there’s not as much of a barrier of entry for me to get to the studio, but I have been able to significantly ramp up my operations because of that. And in terms of the impact of how much work I am creating on a day to day basis at the studio, I think having more exposure online via Instagram, via my website, things like that, has allowed me to sort of expand my reach beyond just the walls of where I make my work.
In order to do this kind of a gig, do you have to be conscientious of being a good time manager?
Yes, which is difficult because even though I am a project manager, my title is senior program manager and there are a lot of project management components involved in that. So even though my day job is as a project manager I am actually pretty terrible at project managing my personal life. I think there is a part of me that rebels against needing to be orderly 100 percent of the time and I am pretty orderly for 40 to 50 hours a week and live a little bit more of a relaxed schedule the rest of the time, but yes, I am absolutely conscious of my time. In part because there are business considerations. If I am spending an hour making a mug that going to be a really expensive mug that I need to sell to recoup those costs, but in part because as much as I love ceramics, as much as I love my day job, there are other things that are important to me that I want to make sure I am making time for. Like my friends, like my family, like my fiancé, and so I try to be conscious of time so that I am not wholly consumed by any one thing and I can dedicate enough time to other areas of my life that are important.
Does it require that you have to develop leadership skills to be able to make that bigger impact?
That is an interesting question. I think it requires…I am not sure if I would say that leadership is exactly the right word. It definitely requires intentionality. And it requires making decisions about what you want and then sticking to those decisions. It’s really easy to be swayed by what’s popular and by what sells really well and by what gets the most amount of interaction on a social media platform and all that stuff is great information that provides valuable data for how you want to run your business but it can also control you in a way that is really unhealthy and that can stifle creativity. And that is not a unique or novel thought. Plenty of people have arrived at that conclusion before I did, but I think it points to the importance of being really intentional about what you are doing and I think that people can tell if you are just kind of banging something out, route production that your heart is not really in in any fashion. I think at some point that is going to come through. What I hope is that despite the fact that my hands are kind of in a lot of buckets, that my love for the craft still comes through in the final product and also in what you are seeing online. I try to be really intentional about what sorts of things I am sharing and how that might contribute to whatever impact that I might have.
What has been one of the things that has been a relief for you during this time?
This is going to be a really silly answer. My partner and I, we got stuck half way across the country around this time last year. We were both traveling for work and we were away from New York City right as the pandemic was really crushing down on the city and the city was about to shut down. So rather than coming back to New York we ended up staying where we were, thinking we would be there for a few weeks and we ended up being there for four months. And we ended up acquiring a car along the way and drove back to New York with that car and so as new car owners I have found a tremendous amount of competitive joy in parallel parking in New York City. (laughter) There are a lot of things I love about having a car. I moved to New York City so I wouldn’t need a car, like I loved not needing a car. I love public transportation. I love the idea that the purpose of urban life is that you it’s pedestrian friendly and bicycle friendly and I have a bike and all those other things but in a time when the subway did not feel so safe we felt very fortunate to have a car to be able to get around, in addition to loving being in the car and blasting music and being able to drive places I also have found a tremendous amount of joy in finding the perfect spot. And perfecting the art of what I call, and I probably shouldn’t say this in public, but I think it is a fairly common New York City thing, the art of the tap back, where you are kind of wiggling your car into that space that’s just big enough for you to fit. And I just derive an incredible amount of joy from getting our car into a spot that seems impossible but I make it work.
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