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Zeynep Testoni | Episode 576
Zeynep Testoni’s work is inspired by the ocean and natural surrounds of her home in the seaside village of Gerroa, two hours south of Sydney in NSW, Australia. Zeynep has chosen ceramics as her ‘encore career’ after teaching English in secondary schools for almost 30 years. Zeynep’s home studio is becoming a thriving local hub for pottery enthusiasts.
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I’m curious. Why let people into your personal art space?
That’s a big one! It’s really interesting. I think for me because I have always been a teacher and I have always shared my space I think I felt that I needed to share my joy and I can’t contain myself to myself. I think that is what it is. I do enjoy the quiet time alone and at the same time I am a very, very outgoing person. I am the person who walks into a party and starts the dancing. I am that person. I am always the first one on the dance floor and all that sort of thing. So for me by sharing my art space what I am effectively doing is creating a community around me of like-minded people. And I think having been used to being around people all day, every day, I would have found it incredibly isolating to move to a new area where I didn’t know anybody and to be in a garage studio. it’s a double garage with a beautiful view. I have a water view from my pottery wheel. I am so fortunate. And to be in that space all day, every day, 7 days a week on my own, I think I would have turned into a potty potter very quickly. So by inviting people into my space two days a week and once a month on a Saturday and once a month on a Friday evening. It still has some boundaries n it however it means that I have the company that I seek, and the social interaction, so it serves me well, but it also mean people can come and experience the joy. It gives people permission to be a kid for 2 and half hours. Suddenly we are all five year old children playing with mud.
Do you like a specific age group to teach?
Not particularly, no. The age range in the studio at the moment is from 17 to 75. So we have a huge age range. We have a lot of young women at the moment. Actually we are having 5 studio babies this year. We have had two babies already and there is another three happening soon. So lots of young women as well as people that are reconnecting with pottery after a huge break. One of the ladies teaching in my studio had not been doing pottery for 20 years because she had been raising her grandson and so on and so forth. And because I have the facilities here she has not only reconnected with her pottery in the past 12 months, she is now selling it and is looking to set up her own studio. So lots of people have been able to reconnect with their joy as a result of coming to my home studio.
How do you introduce a student to the studio?
I have a whole induction process in that I will do, because I am a teacher I have hand outs of course. I have handouts of hazards in the studio, we do a health and safety talk around silica dust, we don’t sand anything in the studio. How we recycle clay, I have the three bucket system because we don’t have running water in the studio, so we kind of go from one really mucky bucket to a cleaner bucket. And how to recycle clay and so on and so forth. So they get a whole kind of induction talk initially. And then I will give them a tour of the studio, I have specific shelves for different things, and people just get an orientation to that.
How do you know what to teach the students?
That’s an interesting question. Obviously we teach the basics of wheel throwing, and because I run a six week introductory thing, what we teach is really how to throw a basic cylinder and turning the cylinder and decoration and techniques. We might teach six or seven different ways of decorating a pot and then how to glaze a pot and that is pretty much your six week course. From that point on if people return to the studio during studio access hours, which is like a gym pass. We have two other teachers and we generally teach at point of need. I have one student who has been coming for two years now, but really she is working on her own projects. So I will just observe and look at where people are and just nudge people outside of their comfort zone. My way of thinking is that growth lies just outside of your comfort zone.
Is praise important in the process of teaching?
Absolutely! Absolutely! I think that positive reinforcement is incredible and I think with adults as well. I’ve been teaching adolescents for a lifetime, but teaching adults I can actually see who the adults are as teenage kinds as learners in the classroom. So I can see the perfectionist straight away, and I can see the defeatist. The defeatist says, I can’t do this. I can’t do this. They have a very negative self-talk. So I give them the positive reinforcement to get them to move forward. So I think it is super important to be positive.
How do you advertise?
I don’t actually have an advertising budget, as such. The first thing I did initially was put it on Facebook, both on my personal page and on local group pages and I said I was offering classes. That’s how I started advertising. Then I pretty much have continued through Facebook and Instagram to put the classes out there. Then the classes start to take a momentum of its own because the more people that come through the studio in turn only need to tell five people and it snowballs from there.
Book
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
Contact
Instagram: @zeyneptestoni_ceramics