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Joe Robinson | Episode 536
Joe Robinson is the co-owner and steward of the historic East Creek Anagama wood fired kiln. Nestled on 20 acres in Oregon’s coastal mountains, East Creek is a community art studio and retreat. Joe will share news about the upcoming NW Wood Firing Conference in June 2020, which is being organized by the East Creek team.
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Putting together a conference is a lot of work. Is there a theme that you had to nail down for your conference besides simply a wood-fire conference?
Yeah totally, we put together a steering committee with a couple of the folks that are super instrumental here at East Creek, Lou and Lori Allen and Richard Brandt who teaches ceramics at PCC and Chris Payt who has been a resident here at East Creek. The five of us spend an evening talking about an overall theme. We know that large conferences always have a theme so we wanted to make sure we were in line with the best practices for conferences. What we came up with was sustainability, accessibility, and education. Those are the three things we think about a lot at East Creek. Sustainability is an environmental term but it is also a community term and a financial term. There is a lot of things you have to sustain to keep a wood firing practice going. With accessibility we know that wood firing has an old white dude problem and our communities don’t reflect the demographics of our areas. I acknowledge that I am a white dude, I am a young white dude but I eventually will be an old white dude. So how do we take steps to make sure that we are being inclusive and bringing in people who have never had the chance to try wood firing. And third is this education thing, we have high school students that come and fire at East Creek and we have college students and graduate students and those things are really at the center of our core values.
Who are the partners you have for the conference?
I am glad you asked that. That is a really important piece of the support system for us. You mentioned that you heard about this through Georgies and Georgies was our first sponsor that we got on board and the Georgies folks are super awesome and they have been helping me since I think I was 14 years old and trying to buy my first potters wheel. So I have known those guys for a long time and they have always been super supportive to my own pottery career. As well as all the local arts organizations I have been involved in that are doing ceramic stuff. We also have Skutt Kilns is going to be our national kiln sponsor and we have Eutectic Gallery on board and they will be doing a concurrent show which you will see some details coming out in the near future.
How important is it to get a “big name” for the speaker at the conference?
Well, to me, I think of a conference kind of like I think of having a great party or throwing a concert and that is in order to get momentum I think it is really important to have the cool kids show up. Whether that means the cool kids show up at the party and people start hearing about it or you have a big headline band that has a bunch of awesome openers too. I think we know from human social dynamics that that’s an important thing and that was my strategy thinking, How are we going to being the process of putting this conference together? And we thought, Gosh, if we were trying to put together a music festival and we got Kanye West to say yes, then that is going to help us get a lot of other great artists too. So we thought , Who is the key note speaker that we think is the most desirable key note speaker in the United States, who should we reach out to? I polled some of my wood firing friends about this and everyone had Jack Troy at the top of their list. So we thought if we can get Jack on board we will probably be able to create some critical mass with other great programming as well as a group of people that are local and in the area that really want to come and see Jack’s pots and hear his key notes. I think that is a huge draw and will give us the momentum we need to make this successful.
How important is the networking of relationships to be able to pull this off?
I think in that regard the conference is a lot a wood kiln in that it is a tool that I could not possibly wield myself. The community practice that we all do, this conference is just an extension of that community. A lot of time it is important to have somebody who is the single voice that is speaking for the rules or speaking for the organization or for the kiln, but really that one voice is a representative voice and there are many other voices behind that voice that are all in agreement and say, Yeah, go and speak on our behalf. That is how I see my role in the conference, there is no possible way that I could just do this myself. I can’t talk to enough people and I can’t be in multiple places at once. Having the folks that are on the steering committee that we made and the people at the Chehalem Center and the students and teachers who are going to be supporting this stuff and the galleries who are going to be hosting the shows, all those people are just critically important and if we don’t have them I a cannot host a conference of this magnitude.
How did you go about building a budget for something like this?
Well you know, we had such a great hand up from the Chehalem Art Center when they volunteered to let us use their building and just for some context, if you haven’t been to the Chehalem Art Center, it’s this huge building on a couple of acres and there is this big brick courtyard. It is a really nice, modern, new building. It has a 5200 square foot ball room and that will house the exhibition hall and key notes and there are two ceramic studios and a couple of large class room studio spaces that will host panel discussions and there are conference rooms for individual discussions. There is a 2000 square foot primary gallery and a smaller secondary gallery. There is a commercial kitchen. So this facility is a really awesome place that can handle a lot of programming all at the same time. Plus the gallery shows. If we were to try and rent that space it would probably cost us more than 1500 dollars to do the weekend thing. So that is nice to have that all taken care of and given as a gift so we don’t have to worry about bringing in enough to pay the rent. So the things we are worrying about are things like, building a website and making out advertising commitments with Ceramics Monthly. I had maybe 6 or 8 line items of costs on the books at this time so really the spreadsheeting has been more about keeping all the moving parts organized and figuring out the holes for programming and what our resources are and that is when the budget spreadsheet will come into a little bit clearer focus.
How important will volunteers be for the project?
Well, you know, I think that volunteers are super important in any kind of community arts endeavor. One thing that I am focused on trying to do is make sure that people who work and do work that should be paid, get paid. The conference is going to have revenue from people that are registering and from sponsors and vendors. So the plan to use that revenue is to pay for our expenses and to pay people for the work that needs to be done, in terms of getting chairs out, we will have 600 chairs that will need to be moved around, so there is going to be this paid work component. Some of the people working for the conference will be getting a stipend, which really means they will be getting paid a really terrible wage and it’s like an honorarium for a volunteer. Also, I am curious what the student input is going to be. I think there is a tremendous opportunity for them to get involved in this and get some volunteer hours and get the chance to interact with some of the important wood firing artists.
I read a quote that recently said this: Prepare, prepare, prepare, then pray. How does this quote resonate in putting together this conference for you?
I think that resonates really well. It reminds me of another quote from Nolan Ryan, the pitcher, and it is kind of about managing anxiety and I am hoping I will be able to say this when the day of the conference comes, but it’s, I’ve done everything I can do to prepare for this day and what happens happens.
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Instagram: @eastcreekjoe