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Shannon Holt | Episode 411
Shannon Holt is a creative director exploring reductive form on a potter’s wheel in her Portland, Oregon workshop. Her work is created under the brand of ESO ESTO. Drawn to clay in 2014, Shannon immersed herself in its foundations and has been riding the tension between her design training and the expressive immediacy of this medium ever since. Typically a form is discovered while working on the wheel, then refined through iteration until it feels complete. Guided by the allied attributes of Form and Texture, ESO ESTO wares manifest an affinity for understatement, a deep respect for craft, and the desire to elevate raw material into the realm of beautiful objects.
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Where do you get your creativity from?
From the world I live in. I am constantly looking at artwork and idea out in the larger world. I look at pottery too on Instagram- I do follow quite a few potters. Your question is like asking Where do ideas come from? You don’t always know where they come from… from every day interactions, some little thing you heard and it’s been in your mind for a while… Sometimes I get ideas when I sit down at the wheel and I see what is going to come up. I do a lot of form study. Right now I am on a planter binge. So I think ideas come from anywhere.
How important is play to creativity?
I think it is incredibly important. One of the reason why I deliberately want to be a part-time potter because in the busy times like the holidays, I feel like I get close to a production potter because I am getting a lot of orders in and I am cranking them out and jamming. And I find that totally un-fun because there was no room to just play around on the wheel. I have a very strict idea of play that isn’t just throwing clay around. I want to make a form and then try to refine it. That is my idea of fun.
What are some of the rules of proportion that you look for?
I don’t think about that very much. I’d say two to one. I’m just throwing that out there, but it’s probably pretty accurate. A lot of things I make are two to one. It might have twice the width on top and one on the base or something like that. It isn’t like that on every occasion, but that is probably kind of like a comfort thing for me. That’s a question I have never been asked and I’ll have to be thinking about that.
How did you know it was time to start selling?
I don’t know if I really did know. I know that at some point I wanted to be in some stores. I was getting ready to start reaching out to some stores, and then one of the stores in Portland called Canoe saw me on Instagram and they reached out to me. Canoe, I think, is one of the best shops in Portland if not one of the best retailers nationally. It is highly curated design-esque shop in objects. I was blown away that they reached out to me and I was completely unprepared. I basically invited them to come over to my house and look at things. They liked this, this, and this and then they ordered. That was one of the first brushes with retail that I had.
Does success produce confidence?
Oh, I think so. I think particularly in this case for me when Canoe came and saw the work in person and ordered it, that was not only gratifying but really legitimatizing for me. Because a lot of people know that I left my business and went to school for pottery and and pottery is still like you know, it’s not like you’re leaving your business to start on a presidential campaign. It’s like, Oh you are doing clay. It still wasn’t a very serious thing. When I say I do clay and that my stuff is in Canoe, that legitimatizes my work.
Is it possible to learn how to take good photography?
Oh Yeah. I think you can go on YouTube and in ten minutes learn how to take good photography. I mean especially for a webstore there is probably 300 tutorials. I did not even have a light box. I literally used natural light, a white background, and a reflector card. Other people have much more elaborate set ups than I have. But I do neutralize all my backgrounds in photo shop, so there is some work done on them. But I think it is super easy to learn, it just takes a little time.
Who is your inspiration for life?
You know, I can’t really answer that. I think there are a lot of inspirational people right now. With what’s going on in our country right now I find our former president and his first lady very inspirational. Looking back through their behavior and the way they treated the office of the Presidency is really inspiring to me and part of it is wishful thinking as well.
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Instagram: @eso.esto