Jake Boling: Pottery (Location 8)

I spent years working as a creative for large outdoor brands, making images designed to circulate quickly—shooting catalogs, campaigns, and advertisements. Ephemeral artwork that lived on a coffee table (or, if I was lucky, on the back of a toilet) for a few weeks before being thrown away, no matter how carefully crafted.

Over the past few years, I’ve returned to a more deliberate practice of slowly making tangible objects by hand. In my home studio, rooted in the West Plains of Spokane, I process clay and make glazes from wood ash. My pottery is painstakingly fired with wood, and I grow the flowers arranged in my vases. I shoot photography on 4x5” film, in a camera that was “outdated” long before I was born. I develop those images myself, then make the frames that will hold them for years. My paintings begin as rolls of canvas in the corner of my studio, which I stretch and prime before painting. When they are ready to be framed, I select the wood and make those frames myself.

These processes are laborious by design. Each piece takes time, and each one is unique. The slowness is part of the work.