No one said anything about presentations...

So, yesterday, I went to the studio, started working, etc. etc., nothing out of the ordinary... and then Aedan comes up and asks if I've given some things for my presentation to Minori yet. Excuse me, what?

Turns out they'd been planning to have everyone briefly show off their work at 3p.m. Followed by dinner around 8. So, do you have some pictures or a PowerPoint made that you can show? Nothing serious... And if you want to make something for dinner, most everyone's going to make a dish of some sort...

Ah communication. Unfortunately I hadn't been a part of that particular grapevine, so yesterday took a bit of a detour into my room, with my laptop, throwing some pictures onto a PowerPoint.

I may have been caught a bit off guard by the whole thing, but it was, in the end, absolutely wonderful to sit around for a few hours in the lounge area and to get an overview of the huge variety of work that is thriving here. We had some amusing (and approximately tri-lingual) technical glitches, like one girl's 6 gig (or am I exaggerating?) PowerPoint that froze my computer, or the projector asking someone else's computer for a Japanese keyboard, or not being able to figure out how to just run a slideshow of some pictures, without putting them in PowerPoint... And so on. I think there's at least 12 or more artists here right now (which, from what I've heard, may be the most they've ever had at one time), and we got through everyone in about 3 or 4 hours. Which seems like a long time, perhaps, but it was fascinating. Everyone has such different motivations, and styles, and languages, and backgrounds, but we're all potters, in the end. Or visual artists, at least.

So, afterwards was dinner, and I volunteered for the cleanup crew, since I didn't really have enough food to prepare any kind of dish that would feed more than maybe 2 people, and I certainly didn't have time to go to the store. I would like to cook for everyone some other time, though. Dinner was fantastic, including about 3 varieties of fried rice, Korean miso, something spicy with octopus, a fruit and vegetable salad, sashimi, essentially all kinds of foods from all over the world, plenty of conversation, some sake... I finally retired to my room around midnight, but from what I've heard today, at least a couple of people were up until almost 3a.m. I talked for awhile with a couple of Japanese guys about raku... there's so much to learn, and too few words to express ourselves. Apparently they use rice husks or hulls or something like that, which has to do with the rice growing and then there's the (insert hand gesture here) and it's not the rice but its about this big (insert hand gesture here again)... And what is "sherushi"? Celsius and ...Fahrenheit? How do you say that? What temperature do you fire at? You use sawdust, right? What is that? In Japanese?

Absolutely fantastic, that's what it is.
I can't wait to fire.