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Rachel Donner | Episode 226
Rachel Donner is a full time potter living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She grew surrounded by art and history in the small town of Taos, NM. Rachel studied ceramics at the University of Northern Colorado and went on to do a few residencies and assistantships before settling back in New Mexico, for the time being.
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How do you find your way in life?
I guess it goes back to the experimental thing. If you don’t try something, anything, something you wan to do, you are not going to know if it’s going to work or not. I had a hard time as a teenager so I think I have learned a lot from those experiences of kind of suffering, self-inflicted suffering, to being able to laugh my away through life, and try things and not be so scared and uptight. Because the worst thing that is going to happen is someone is going to say no and then you can just move on.
How do you get to the point where you can take a no?
Sometimes it happens before you are ready and then you just have to deal with it. It’s from those experiences you learn to take it less personally.
Your ceramics are beautiful. How do you find a style, a voice with ceramics?
I think that is every artist’s struggle maybe. to find their own style that is recognizable.I have been developing my style since using the shop glazes at school, and kind of copying your professor. Then you see more things you like online. It’s like you collect things and you collect a little library in your mind and then it starts morphing. And then there is that terrible thing that happens when you accidentally copy someone but you don’t even know you are doing it. But eventually In think it starts to work its way out.
How do you go about promoting yourself?
The thing with Instagram is it’s actually really simple to be like “this is me this is what I do I’m going to post pictures of it”, and then that kind of does it’s own thing. But sometimes it is hard to get yourself out there as an individual artist especially because you have to be kind of self-centered about it. You have to be pushing yourself all the time to everybody. Sometimes that gets a little tiring for me but I think it’s just about finding different places that you can have yourself existing for people to come across.
How do you put yourself out there as an introvert?
I think a web presence is a great way to do that for an introvert. Because it’s a lot safer to talk to someone through a keyboard or through direct message on Instagram then it is to have to talk to someone face to face.
What would be your perfect dinner?
Oh man, that is a hard question. Of course it would be on handmade dinner ware. Potters love cooking but I’m not really one of them. Probably at a restaurant, like pizza or sushi.
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