This Saturday is the Taneytown Artisan Festival at the Taneytown Memorial Park from 10-4. I hope to see some of you there.

I have gotten into many of the juried shows that I have applied to, but there have been a handful that I applied and didn't get in. Unfortunately, most of the time when you don't get into a show there is no feedback. You don't know if they don't like your work, or if there was someone else in your category who was better, or.....

Well, I got rejected from a show recently and they share the feedback from the jury! What was interesting about this feedback is that 90% of the feedback was about my photographs and not about my actual work. I bought some photo board backgrounds on Amazon a while back that were inexpensive, but fit my taste. I feel like pictures I take with these are nice, but it doesn't take away from the pottery. All three jurors made comments about how hard it was to see my pottery with the backgrounds.

I started doing some research and found that there are standards for how ceramics should be photographed. The standard is a Flotone black to grey to white background. I purchased one of these and it's basically a fancy piece of paper. I don't know why a fancy piece of paper is $45, especially when it seems like it would scratch pretty easily. I used some butterfly clips to attach my fancy paper to my photo boards so it could stand up.




I definitely like this background, but I'm not going to lie the fact that it's defacto required irritates me. It also irritates me that they said they "can't see" my pottery. Maybe it's not to your aesthetic, but you can actually see the pottery.

The second big piece of feedback was about my booth shot. This was another rabbit hole to go down. There is a private Facebook group about this and I've definitely done everything wrong. I took a booth photo during a show - you know what my actual booth looks like when I do shows. This was not at all correct. I need to set it up in my yard on a bright, but cloudy day with all of the walls on it. It shouldn't have any identifying information (aka my sign) since most juries are done blind. I likely need to have fewer things in my booth so that things stand out more. There's more, but you get the picture.

More than a few people have noted by trying to conform to all of these norms that their jury picture will be significantly different from their actual booth. While some variation is ok, on the whole the expectation is that it is mostly representative. The thing that keeps running through my head is, in a world where art is meant to be unique and everyone strives to be different - why is the goal to make everyone look the same?

One juror actually gave me feedback on my work. She said that I should edit myself and narrow down what I make so that it's clear what my work is. I really struggled with this feedback. I've written blog posts previously about this. Aside from when I'm learning in a class, I do have a vision for what things will look like in my head. Does everything I make look like each other - absolutely not. I actually get a ton of compliments in the shows I do attend that they like how varied my work is and how boring so many pottery booths are.

I'm still struggling with what to do with this feedback. I will use the flotone for pictures I submit. I will also probably take a new booth photo, but I'm not going to stage it to the point where it feels dishonest. Finally, I think I'm going to throw out the feedback on editing my work. If that's what it takes to get into a show, then that's not where I belong. All in all I really do like that I was able to see the feedback even if it took me a bit to process it.