There’s no other way to describe artist Bill Shinn’s ceramics studio: It looks like the aftermath of the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
Shinn isn’t slighted by that description.
“Someone else said that, and I kinda like it,” he said.
Since this story is about a little teapot, the description is even more fitting.
Tucked in the landscape of his Orcutt backyard, Shinn’s studio displays his life’s work in all its stages of completion. Some pieces have been recognized with awards. Some have been featured in ceramics magazines.
On a table outside, an assortment of teapots sits in the sun. The collection is a crazy mix: Some are tall and thin, others are short and twisty, and still others are curvy and wavy. Look closely at each one, though, and see that it’s a masterpiece in its own right, squeezed through an extruder and guided carefully by hand into its unique shape.
Shinn, a former fine arts instructor at Allan Hancock College, has devoted his life to the arts. Starting as a painter, he eventually embraced the more tactile experience of making art with clay.
“Unfortunately, to my painting friends, I ‘went bad’ getting into ceramics, but clay was more fun,” Shinn said.
His interest in ceramics actually came from a most unlikely place: As a fighter pilot in the Air Force, he was inspired by the view from above. He enjoyed taking pictures and marveling at the perspective.
“I really just loved looking at the ground, the aesthetic nature. Even manmade things look beautiful from the air,” he said. “That kind of got me into sculpture.”
Shinn uses a machine called an extruder to produce the many pots in his studio. The technique is familiar to potters but usually employed to produce small pieces, such as handles. For his work, Shinn uses a giant extruder to make the entire piece.
Shinn said the extruder is still a mystery to a lot of potters who prefer to use a potter’s wheel.
“They don’t realize they can get creative shapes with the extruder,” he explained. “With the potter’s wheel, everything is round, and with the extruder, people say everything is straight. No, it isn’t. You just have to do things with it.”
The extruder works much like the toy sets children use to mash Play-Doh around—push the clay into one end, and a die cuts it into tubular shapes.
Shinn used this technique to create a small teapot that was accepted into two shows, winning an award in both. Getting accepted into a show isn’t new to Shinn, though getting into both shows and winning an award in each was quite an honor.
The teapot received the Jurors Award in the Jersey Shore Clay National competition in New Jersey. When it didn’t sell, Shinn entered it in the annual CCACA competition at UC Davis, where it received the People’s Choice Award. It sold there.
Later, Shinn got a call from someone who wanted to buy it—too late. He told the prospective buyer the piece was made with an extruder, so it was one-of-a-kind. He offered to produce another piece for the man.
“When he told me his name, Robert Brent, I jokingly said, ‘Oh, the famous producer of the Brent wheel?’ He answered, ‘Yes, and the inventor of the extruder,’” Shinn recalled.
Shinn was creating a piece for the man who invented the very machine he favors to produce his pieces.
The success of this particular teapot has been an encouragement to Shinn, who began giving demonstrations and classes on how to use the extruder to make larger pieces. He was asked to be a juror and guest artist for the American Ceramics Society show in Los Angeles, and he will be attending a weeklong workshop with Potters for Peace in Nicaragua. He’ll also be teaching several classes and workshops.
Shinn enjoys a success that many artists hope to achieve, but he warns that such good fortune could also become a trap. He said the recognition artists get from sales or shows is encouraging for someone just starting and seeking validation (“I remember vividly when I was a teacher in high school getting a call telling me a painting I did got an award. I just sat and cried, I was so happy,” he said), but it’s easy to get caught up in making sales and entering shows at the price of creativity.
That balance is something he’s mindful of when he does such things. Throughout all his endeavors, he tries to maintain a focus on why he got into art in the first place.
“There are a lot of things that suppress being creative,” he said. “The main motivation for me is creating something I’ve never seen before.”
Arts Editor Shelly Cone just needs a couple of cups of coffee to revive her creativity. She can be reached at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 11-18, 2009.
