BIG BIG PUN (MFA*)

FOUNDER

Big Big Pun has an MFA, which she earned the traditional way — by sitting through critiques where deeply uninspired people with excellent eyewear and questionable breath suggested her work might benefit from words usually reserved for feminine hygiene ads: cleaner, lighter, more controlled.

At one particularly low point, someone said “edit,” followed closely by “minimalism” and “restraint,” which felt less like feedback and more like a medical diagnosis. She learned everything she needed to learn. History. Proportion. Scale. And how to be politely told she was doing too much… by people doing very little.

Where most people finish, she starts getting interested. She studied pots that behaved so well they practically tucked themselves in at night — polite, balanced, deeply committed to not causing a scene.

Meanwhile, her feedback consistently circled one word: unresolved — academic code for this doesn’t fit in my brain, and that rarely ends well for you.

It did not stop her.
It did the opposite.

It lit her up. Gassed her up. Sent her straight back into the studio to push harder, further, and just past the point where things start to get uncomfortable — which, coincidentally, is where the good stuff lives.

Because somewhere between a very confident opinion and a glaze bucket some demon left the lid off of, she realized something important: you’re working with dirt. Not polite dirt. Not well-behaved dirt. Dirt that expands, collapses, blisters, crawls, cracks, fuses itself permanently to things you care about, and occasionally produces an object so beautiful it feels like it’s mocking you personally.

That’s not failure.
That’s participation.
That’s the light that got left on.

Big Big Pun stopped trying to make clay behave and started treating it like a collaborator with boundary issues.

Now she runs her studio accordingly. She’s not alone in this.

The kiln isn’t a tool — it’s a weather pattern.

Cone 6 is the optimistic dog — mostly sunny with a 100% chance of being wrong.
Cone 10 is the other dog — severe weather advisory, property damage likely, no one is safe.
Bisque is the cat — refusing to evacuate and somehow listed as the cause of the storm.

Which explains everything.

Function is optional.
Mediocrity is not.

Some pieces hold water.
Some hold fruit.
Some hold the kind of tension you usually associate with family holidays.

People encounter her work and do that thing where they lean in, squint slightly, and ask, “Is this supposed to do that?” — which is the correct question and SINGLES the wrong buyer.

Because the real answer is:
it did that —
and she didn’t stop it.

That’s Big Big Pun in a nutshell.

Where most people pull back, she adds one more layer.
Where most people fix, she breaks.
Where most people decide it’s gone too far, she pushes.

The MFA taught her how to make things that make sense.
The kiln taught her how to make things that matter.

And Big Big Pun, to her credit, chose to matter.

*MFA = Master of FUCKING Around