by Loretta Radeschi
hen ceramic artist Lisa Naples of Doylestown, Pa., accepted a five-week residency from the National Council on Education for the Ceramics Arts and the Australia National University in 2005, she had only the sketchiest hint of what she was going to do with the time. The area of her work that most craved her attention for change was the surface. What resulted after five weeks was a complete change of her style of ceramics from surface texture to color palette to shape.
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| Lisa Naples made a nearly complete change in her style of ceramics after completing a residency in Australia. |
“In the past I made every kind of functional piece that came into my mind,” she explains. Now she admits, she doesn’t want to make more than a half dozen functional pots. Her new work focuses on portrait plates of birds with texts wrapped around the plates, and animal sculptures. “The work is still in its preliminary stages. I would like to work larger and create free-standing figurative sculptures,” she states.
Naples describes how simply being in Australia led to the change in her work. “Travel by itself is custom-made for offering new perspectives. In addition, I was a studio potter, and also a wife and mother of two young girls, and I traveled halfway around the world alone. I was completely in unfamiliar territory. Everybody spoke English, but I couldn’t understand them at first. I was working with red clay but it didn’t behave at all like mine. The fact that people drive on the left side of the road means paying attention on foot, bicycle or car. My life depended on it. It was summer at home and winter in Australia. I had a lovely spacious apartment in the studio. A door at the end of the kiln room was my portal to it, but it was quiet and solitary, the opposite of home. There were about five days, two weeks into my five-week residency, where I completely lost my bearing. It was like a cyclone hit me. I was adrift. That was when the real rebirth began.”
Upon beginning this odyssey, Naples says she gave herself four directives: “I wouldn’t do anything I’d done before. I’d lose the rules in my head. (I used to have a closed mind about using commercial stains.) I’d stay open at all costs to anything and everything. I wouldn’t try to impress anyone.”
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| Lisa Naples in her garden. |
Naples admits changing her style caused a major identity crisis. “It’s incredibly hard to let go of a body of work that is as personal and successful as my previous body of work was. I love that work and I’m very proud of it. Even after I got home from Australia and had some old work to finish up while I was making the new work, I was confused. I’d take out of the kiln pieces from both bodies of work. The old work was resolved and beautiful, and next to it was this stumbling, stammering new stuff.”
She never doubted her trajectory, though, but wasn’t always confident that she could sell this new work. “That’s where the angst came in. However, I felt deep inside that although the old work had become known and attached to my name (and I’d worked hard for that and perhaps was giving it up) that this new work ultimately would become as successful if not more so because it was being brought forth from a natural, honest place, combined with more than 30 years of experience.”
Although people have asked Naples to make some work in her old style, she has resisted their requests. “Financially and ego-wise it can be hard to refuse them. From a practical point of view, I want to please the people who have supported me. It’s hard to say no to them, but it would have been harder to say yes.”
With her new line of work, Naples is eager to get into the studio now. Sales from a local art show this past spring have boosted her confidence. At that event, she generated twice the income from the new work as she did last year with her previous body of work. “With the old work, when I would do a show, I’d make lists of how many of each cake stand, cup, vase, teapot, etc., I wanted to take to the event. Now when I do a show, I know how much I want to earn, and will allow myself the freedom to make pieces that will sell for a certain amount of money, but I won’t tell myself what to make. I want to continue this wonderful experiment and odyssey that I’m on.”
Naples will show her new pieces at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show in November. It’s there that she believes she’ll learn how viable the new work is in generating income.
She’s received lots of advice on marketing. Some artists who have come by her studio told her to pack away the old work. Others have suggested she mix it with the new because it’s who she is. Still other friends have said that they wouldn’t recognize her from her new work; others think they see her in it.
“When you take that plunge and your new work isn’t good yet, and your old work is fine, it can be a challenge to decide how to proceed,” she explains.
To keep her clients informed, she has included them in the entire journey. “I notified people on my mailing list in advance of my trip that I’d been given that honor of studying in Australia. When I returned home in late August (2005), I forced myself to get a studio sale together for mid-November, when I’ve always held a sale. That was important to me. It was also scary because the work was raw and nascent and uncertain. Some people counseled me to wait to introduce my new work when it would be less vulnerable, which gave me pause. But in the end it’s your own instinct that has to carry the day. I refuse to let fear rule my decisions.”
Loretta Radeschi is a Pennsylvania-based free-lance writer.