38/2025: The studio waiting

Image © Jose 2025

When I was 18 in Portugal, I got involved with what was then AFS, American Field Service, an international non-profit organization that organizes educational exchange and intercultural learning experiences. AFS began in World War I as the American Field Service, a group of young Americans who volunteered as ambulance drivers in France. After the wars, it reinvented itself as a peacetime exchange organization, sending teenagers abroad to learn by living in another culture. It still operates today as AFS Intercultural Programs, with students moving across more than 50 countries.

In 1982, being an AFS student in the U.S. meant stepping straight into someone else’s life – school, family, community – not as a visitor but as one of them. It was full immersion, transformative in so many ways, and it left me with a sense of independence and belonging that never really went away. After living with the Perez family for a while, when they were both made redundant with three young kids, I had to move and Mr. Parr, my ceramics teacher, took me in. I spent a lot of time in the school ceramic studio, and he had a studio at home with a kiln, so I would end up spending more time there. He was a full-blown professional, with shows throughout the year. He taught me a lot, though I would have learned more if it wasn’t for all the teenage distractions and the novelty of the U.S. and a border town like San Diego.

I returned to Portugal and tried to do ceramics for a while, it was hard to start from zero and after a while I quit. When I went to design school, some teachers used to say my product designs looked like ceramic objects, go figure. In my first job at a design company, I designed some ceramic vessels for Expo’98; some friends still have pieces that were produced in short quantities. My daughter didn’t really know what to do in college; after a stint in sculpture, she decided she wanted to do ceramics, go figure. Sometimes I go with her to get supplies and the passion, the unfinished business of ceramics is still very alive.

When we bought this house, it came with a sculpture studio, a place where the previous owner worked all his life, and he had a long and fruitful life. The first time we visited the house, his studio was as if he had stopped working a week earlier. His tools were laying around but organized, there were blocks of stone unfinished, some finished sculptures, some mock-ups and earlier tests, all of it very alive with the sculptor’s presence. The family was going to empty out the space, and I asked them to leave it as it was. And so now, we start the process of transforming the studio into a… ceramics studio, go figure. As soon as I saw the space, the vision became clear, the purpose mandatory, the desire immense, and while I have been happily dealing with the house, fixing, building, turning it into a home, my eye and heart have always been in the studio.

The process will take time, I feel it will be a winter project, though I am not sure how to get the oil furnace running before the winter, and that is going to be critical. There is a lot of stuff that I will have to let go, and some I will donate or offer if anyone is interested. But the previous owner had mottos, shared by his daughter: “there is nothing that can’t be fixed” or “I can make a tool for that.” Many things are still working, broken and fixed, mended, maintained. His studio has numerous metal containers with parts and bits from every past life they were a part of, there are handles from broken tools that were never disposed of, tools without handles that still work, belt-driven tools, so many grinding stones and sharpening gadgets for the vast amount of metal tools he used to sculpt stone. He even created a makeshift photography studio with a black screen and artificial lighting to document his work.

Of course, I see all this in a romantic and fond way, but everyone I invite into the space looks at it all as if it is junk. And some of it might be, but so much of it will live on in what I intend to create. I have a friend, a professional ceramist, and now my daughter in her last year of ceramic school. This will be a project where I am going to enjoy the journey as much as the result. And after all these years, who would say I would end up going back to ceramics, go figure!