(low-beat music) >> Chad: Metal to me, like is very malleable and where most people look at it and is very rigid and it's like, "Eh, you can kind of heat it up and bend it this way or you can hammer it that way."

There's a forgiveness with steel and honestly, you can kind of just beat it into submission when you want to.

>> Brett: I don't know, it's like continuing on the tradition of telling folk stories in a way.

It's just giving it this visual that it didn't have before.

>> Milissa: If we can touch someone in some kind of way with our pottery, that's really meaningful for us.

>> Eric: And each piece is individual.

And I think people like the idea of having the only one.

You know, it's something special.

You have it and you're the only person that has it.

And if treated properly, it could last forever.

♪ We'll talk this whole thing out ♪ ♪ I'm not Mr. Next Year ♪ ♪ But I'll be Mr. Next Round ♪ ♪ Sugar you've got Mr.

Right Here right now right now Jack ♪ >> [Commercial Announcer 1] Doing as much as you can as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

(upbeat music) >> I have a very strong connection to other students.

Everyone makes an effort to help each other.

I'll remember the feeling of being here, the feeling that I was a part of a family.

(upbeat music) >> [Commercial Announcer 2] Ivy Tech offers more than 70 programs with locations in Michigan City, LaPorte, and Valparaiso.

New classes start every few weeks.

Ivy Tech, higher education at the speed of life.

To get started, visit ivytech.edu.

>> [Commercial Announcer 3] Family, home, work, self.

Of all the things you take care of, make sure you are near the top of the list.

North Shore Health Centers offers many services to keep you balanced and healthy.

So take a moment, self-assess, and put yourself first from medical to dental, vision, chiropractic, and mental health.

North Shore will help get you centered.

You help keep your world running, so make sure to take care of yourself.

North Shore Health Centers, building a healthy community, one patient at a time.

(cheery music) >> Announcer: "Eye On The Arts" is made possible in part by, South Shore Arts.

The John W. Anderson Foundation.

And the Indiana Arts Commission.

Making the arts happen.

Additional support for Lakeshore Public Media and local programming is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(cheery music) >> I'm a much more rash individual.

I've always swung a hammer, like even way back in like late middle school and stuff.

I've always just been a very hands-on kind of person.

(upbeat rock music) I went to American Academy of Art in Chicago.

While I was there, I was doing oil painting and very quickly I realized it just wasn't my game.

One of my professors, his name's Bobby Jo, he was like, "Hey, like, what are you gonna do now that you're leaving?"

I was like, "Ah, I'm just gonna go grab a job and stay in Chicago and stuff for a while."

And he's like, "Come up to my studio up in Woodstock.

I want you to check this place out."

And so I went up there and he had a metal fabrication studio.

Before I knew it, it was like three and a half years later I'd been working for him.

And it was just a really, really cool experience.

And in those three and a half years it just snapped.

Went by and went back to school and finished up a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree down at Ball State and moved on to, by chance, Denver and started my studio out there.

And it was a domino effect after that.

(upbeat rock music) My work is, it's like 50% functional and 50% sculptural.

When I was in Denver running my studio, I was doing a lot of furniture and fountains and fire pits and stuff like that that were all like, of my design.

And clients would come to me that had big, fancy houses or big fancy gardens or, you know, landscaping and stuff, and they'd be like, "I want something kind of like this."

You know, and they'd have a rough idea of what they wanted and then they'd just turn it over to me and be like, "What do you think?"

And I'd get to be super creative and like, make these sketches and drawings and spitball ideas and sit down with clients and work back and forth until we settle on something that's a happy medium between what they want and what I can fabricate and be what came out of like my creativity.

(upbeat rock music) Well, like the beautiful thing about metal is like, say I cut a piece of metal here and then it's like I fit it all up.

I'm like, "Dang it."

It's like, I wish that was two inches longer.

It's like, cool, get out the welder zap.

It's like, oh, now it is two inches longer.

Like, so there's a, like, there's a forgiveness with steel and honestly, you can kind of just beat it into submission when you want to.

At the same time it's like, it just kind of is the nature of the beast.

Metal to me, like is very malleable and where most people look at it is very rigid and it's like, "Eh, you can kind of heat it up and bend it this way or you can hammer it that way."

Adding metal to wood constraints in that are always just, how do you get the two to stay together?

'Cause it's like you can't weld 'em together.

Like, it has to be some sort of a mechanical fastener usually.

Sometimes when you're putting things together like sculpturally, by chance, you just kind of stick something up there and you're like, "Oh, that kind of wedges in there nice."

