A Business Owner & Member Tell the Story | Valerie Grossman & Kyriaki Karalis

Valerie Grossman & Kyriaki Karalis | Episode 451

Valerie Grossman Photo by Stephen Bivens

Valerie Grossman is an artist and owner of BRICK Ceramic and Design Studio located in Cleveland, Ohio. Valerie received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2012. In May of 2015, Valerie opened BRICK as a shared studio space and gallery for ceramic artists.

Valerie Grossman

Kyriaki Karalis is one of our interns from the studio and was the ceramics tech at University of North Florida. Kyriaki is a professional potter who relocated to Cleveland from Florida and recently found our clay community and studio to be a good fit. Kyriaki makes and sells wheel thrown porcelain pottery.

Kyriaki Karalis

Valerie Grossman

Kyriaki Karalis

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Valerie Grossman

What is your creative muse?

V:I love fashion.I watch a lot of haute couture fashion shows. I look a lot online for images. I take a lot from daily life so a lot of my pieces that are about indulgence that comes from working at a bakery where I was staring at pastries all day. So I love sweets and treats and things like that. Everything glamorous. I think because I have to be so not glamorous in the studio it always go to glamour.

K: One of my favorite inspirations is nature and sometimes it is not direct. Sometimes it is just being able to get on a trail and being able to see different colors or watching the sunset over Lake Erie and seeing what kind of color combinations come out of that and seeing if I can apply that to pottery.

Kyriaki Karalis

So with an image based society we have right now especially in the ceramic community how do you keep yourself from plagiarizing other’s work and keeping your work true to yourself?

K: I do check out Instagram a lot and I follow a ton of potters. I don’t know. I don’t think I have a great answer to that.

V: I think looking at a lot of images online is good in some ways because you can see what is out there and what is already being done. I think that into consideration. If you are inspired by it and you want to to something like it, what you make is never actually that close to the other thing it is just sort of inspired by that and kind of going from there maybe. I think clay is such a vast medium that you can really play, like people are always coming up with new and weird things to do with ceramics. That was a lot of my premise in school, how far can I push this material beyond what’s been done. It’s really difficult, you just have to kind of push through and keep making.

Valerie Grossman

How important is community for you as a maker?

V: I think it is really important to me and how I view ceramics because it has always been a very community medium for me. My experience with ceramics is we all make things and we come together and make food and we eat off these things and we use these mugs to drink out of. You can come together and critique, Oh, I really like that handle. Thanks! It is kind of cool. Definitely important for me in the studio because I wouldn’t have this space without a community.

K: I think having a community is really great for a few different reasons but one of the things that I am really excited about with Brick is that I am finding friends, so actual friendship that is totally a win. I graduated from college in 2004 and I have worked by myself since then, I have worked with other people who have been non-potters, and it’s really just great to work with any other artists just to provide ideas and feedback and that is pretty valuable stuff.

Kyriaki Karalis

What is one of your favorite tools to work with?

K I really like to find things to imprint in clay. One of my more favorites recently has been bits of metal that are remnants of somebody milling. My boyfriend actually does metal work and drawing sometimes too, so sometimes I will just walk through his workshop and grab random things and use them on clay.

V: My favorite tool is a rib, like a yellow mud tool rib or the red one. I kind of keep them secretly in my box because they will disappear. Pretty much all the tools I have ever owned are the studios now.

Valerie Grossman

What is your favorite piece to make?

V: My favorite piece to make is my thumbprint cup. So it is a thrown cup and I pick it up and I put in my little thumb print and late I flip it over and trim it with a foot ring. It doesn’t have a handle. I enjoy them and people seem to like them.

K: My favorite piece to make is a mug with a handle. I feel like I could improve my handles, but I have been steadily improving them over the years. But I like to make them and I like to use them afterward.