“It's always a little bit nerve wracking. Like I'm always nervous. Just because, when you do an art space thing it's always relying on other people liking what you're doing and purchasing and supporting you.”
By Tayla Ham - Origninally Written May 3rd 2024
Seated on a pastel purple chair, Shelby Sherritt carefully applies a pink glaze onto a book-shaped jar, surrounded by dried native flowers, artworks, and glazes in her studio. The air is filled with the earthy smell of clay as she reflects on her new business, The Pottage, which opened in April. “To be able to see how many people have been inspired or want to create their own pottery, is just so exciting to me because it's just another way that I can share my joy,” Sherritt says.
Pieces painted by customers on opening weekend sit to dry, adorned with a beautiful array of designs, varying from patterns to cute pictures, all with a range of coloured glazes, each as unique as the next. In the following weeks, Sherritt and her team will fire, glaze and return the completed pieces to the customers. “To give people a space that we don't have in Ballarat to paint pottery. It's really inspiring and exciting, and we just really hope that people enjoy themselves,” Sherritt says.
“[The Pottage is] a very fresh and new business adventure because so much of what I've done in the past has either been a content basis or, a, you buy my finished pottery, basis work,” Sherrit says. “The Pottage is like kind of like a step in the direction of, I guess, not being so reliant on my pottery product sales and making all of the videos to then just almost offering a service that can allow me to have a bit more balance in my life.”
“At the moment, I do so much social media, so it just got to a point where it wasn't sustainable for me anymore… And this year, I was really like, what do I want to what do I want this to look like? And what do I want my health to look like? And yeah, so this, the future is sort of moving towards a, more sustainable for my mental health and my physical health, business model rather than working so hard all the time.” Sherritt says.
Amidst the chaos of the 2020 pandemic and lockdowns, Sherritt’s pottery went viral when she started posting her art on TikTok. Her unique style and the iconic Australian animal pots helped draw an audience. However, Sherritt almost never started on TikTok at all. “I posted a couple videos, didn't like it. Delete that. Yep, I came back to it. Delete those videos,” Sherritt says, explaining her initial hesitation on TikTok. “I came back to it one more time because I had a few friends being, like, ‘No actually, like, it's quite like a good platform to reach new audiences.’ And I was like, well, you're saying that it works. So maybe I'll just give it one more go.”
From there, Sherritt posted an introductory video that went semi-viral, which spurred Sherritt on to continue posting, “I couldn't believe the love and support on the app in those early days. And it was really wholesome and really nice.”
Sherritt's account following shot through the roof when her account went viral right across TikTok. “I was just posting in the moment,” Sherritt explains when she bought countless vintage unlabelled pottery moulds and decided to create a TikTok series about it called "Mystery Moulds". “I literally posted [the first Mystery Mould] video as soon as I got home. And yeah, it went big viral, like wild viral, and I couldn't believe it. And I was so excited because everyone else was as excited as I was.”
Sherritt’s TikTok account now has 1.9 million followers and has posted over 100 Mystery Mould videos, with countless other videos showing her tireless work scattered throughout. “I'm really, really, grateful for the support and love my work has gotten over the years,” Sherritt says. While Sherritt still loves making the content for TikTok, with such a massive number of followers, she does have one of her employees manage a lot of the actual posting on the platform now, “I find it really daunting in a way because the platform is just so huge and diverse and vast that it almost gives me the stage fright now.”
TikTok is where the majority of Sherritt’s followers are; however, she also has a thriving YouTube community, with 387 thousand subscribers, where she publishes long-form content compared to the “heavily edited” short-form content published on TikTok. On YouTube, Sherritt shares “helpful information about pottery or just have more of a conversation and a candid connection with people”.
However, she did share that having such a large presence on social media can be difficult to balance at times. “[With] your business kind of relying on social media a little bit. It can be really exhausting when you don't have a switch-off time. With a normal job where you're like, Oh, this is nine to five, you switch off, you go home. But with social media, it's always going.” For Sherritt, managing her well-being is as important as her business is, as it should be for anyone.
Sherritt has always been creative; however, working full-time in her own studio and inspiring people to paint pottery isn’t where she thought life would head. “It wasn't until I was diagnosed with cancer, but I sort of was at a crossroads of not really knowing what to do with my life and being like, well, life's too short to be doing stuff that I don't enjoy,” Sherritt says. ” I found clay because I liked how I had complete control over the medium. And it was just so tactile and sculptural that I became obsessed with it.”
With the opening of The Pottage Sherritt has been ecstatic was exciting for Sherritt to see how her social media has inspired so many people to want to “explore their own creativity in that space.” At the moment they are still “testing stuff seeing how it feels,” however, Sherritt hopes that they create foster space that feels “nice and cozy” and as well safe for people for people. Hopefully The Pottage can be a place “to nurture play, and sometimes we don't nurture play enough. Yeah, should be nice for inner children to come out and show their sparkle.”
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