And then you're like, "Oh."

And like, you come up with this idea of a way to trap that piece of wood inside of the metal.

And like one of the side effects of that is a lot of times like you have to weld near wood and then the wood catches on fire and it's like, well, that's just cool.

You know, like that's in there, that's permanent.

Like you burnt the wood to get it trapped in there.

And like, I think some people would look at that as a flaw, like in your craftsmanship, but I look at it as like, no, like, that's a reaction to like that piece of wood being like incorporated in the sculpture and it becomes a detail, you know, it's just like if anybody comes up to that sculpture and they really look at it and they see that little charred spot in there.

Somebody that might not understand the welding process might ask somebody and be like, "Why is that burn?"

Somebody else might be like, "Oh, it's because when he was welding here, they caught the wood on fire."

And then that starts a whole conversation with between those two people who I don't even know.

And like, that's the beauty of art, right?

It's always art is meant to start conversations and bring people together and like, "Boom, there, my art just did that."

In any art in general, as you're working through a composition, you're setting things up and then you're stepping back and looking at 'em and you're judging that composition based on the normal parameters of aesthetics and art.

All of those things you learned in art school, like they come into your own personal critique of your work.

So, it's a lot of back and forth with me when I'm building a sculpture.

I recently did a sculpture for the South Shore Orchestra.

It was a tabletop sculpture and I whipped that thing up in like an hour and it was just a bunch of stuff out of my scrap bin.

And I had the acetylene torch going with the rose bud on it, you know, heating stuff up and bending it around.

And it just came to me like I worked through it.

I stepped back a few times and looked at it and it was like, oop.

Then it was done and I was like, "Oh, that thing looks sweet."

It was only an hour of my physical time, but it was like a lifetime of me having experienced critiques and metal work and all these things that all culminated into that one hour's worth of physical effort to make this really cool thing.

Art has been everything in me since as early as 1994, which is my first real sketchbook that I was like regularly drawing and dating.

It's just been ingrained in me my whole life to just make and do art.

Now it's more about like sharing it with other people if they have an idea to help them bring it, like bring it to life.

Community's everything, man.

Just like having friends that, and acquaintances and stuff that are just as excited about art as I am.

(upbeat rock music) (cheery music) >> I'm very drawn to folklore and like fairy lore, so a lot of my work is my interpretation of how I want to see or feel that world, immersing myself in these places that some people would say are fantasy, but I think that your imagination is just as real as the world around you.

So I try to like put that onto paper.

(cheery music) Folklore kind of teaches people about the past and different lessons and things, and I think it's important to not necessarily hold on to like pure tradition because I think you should grow and evolve over time, but there's also like certain truths that will always be fairly relevant and folklore is really good at just sharing those things that have happened in the past and they're helpful to people and they can be inspiring or funny or scary and it's just exciting.

I think a lot of the darker folklore isn't even necessarily dark.

Everybody has the capacity to be like both light and dark.

And I think that finding a gray area, I feel like a lot of the stuff I do, even if it's really spooky and scary looking, I never wanna overlook that there's a gray area and like, even though this creature might look really scary doesn't necessarily mean it is because a lot of the stories with scary creatures, they're showing up for a reason to like warn somebody about something.

So they're not causing the harm, they look scary so you notice them.

And I think that's pretty nice.

They turn out to be more helpful really.

(upbeat music) Even though there's lots of very specific descriptions of certain like fairies and entities, they more so are about the feeling and you can look at different people's interpretations of the same kind of fairy.

And it's really interesting to me how many people can pick up on like a certain, like very similar feeling for of the same kind of like fairy or creature.

So, there's something really interesting about that to me.

I do like specifically drawing animals.

I've always really loved drawing animals ever since I was little.

That was drawing possums and tigers and dogs were kind of my first kind of illustrations that I remember ever doing.

So I've always just been really drawn to animal life and creatures, in general.

But now, I do like to draw a lot of, like mixing plant and animal together.

So it's still nature based, but a little more fantastical.

(cheery orchestra music) A lot of my inspiration actually comes from listening to people's accounts that they've had and people describing things that they've seen, which is maybe more common than a lot of people would expect.

So, I love listening to different podcasts where people describe encounters and I'll just do quick sketches.

That's why I have all these sketches around my house.

I'll do these quick little sketches and try to capture like the feeling that they're conveying through telling their story, but also just drawing as closely as possible to the way they described the weird thing that they saw.

And it's really vulnerable of them to do that.

