This is the third post about the making of my wall installation regarding Apple and the EEOC. To read the whole series from the beginning, start with It's Raining Men, then Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
Next I needed to gather up the knowledge, tools, and materials to color clay. As I share how I found those things, I will also share their prices—because making art costs money. Speaking out requires the very resource that my employer intentionally withheld.
Last fall I drove to Berkeley twice a week to take an in-person class ($375.00) with Anastasia Tumanova, who makes transcendent botanical looms and mandalas. There, I learned her method for coloring clay, and embarked on my first experiments (like these pumpkins).
Carving out dedicated weekly time for testing and asking questions—in her beautiful sunlit studio surrounded by her works in progress and a cohort of supportive women—helped me build the muscles to keep iterating on my own.
I also watched a video, Colored Clay with Curtis Benzle ($32). My main takeaway was the optimization of obtaining clay in a dry, powdered form, to save myself both the hassle and lag of dehydrating it myself.
Bolstered with this information, I went shopping. I sourced as much as possible locally: at Clay People, Kamei Restaurant Supply, Ross, and only as a last resort, online.
- Mason stains (~$200). 1oz (28.35g) can range from $2–$20
- USPigment stains ($70). The sample pack included .5oz–1oz (14g–28g) each of 30 colors, mostly reds.
- 50 lb dry porcelain ($100), special-ordered at the minimum order quantity.
- 8 qt food storage containers with lids ($10/ea) to store clay powder.
- 8 oz wide mouth plastic jars ($23 for 36), a good size for 100g stain tests.
- metal scoops for handling clay powder (about $5/ea).
- mini spatulas ($5 for 3) - forever dedicated only for use with clay.
- a 4-digit number roller stamp ($13) for marking test tiles.
I already had a half-mask respirator for safety, plaster bats for drying out wet clay, scales with good readability for small quantities, spoons, a water pitcher, and cleanup sponges.
That just left the task of preparing my studio sink. If you pour heavy ceramic materials down a drain, they'll settle and clog the p-trap. To prevent this, I bought a 43oz Gleco Trap ($120) and hired a plumber to install it ($190).
The trap came with straightforward instructions, but hiring a professional added peace of mind for my property manager and studiomate. It also outsourced the work of adapting between pipe diameters when my studio's sink and the trap fixtures didn't match.
It makes such a difference to be able to rinse my tools in the sink. Otherwise, I would've had to do some real machinations transporting clay water around town to dispose of properly.
In all, this project's start up costs came to just over $1000. Interesting, given that each raindrop represents $1000. Apple could've docked any man on my team that amount ten times over—many even twenty or thirty times—and we still would have had a pay gap.
Not to mention, those men are still gainfully employed. In the five years since my constructive discharge, I've lost out on over a million dollars of total compensation, and had tens of thousands in fallout healthcare costs. Comparatively, $1,000 is a drop in the bucket.
But buckets, at least, I have. So in the next post, I'll mix raw ingredients into colored clay.