Making Connections With Art | Michal Karen Gelman | Episode 948

Michal Karen Gelman | Episode 948

Michal Karen Gelman makes contemporary functional ceramic homeware. Michal finds herself drawn to the functional, but at the same time, she sees the material, as she touches the evergreen. Michal is fascinated by this connection. She loves to take a surface, a clay sheet, fold it, gives it a capacity, and create a container. plays with the rough and the delicate, the horizontal and the widthwise, movement versus stillness. What attracts and drives Michal forward, is the contact with the material itself, the traditional forms, and the way to unravel it. Freefolding is Michal’s studio brand.

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What does it feel like to connect with a person buying a piece face to face?

I feel grateful. I admit the first moment I am scared because in a way it is overwhelming. It keeps happening and then I am grateful. Yes, just feelings of being grateful and connected to that person.

How do you see this as one of the ways of building community? Can art really build community?

Yes, I believe that it can build a community even if I am not meeting people face to face because someone connects to an object and connects to you as an artist. You share values and I think sharing values makes a community.

How do you balance the need to pay the bills with the need to create community?

I think for me it goes together because…I don’t think, Okay I have to make a community, I have to make money. While I am doing my thing and I am connecting to myself and to people it slowly brings around more people and it brings people to buy, it brings people to learn from me.

How does making art, making pottery deepen your understanding of the needs of the people that you are selling to? How does that give you a better insight?

First of all, regular customers, if they are living in my small community or people in my larger community, people would come and say, I need that or I broke that. Or they really give me feedback about my work practically. But then people would give me feedback about my work, like yesterday a friend told me that my pot that stands in her therapy room gives her so much encouragement and energy just by standing there and to me it is surprising and not surprising, it’s just a pot. But now I can see all the time people give me feedback about how they use the pots and what it makes them feel and then it’s a conversation and communication.

What tool do you love working with and what tool do you think you should like but you actually never go to?

I really like the sponge. I really like the sponge. I put the sponge on the edge of the rim…actually my finger is the best one, it’s the thinnest and the smoothest one, but the sponge I like. The one I should use more…I like to buy many knives but actually I just use a a simple Japanese knife. So maybe my answer would be a ceramic knife, I don’t use them. I have many different shapes but I never actually use them.