And it reminds me of like just traditional oral folklore, like how people would tell stories from person to person.

I don't know, it's like continuing on the tradition of telling folk stories in a way.

It's just giving it this visual that it didn't have before.

I guess my only hope really would be when people look at my art, would be for them to have some kind of their own personal internal spark.

So, become inspired or fascinated to create their own work.

I think it's really important to inspire other people to create things because when you make your own internal world physical, I don't know, it just makes everybody, it can make you feel so much happier and healthier to let those things out.

(cheery music) (upbeat music) >> So I started as a freshman in high school and right away I knew that's what I wanted to do, man.

So I took every class I could in high school to the point where in my senior year I was taking five art classes and then right after that, I bounced around a couple of studios and just got to hang out, like, learn from the guys that were doing it.

One of those studios I was bouncing around at is where I met Milissa.

>> I did ceramics all throughout my high school career, so I kind of just wanted to get back into it, get my hands back in clay, and I thought that was an opportunity for me to do that.

We're gonna be offering a lot of different workshops and then I'll be doing some session classes.

The hand building with me, I think that we're gonna focus on some garden items, teaching people the basics on developing further skill if they've worked with Clay before.

We'll make some neat projects and just focus on creating together and having fun.

I have found that people want to come here not only to create, but also to spend time with others just to kind of get away from their own busy lives.

And so we just want it to feel chill when people come in here.

We work with a few different clay bodies just for a different look.

We work a lot with texture so that we get a very dynamic finished product.

Sometimes we work with coils, sometimes we'll work with slab built pottery and make straight walls items or just kind of free build with it.

So, I like people to touch on all aspects of hand building so that they can find which niche they like the most.

(upbeat music) >> The actual terminology, I believe, comes from an old English word where throwing was actually turning.

It's kind of the exact opposite of working on a lathe.

You start with a lump and then you get a final product.

But instead of taking away material, you're just compressing and moving the material to where it needs to be.

And it's rewarding, it's satisfying to watch, it's satisfying to do.

It takes some time, you know, but everybody eventually gets things made.

So here we use a couple different clay bodies depending on the look you're going for or sometimes the durability in things.

So we'll have some stonewares and some speckling that will add a little depth to the glaze with some porcelains will have Raku firings.

And that's a special clay on its own.

But what's really wild is that people have been doing this for at least 16,000 years.

26,000 years ago, they were weaving baskets.

You know, 16,000 years ago, they're making pots.

The wheel on a cart was invented 10,000 years after they started making pottery.

And still, there's new ideas all the time, every day, like it is the golden age pottery right now.

There is more people doing more things than ever before.

The information, it just gets faster and faster every year with neater stuff.

So on the wheel you start off, you'll get it centered.

That's the hardest part.

Then keeping it on center, that's the second hardest part.

As you build the skills, you get to the point where things just become second nature.

We're lucky to get some people in the area that had a passion for it and it becomes part of your life.

But there's always like a core group of people that want to be involved and then they start feeding off of each other and coming up with new ideas.

So they've come from, you know, amateurs and hobbyists to now semi-professional, which is awesome.

It's awesome to be a part of that and help 'em get there.

(upbeat music) >> I love to gather people.

I always have.

And so to have group of people who love to be here and create as much as we do really means a lot to us.

We love to kind of foster that sense of community and like Eric said, you know, when you have all of those people come together, everyone kind of grows with one another and feeds off of that energy and it just creates a really magical space for everyone.

The biggest motivating factor is time together.

Also, we just both love the craft.

>> Yeah, I like making pretty things.

I like making things that people want to use.

I know it seems silly 'cause we're competing against $2 coffee cups from the store or 39 cents solo cup and there's, you know, nobody needs what we make.

You use it 'cause you want it.

It brings you joy in some way.

And that's why people buy our stuff.

It's not because they're not filling a need.

The days of a village potter making everybody's cups and plates, that's 200 years in the past.

It's never gonna be like that again.

People use our things because they want to.

>> Milissa: I think that when people can resonate with something, if we can touch someone in some kind of way with our pottery, that's really meaningful for us.

>> And each piece is individual.

And I think people like the idea of having the only one.

You know, it's something special.

You have it and you're the only person that has it.

And if treated properly, it could last forever.

(upbeat music) (upbeat guitar music) ♪ Can't say I'll be the best of your whole life ♪ ♪ But sugar I'm the best you can get tonight in this dive ♪ ♪ In this one horse town ♪ ♪ I know my way around a kiss and I look okay ♪ ♪ My hair's been cooperating with me today ♪ ♪ So what do you say let's turn this night around ♪ ♪ I'm Mr.

