Member Interview
Charles Galatis
What is your name? Charles Galatis.
What is your everyday occupation? I own a textile business named Mimbresco. We mainly focus on producing fashion accessories like scarves and shawls made from heirloom fabrics, which are hand-woven and dyed by award-winning weaver dyers in India. My pieces are carried at the SF MOMA, Asian Art Museum, Japanese garden in South Bay, and a few museums in Los Angeles. I also occasionally do textile consulting work for companies like Disney, where I helped produce heirloom fabrics for their live-action period film, Mulan.
What’s your artistic background? I grew up in South Florida. After high school, I went to Goddard because I wanted to work with the Bread & Puppet Theatre (which is a political radical puppet theater created by Peter Schumann), then I moved to Boulder, Colorado to study early childhood education, psychology. Later I took a fourteen-month trip to Europe and India in my late 20’s. I was there to help build a senior thesis piece for my dear friend who was pursuing modern dance. After this extensive trip, my love of textiles and India led me to the current business I own today.
How long have you been doing ceramic work... I remember making a tea set for my mother at 10 years old. During my teenage years, I got into ceramics more seriously after taking a clay coil workshop at a local museum. I ended up creating a lot of ceramic pieces at home, where my parents had a studio with an electric kiln set up. This eventually led me to getting accepted to prestigious art festivals in Florida, where I sold a lot of my clay pieces.
(Side note: I recently found some of my work online from when I was 15 years old (see picture). It was eventually donated to a local church consignment shop by my mom during her house cleanup. This piece ended up in a gallery in NY and got sold for $1,800! Though the description said this piece were made in mid-century, I made it in ’71.)
There was a long pause of creating any clay work until the recent pandemic. I began carving tea bowls to continue my interest in clay during the lockdown. Soon after I joined TPS, I do occasional communal high firings and some sculpture works at the studio.
Tell us about your love for hand-built sculptural work... I’m influenced by Louise Nevelson. When I was a kid, I’d like to just go to construction sites and take leftover wood and build these boat-like structures. Once I saw Nevelson’s work, they really resonated with me - creating 3D collages with combined materials. When I approach my clay work, I like playing around with the materials to construct. Then I create a playful contrast by using different textures and colors on each layers of my clay pieces, often by sanding the edges or doing a little carving on the pieces. Tool-wise, I have two favorites- a plain rectangular-shaped steel pad and a metal gouging tool. I got a clay extruder pretty early on with a slab roller, and a wheel and electric kiln when I set up my home studio allowing pieces to be produced, bisqued or mid-fired here.
What is your creative process... I’m currently interested in building complicated interactive sculptural pieces. I usually start by creating a few geometric shapes, then keep adding and editing out the shapes by revising it multiple times until the idea is done. Sorta just doing things and figuring it out along the way while executing the idea. However, sometimes I do a brief sketch of the shape.
How does Buddhism intersect with your creativity... I’m really interested and inspired by the “V” shape. In Buddhism, I recall the “V” is like what they call the source of Dharmas, which is the idea that it’s very open at the top and down to a minuscule, just to a point at the bottom- how things kind of give birth in a way. In creation, everything kind of comes out to one thing with a spark, and then takes off from there.
Some time ago, I set up a home meditation room three feet across from my home studio. I love this room. This is my sacred place and whatever I've come here to do, it gets done. I think everyone needs their little dedicated space. It doesn't have to be big.
What’s the most memorable ceramic workshop/class you’ve attended... I took a Bruno Kark workshop (at TPS) – a potter who makes Ikebana containers and throws large pieces beautifully and it was very inspiring and opened my eyes to sculpting more pieces in different ways. I made some of my favorite pieces from that workshop.
What are you currently interested in... Experimenting with growing borax crystals on my ceramic sculptures, learning concrete casting, and working with glass. Eventually, I would like to learn how to fire a gas kiln and do foundry work.
How do you deal with being in a creative rut... It’s like anything – you have an idea and you keep going at it and it eventually leads to another idea and so forth in time. I've got more than a few things happening at once in my studio for this reason. Just like everyone, I have good days and bad days. Some days it feels like things are pouring out of you but most of the time it’s just hard work.
Where are you with your work and process right now... I’m still figuring things out as it’s evolving. I don't really like a lot of what I produced. I could see that's a subjective thing. Maybe some people would like some of it, but for me, most of it I don't like. I know it's a weird thing to say, but I'm very weird about that. I like the process of it though. A lot of my current clay sculpture pieces are built by using multiple rhythmic geomatic shapes, where I still need to figure out how to successfully fire the piece without having major cracks on them. It takes a lot of testing to figure out to give the right pressure points and thicknesses to the pieces, considering their unique design.
How do you stay creative... I usually pair my business trip with my personal trip, to find inspiration in a local culture, history, and art. When I travel, I like to travel in-depth, and treat it as a short residency. I sometimes rent a car and start driving aimlessly (this is how I found this gorgeous slab on a road in Wyoming that I turned into a table in my meditation room). Also one of my favorite bi-annual creative activities is going to Biennale, which I always plan enough time to visit neighboring cities from Venice to check out many other amazing exhibitions and their monuments.
Interview article and photography by Inhae Lee