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Aysha Peltz | Episode 523

Aysha Peltz’s pottery explores imagined space, scale and the poetic properties of the ceramic medium. She is a studio potter and faculty at Bennington College in Vermont. Aysha and her husband, Todd Wahlstrom, also own and operate StudioPro Bats. Aysha has taught at a number of schools and art centers including: Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the Kansas City Art Institute. Aysha’s work is in many collections including Huntington Museum of Art, where she received the Walter Gropius Master Award. Aysha received her BFA and MFA from Alfred University.

 

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What is your morning ritual like?

Todd and I have always gotten up and had coffee together and we still do that even with the craziness of weekday mornings. There is still a moment of sitting on the couch and drinking a cup of coffee, which is loving and wonderful but more about getting the caffeine in me so I can keep going. That’s the secret. But it is a moment to pause and then the morning is insane because I have two school-age kids that go to school in different places. So there is the making of snacks and lunch and the packing of bags and some mornings I am driving off to teach at Bennington college where I teach ceramics. But the moment of sitting and drinking a cup of coffee is the most pleasant part of it.

How does that morning ritual play out in your ability to be creative?

It is cyclical. So my life is split up into different sections. I share my position at Bennington with another person so I am only teaching full time half the year. That allows me to be in my studio during the summer and fall terms. When I am teaching I am not going into my studio regularly. It is really pretty shut down because my focus is on teaching and there is not a lot of time. I am also very involved in my kids’ lives so that pulls me out but when I am active in my studio, when the time of year is summer and fall everybody gets off to the places they need to be, whether it is school or camp and I do some exercise of some sort, maybe a jog with a neighbor or a walk and then get to the studio. Once I am in the studio everything is great because it is my space and my time. Lately I am working with hump molds, which grew out of interest in fluid glaze that came from some more complicated platters that I have made for many years. Hump molds are a really interesting way to warm up and make something and then get to the more complicated forms in an hour or so.

How is the relationship with your daughters influencing your work now? Or does it?

It impacts my life, of course. It has shifted everything. I think before we had children I was totally focused on my work. Everything could be about my studio day. And so having my first child 12 years ago, that was a shocking jolt to me, how different it was going to be and I felt it immediately. Sort of a moment of, Oh my goodness, what have we done.  Not in any way questioning having our wonderful daughter but recognizing everything has changed in that moment and the amount I of time I had to focus on my art had to shift. And I think that was hard for a few years and now it is okay because I am older and I have two kids and it will be what it will be. They are the most important. If they had needed something that would have pulled me away from this I would have not come. But I also enjoy saying to them, I am going to go do this incredibly cool thing and I am going to go talk to a lot of people about something I love to do and I am really excited to do it. And they were totally lit up about that and really supportive.

How does being in relationship with your husband, another artist, give you freedom to be more creative or freedom to be a creator?

Well, Todd and I met when he was in grad school and I was a senior as an undergraduate, we were both at Alfred. And I think for him that second year of graduate school is incredibly intense and I was getting ready for a senior show, so we met when we were the most focused in what we were trying to figure out in our studios and in an academic way. And I think that has set us up for a relationship that’s always been about a real understanding of our work and who we are as artists. So we knew how to enable each other to get the time we need, we knew how to set up a studio that would work for us, which means we could not share a wall because we knew one person’s music would drive the other crazy. So we have a hallway in between So I think we just knew each other as creative people and artists. So that has continued now and we have been together for twenty years. It is an ebb and flow, there are times when Todd needs me to step up and be in the home life more and there are times like these where he is really stepping up and helping me be here. So there is a really great understanding and it has been helpful for all of these years.

Do you love being an artist?

Yes.

What is the best thing you love about being an artist?

I love being in my studio and working with a material and feeling like I am figuring something out about the material. I could say texture and I could say volume and I could say pot, but there is really something about my interaction with this thing. I set up a structure, I put some texture on it, I make a move, and then it responds, and it is that moment that gets me super excited and it is so simple. It is so selfish, I mean I keep coming back to that word, it is so much about my excitement in a small moment. I feel incredibly lucky to have a life that allows me to be an artist because of the relationship that I have,  because of a job teaching art to students. There is a feeling of gratefulness that I often come back to. This is a pretty great life.

What is the studio, right now, has got you frustrated?

Frustration may be too strong a work but I am always looking for some time to develop something new that can take a lot of time. That is the piece that I don’t have right now, is an open ended period to really explore something that is completely new.

What in the studio has you very excited?

Well, I have recently fired a couple of new jar forms that are getting a really taught sense of volume and are allow the multiple glazes that I’m putting on them to run in an interesting way. I think that that sense of volume combined with the fluidity of certain glazes has got me thinking about forms that can enhance that interaction.

Book

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Contact

ayshapeltz.com

Instagram: @ayshapeltz