Right Here ♪ ♪ I'm Mr.

Right Now ♪ ♪ Mr. Let me get us two more beer dear ♪ ♪ We'll talk this whole thing out ♪ ♪ I'm not Mr. Next Year ♪ ♪ But I'll be Mr. Next Round ♪ ♪ Sugar you've got Mr.

Right Here right now ♪ ♪ You wear your old heartaches all down your arms ♪ ♪ I take mine and turn 'em into songs ♪ ♪ But they're still there I'm still hurting too ♪ ♪ So let's drain these bottles get few more to match ♪ ♪ I'm not the best horse but I'm the one you can catch ♪ ♪ So take hold of me and I'll take care of you ♪ ♪ I'm Mr.

Right Here ♪ ♪ I'm Mr.

Right Now ♪ ♪ Mr. Let me get us two more beer dear ♪ ♪ We'll talk this whole thing out ♪ ♪ I'm not Mr. Next Year ♪ ♪ But I'll be Mr. Next Round ♪ ♪ Sugar you've got Mr.

Right Here right now right now Jack ♪ (upbeat guitar music) (upbeat guitar music) ♪ That amber's rolling through our mind ♪ ♪ And your hand's getting closer to holding mine ♪ ♪ And you haven't checked your phone since 10PM ♪ ♪ You're keeping your story a mystery ♪ ♪ But I know there's gotta be a why and a he ♪ ♪ So don't worry girl ♪ ♪ You'll forget all about him ♪ ♪ I'm Mr.

Right Here ♪ ♪ I'm Mr.

Right Now ♪ ♪ Mr. Let me get us two more beer dear ♪ ♪ We'll talk this whole thing out ♪ ♪ I'm not Mr. Next Year ♪ ♪ But I'll be Mr. Next Round ♪ ♪ Sugar you've got Mr.

Right Here right now ♪ ♪ I'm not Mr. Next Year ♪ ♪ But I'll be Mr. Next Round ♪ ♪ Sugar you've got Mr.

Right Here right now right now ♪ >> [Commercial Announcer 1] Doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

>> Almost every single professor I've had, I'm on a first name basis.

By building that relationship with faculty, I was able to get involved with research.

It's one thing to read about an idea in a book versus physically doing it and seeing the results.

>> [Commercial Announcer 2] Ivy Tech offers more than 70 programs with locations in Michigan City, LaPorte, and Valparaiso.

New classes start every few weeks.

Ivy Tech, higher education at the speed of life.

To get started, visit ivytech.edu.

>> [Commercial Announcer 3] Family, home, work, self.

Of all the things you take care of, make sure you are near the top of the list.

North Shore Health Centers offers many services to keep you balanced and healthy.

So take a moment, self-assess, and put yourself first from medical to dental, vision, chiropractic, and mental health.

North Shore will help get you centered.

You help keep your world running, so make sure to take care of yourself.

North Shore Health Centers, building a healthy community, one patient at a time.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: "Eye On The Arts" is made possible in part by, South Shore Arts.

The John W. Anderson Foundation.

And the Indiana Arts Commission, making the arts happen.

Additional support for Lakeshore Public Media and local programming is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Radio Announcer: As you travel across northwest Indiana and into Chicago, take Lakeshore Public Media 89.1FM along for the ride.

With our newly expanded signal, we're with you from the southern corner of Michigan and into Chicago and, of course, across Northwest Indiana.

From the dunes of Lake Michigan to the windmills of Walcott.

Lakeshore Public Media.

89.1FM is along for the ride wherever you call home.

(upbeat music) >> [Commercial Announcer 4] Did you know that you can find all of your favorite Lakeshore PBS shows online by visiting video.LakeshorePBS.org.

You can stream a large selection of shows, including, "Eye On The Arts," "In Studio," and, "Friends and Neighbors."

Lakeshore PBS has taken great care to bring you the best in local content.

Not sure how to find local content?

Click on shows and sort by only Lakeshore PBS shows.

Not only will you find local content on Lakeshore PBS, but you can also stream live TV right to your computer.

Click on Live TV and get instant access to Lakeshore PBS Live wherever you are.

Lakeshore PBS is full of wonderful content created just for you.

Missed the last night's episode?

No problem.

Lakeshore PBS has got you covered.

Search for your show and find your episode ready to watch anytime.

Visit video.LakeshorePBS.org to stream your favorite local shows.

(upbeat music) (cheery piano music)