Tales of a Red Clay Rambler: A pottery and ceramic art podcast · Ben Carter

Live from NCECA: Self Revelation and Art Making Now

·1 hr 8 min·5 clips

Connor Zora explains why Trump's win gave him 'so much to make work about' in his protest-inspired ceramics.

The studio stays close. After the sponsor-framed opening, the conversation moves into the daily work of a maker trying to find a personal hand inside production pottery. Repetition is the rub. The guest has to make pints, rocks glasses, and mugs, then starts asking how many ways a vessel can dodge becoming another truncated cylinder. Boredom does not get treated like a dead end. It becomes a nudge to stack shapes, push forms around, and make pots strange enough to keep paying attention to them. The details are very physical. A sphere can hold a triangle. One thrown form can cut across another. The pleasure sits in those odd little collisions. Glaze gets handled without much romance. A lot of the guest's world is gray and tan, still in greenware, bisque, and leather-hard stages before surface decisions go to people across the street. That limit ends up mattering. Without control of the final surface, form becomes the place where identity, old pots, and personal voice can be tested. Instagram is mostly process, not finished-object polish, so unfinished work starts to feel like part of the record. History comes in quietly. Old pots are not rules; they are shapes that talk back. Queerness becomes part of the formal thinking too, tied to bodies, selves, and people who do not all look alike. The clip is less an argument than a slow studio thought about how constraint can expose the maker's hand.

As heard by us

A live ceramic conversation about form, labor, and identity.

This live episode follows a ceramic conversation that keeps circling back to form, identity, and the awkward work of making functional pots feel personal.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Need a studio-bright room where form, labor, and identity get talked through plainly?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Tales of a Red Clay Rambler: A pottery and ceramic art podcast