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Heath Carra & Victoria Henriksen | Episode 746
ShprixieLand is the collaborative pottery art project between Heath Carra and his wife, Victoria Henriksen. For the last 20 years Heath and Victoria have made colorful and richly patterned pottery in their home studio at Kootenay Lake in British Columbia, Canada. Heath and Victoria work mainly with slab-built porcelain, lace patterns, and underglaze.
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Do you guys see your ceramics as a job?
Heath: You know, I guess I do. Yeah, I do see it as a job. It’s the only paying job I have. So yeah, but it’s a really fun job. Most of the time I quite enjoy the job.
How about you, Victoria, do you see it as a job?
Victoria: Definitely and definitely more so these last few years. When we started to get serious about it we actually had to set times and say, Okay we need to be in the studio by this and this time each morning. Scheduling is really important. So we would get in the studio first thing in the morning and then we would take our lunch break usually around twelve, you know, little bit flexible, but having set times for things really works well for us.
So you treat like a job as in you gave yourself a time clock, is that accurate?
Heath: Basically, yeah, I would say so. We treat it like a day to day job. Like a nine to five job.
Victoria: Sometimes nine to nine.
Heath: Sometimes seven days a week. But it was not making excuses to not go to work, not sleeping in, not just giving up at noon and going to the beach. We are like, No, I actually have to be at work.
Does that mean that you had an ethic to work hard?
Heath: I think so, for sure. Yeah, we really stuck with the work ethic idea.
Victoria: Yeah, I think we are both pretty driven. Again, because we had to make this work. There really is no options for employment around here other than this. And of course, we love what we do and both of us are really driven.
Does that mean you would also therefore, be on time and show up and when you said you would show up?
Heath: Yeah, I think so. (laughter) Exactly.
Do you guys also give yourselves the flexibility to live the life you want to live?
Heath: We didn’t for a lot of years. We decided that we were going to sacrifice everything to make sure that we made the pottery business work. Living the pottery maker’s dream. Until we realized, maybe this actually isn’t the dream. Maybe being flexible would be more the dream. So we are working on that right now. We are getting a lot better at it.
Victoria: Taking more time for sure. We took a week off just recently.
How important is it to have a team mentality?
Health: Definitely for us. Hugely important. It comes very naturally for us anyway. We like hanging out with each other. We like helping each other and we obviously work well together. Communicate about what our issues are at the time and how we need help. So it is definitely a team effort.
What happens when one of you gets negative? How do you deal with the downer times?
Victoria: I think we are really, really lucky. Usually it’s just one of us. If we are in a bad state, if we are challenged by things personally..
Heath: Yeah, both of us don’t fall apart at the same time. which is very lucky. We have it scheduled out well that one of us can have a crisis at a time. One person can go take a break and the and the other person steps up and solves all the problems for awhile.
Your Instagram has a great balance of your work and showing your personalities. How much do you like to balance that out between work and personalities to keep your audience interested?
Heath: You know, I don’t actually think about it. I just get up in the morning and look for some great photo that Pixie has taken and then I try to write something interesting that relates to pottery or the life that we live here and whatever I am inspired by.
Victoria: We are not really following the curated Instagram feed model that they talk about to gain followers. We realized very quickly that that was really boring for us. We really wanted to have a lot more freedom with it and be ourselves.
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Instagram: @shprixieland