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Trevor Foster | Episode 1266
Trevor Foster is an American ceramic artist based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Tevor’s intricately sculpted porcelain vessels, tiles, and objects explore mortality, ritual, historical craft, and dark humor. Throughout his career, Trevor has built an international studio practice while learning from artists including Doug Jeck, Charles Krafft, and Shin Koyama.
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Trevor, I don’t think that there’s anything fun about anything being stolen. The question though is that there’s a lot of people who will “find inspiration” from someone else work. What makes the difference between being inspired by another artist and stealing from another artist?
Oh, I think that’s kind of night and day. I got lucky, I think, because it was blatantly stolen and it made a case for it. Inspiration is okay. I mean, there’s other people who make skull cups or octopus cups or another thing that I make out there. But my thing is, as long as you make it different and hopefully make it a little bit better, I don’t see any problem with that at all. if you’re making it from scratch. If you buy something that somebody else made and you take a direct cast of it, that becomes a little of a different thing. With all this AI and stuff nowadays, everything’s getting a little squirrely. Right. In a way, I feel lucky that it was so blatant because if he would have made a few changes other than the logo, I probably wouldn’t have had a case in this kind of thing. And a lot of cases similar to this are probably in a more gray area. So it’s a difficult thing to navigate. And I was just lucky that mine was a little bit more black than gray, like most cases probably are.
When somebody steals from you, what’s something that is taken that people who aren’t artists might not understand?
Well, I just think all of the hours leading up to it and just from art school to conversations you had to life circumstances that made you create that thing, they’re just cutting the queue. They didn’t go through. They got to the peak of the mountain without hiking up there, and that’s disheartening.
When it was resolved, what was the feeling that you experienced when you got word that the case had been won?
Once I saw that it had been resolved, it was just a great feeling. I mean, the whole experience, oddly enough, was kind of positive. There was the community that supported me. There was the foundation that supported me. I just got really lucky. I don’t know. I think it could have happened 10 more times than I wouldn’t have, but gotten lucky or had the outcome that I did. But I just felt really grateful. It actually led to more sales and more followers and a better community and some kind of settlement. So the whole thing was positive, which is amazing because it really was not a positive situation.
Did you have any kind of public apology sent your way?
No, there wasn’t anything like that. There was never an apology, but I think that the settlement was kind of enough of an apology for me.
Can I just change the subject just a little bit from your stolen art to now just you as a sculptor? What’s your favorite tool in the studio as a sculptor.
Oh, there’s like these little serrated, like a kayak paddle. And I think that, I’m not sure what company that makes them. I can only get a Seattle pottery supply, but it matches like a miniature kayak paddle. And then on, there are two round ones and they’re serrated on either side. That’s my favorite one. I don’t have a name for it. It is like a little serrated kayak paddle that’s six inches long.
Book
Japanese Death Poems, compiled by Yoel Hoffmann
Contact
Instagram: @trevorfosterstudio