A Board Member of Studio Potter | Hayne Bayless | Episode 859

Hayne Bayless | Episode 859

Growing up in Seattle, Hayne Bayless first got interested in clay when he found an old potter’s wheel and kiln in a corner of the high school art room. The art teacher knew enough about pottery to point him to Leach’s A Potter’s Book, and that became his guide. Other than lessons with a potter in Tokyo as a late teen, Hayne managed to avoid any formal education in ceramics.

Hayne abandoned wheel-throwing early on, lured by the freedom that hand-building offers. He set up his first studio in a tiny basement he shared with a washer and dryer, a stack of snow tires, mice and the snakes that ate them. The workspace amounted to a little more than a hundred square feet. To navigate the cramped quarters he sometimes had to slide sideways, and since then it’s been Sideways Studio. It also applies to a certain way of looking at things; instead of encountering an idea head-on, you might approach it from a different angle, even sideways. It can help avoid the traps of your own assumptions and biases. His studio is larger now and still cluttered, but he doesn’t have to walk sideways.

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Why is Studio Potter magazine important to the ceramics world?

The clay community I think is pretty unique in the wider realm of craft communities. Maybe it’s that I have blinders on but it just seems like is such an open, sharing, generous bunch of people and so we need all of the vehicles that we can find to get that information together and to tell our stories. That’s really what it’s about, telling our stories, and I think that’s what Studio Potter does best.

It’s been around for about 50 years, is that accurate?

Yup.

Did the free media of the internet, did that impact the circulation and become the reason why the model had to change from what you call dead tree publication to now electronic?

It was a really hair tearing and heart reding decision to make that switch from an actual publication that you hold in your hands to digital. And there were a lot of factors that went into making that decision, but the funny thing is that it actually has increased our “circulation”. We are now, according to the metrics, and how these things get tabulated, 15 to 20 thousand people see Studio Potter every month. Which is mind boggling because that is one or two hundred times as many or even more than we had before.

What kind of people volunteer to keep this publication alive?

Most of them are makers. I would say almost all of them are makers of some stripe or another but they are really all committed to keeping the flame burning and nobody ever imagines that we are going to be to competition Ceramics Monthly or Art and Perception or any of the others. That’s just not what we do and not even what we aspire to. We have a niche and we are very happy with the niche.

What’s the average life span or tenure of a board member?

That’s would be a very hard thing to pin down. I am probably one of the longest remaining members at this point and I think I’ve been there for ten years. Every board is different and there’s no rules and nothing that says you have to do it this way or that way. Some boards have term limits which has advantages and disadvantages. We do not have term limits. It’ snot easy to come up with people who want to do this. Probably for every eight or ten people we ask, one says yes.

Is it always by invitation or are there some people who come forward and say, Hey, pick me. ?

Sometimes we have had people say, Next time you have an opening on the board let me know. That’s great, I wish we had more of those.

Why Sideways Studio?

The first house that my wife and I lived in was really only about a half a mile down the street from where I live now, but it was a tiny little house. It was built in 1860 something, it had a basement with dry laid stone walls and a dirt floor and a celling that is not even as tall as I am, so I had to duck around the rafters. But that was the only place I had to build a studio early on. So it was cramped, it was dirty, it was wet, and I had to share it with a washing machine and a dryer and a stack of snow tires and everything else. Very quickly that space got so crowded one day I discovered I was walking sideways to get through all of the stuff, to get from one place to another. It was so ludicrous that it was funny, so that is where the name came from.