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Trey Foster | Episode 1263
Trey Foster is a high school ceramics teacher and potter from Southwest Virginia. Trey shares his love of ceramics and teaching on social media and has a line of pottery tools called polliwogs.
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I’m looking at a person that is a teacher, a social media guy, and also trying to be an entrepreneur. How do you make sure you still have time to make?
That has been one of the biggest struggles, I think, for me. I fired my kiln one time this summer. And so luckily, the content kind of forces me to make things, but it forces me to make them much more slowly.
If you could, knowing that you are limited in your making time, if you could only make one piece or one form again and again, What form would you lean towards making?
Oh, that’s so easy. I’m a mug guy through and through. I love mugs and I finally started making some mugs that I really am proud of and I would consider it to be sort of art mugs. And so those are coming out of the kiln tomorrow and I’m super pumped.
Are there skills that you think about that you wish you had under your belt that you don’t have now?
Yeah, I just ran into this recently. I am teaching an adaptive art class this semester, which is, I’m so excited about. But my goal for that is to make tools for my students to make clay a little bit more accessible. And so my school got me a 3D printer for this. And I do not have the modeling skills, the 3D modeling skills to make what I want to make for them quickly. And so I am trying to do as much research and to grow that skill as quickly as possible.
You said that you make work slowly, but you’re still making work. What do you do with the work that you make now?
That’s such a good question that I wish I had a better answer to. I really don’t enjoy selling at markets. I think part of the reason that I moved into the space that I’m in is because I did not want to spend my weekends sitting at a booth and selling, but I do maybe like one or two a year. And so I save up stuff for that. And then I’ll hopefully finally sell some pots on my website, which I’ve never done really.
Into the classroom… You said during your interview process, one of the big things that drew them to you was that you said you wanted to care for the kids deeply. What’s one thing you do for your students that lets them know you care for them?
The number one way that I want my students to know that I care for them is by teaching them to care for each other. And so what that looks like in my class is every Friday we put the tools down, we sit down, and we just talk. I have a question that we all answer together and I make them memorize everyone’s full name. And so that way every person in the room is given the dignity of like everybody knows your name, people know things about you. And I think when you know people’s names and when you know things about them, then you start
Trey, it’s 50 years into the future, and I don’t know how this could happen, but you’ve passed away and you’re able to listen in at your funeral… What theme would you want to hear most come up?
That’s a big one. That goes well beyond clay. I don’t care if clay comes up in my funeral one bit. I want to be known as someone that was dependable. I want to be known as someone that led people towards light, good places.
Book
The Wing Feather Saga by Andrew Peterson
Contact
Instagram: @clay_with_trey