Wade MacDonald | Episode 1242
Wade was born in Nashville, Tennessee and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan by former opera singers. Wade earned a BA from Western Michigan University and an MFA in ceramics from Michigan State University. Wade has exhibited internationally and received the NCECA Emerging Artist award in 2018. He teaches at The University of Alabama.
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Do you find that the input you have, is it feeding what you already know or is it broadening your horizons? Is it important to have a distinction like that or a question like that?
Yeah, I think, I guess I get bored easily. So I want to keep challenging myself and a part of the way to do that is to not get comfortable in what you’re looking at or what you’re doing.
Well that’s an interesting answer because you said earlier in our conversation on the podcast about the idea that you don’t spend a lot of time looking at the work of other people, but you do find quite a bit outside of the field. So Is looking outside of your field for inspiration, is that what keeps your work fresh and unique?
I would say yes. I think it’s, for me, it’s important to look outside of the field for new ideas. I think it’s also important to kind of know what’s happening within the field. But at the same time, it’s okay to gather inspiration from other areas.
They say that constraints can be really helpful for creativity, where you give yourself these very specific constraints? I find it interesting that the wheel has a very specific set of constraints that felt limiting to your creativity. Whereas when you changed over to a mold, which is another type of constraint, because it’s a mold… why does one set of constraints inspire and another deterred?
I think it comes back to what your artistic vision is. And it’s, you know, If the tool constrains the vision so much that you can’t realize it, then you have to find another tool, a different tool.
Is there such a thing as a bad idea?
Uh, no, I’m going to say no, because I think bad ideas are can lead to breakthroughs. And I see it all the time in students. And I’m very reluctant to stop them from making mistakes. So they can, they may propose some project that I know is not going to work. And I kind of let them go through the process of failure and recalibration.
How does that showed up in your own approach to your creativity? Have you found a bad idea or a failure that then inspired you and made you better?
Oh, yeah. A lot of failing in grad school, especially in grad school. Yeah, I, I would make things that would just fall apart. They would crack apart. And I thought, this is the end. Like, I’ve got to just throw this thing out. And my teacher, Paul Catullo, would say, no, You’ve spent too much time on this thing. You need to just get the Bondo out and like fix this thing and paint it. And I just thought like, that’s sacrilege. I cannot do that. And it made me think about like my, the rules that I’m setting up for myself with clay. And that those rules, those only exist in my brain. I can do whatever I want, Interesting.
Do you give yourself room for failure now that you are a pro?
Yeah. I think a lot of my pieces are failed experiments. Like they’re not quite, they’re kind of getting there. They’re not quite there. And I just, I kind of keep trying to, like the next iteration is going to be better. It’s going to be better. And so I kind of, I’m always kind of only partially satisfied, you know, with the stuff that I’m doing. It’s scratching an itch, but it’s not quite there, you know?
Book
Northwoods by Daniel Mason
Contact
Instagram: @wmacd.art