To heal country, let’s take a nap, use duct tape
We must heal the country. But how? Pundits are already assuring us that, presidential election aside, the nation will remain deeply split. So I say we borrow some quick fixes we use for other kinds of problems and apply them to the partisan divide. It can’t hurt.
Here are some possibilities:
Turn the country off and turn it back on again.
That’s right: Reboot the nation. Granted, the nation has no on/off switch, but I think a nap would be an effective substitute.
We set a date — say Dec. 1 — and instruct the entire population of the United States to lie down for a snooze at 3 p.m. (2 p.m. Central). Everybody wakes up refreshed 20 minutes later, and we see if anything improves.
Upside: It’s guaranteed to interrupt turmoil for at least 20 minutes because naps are peaceful by definition. It’s impossible to hate-sleep.
Downside: Multitaskers might try to nap while driving, nap while performing surgery or nap while operating a nuclear power plant.
Apply duct tape
Duct tape permanently fixes noth
It wasn’t long before the senior at Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center saw her number of followers on Instagram jump from 400 to 2,400. And now, business is booming for the Clinton Township teen, whose website sells out of inventory quickly after each launch and whose books are full when it comes to custom orders.
Those who have known Hanna for years call her a prodigy whose work ethic and extreme focus on her craft will continue to make her a success as a young artist, even if the current social media spotlight on her subsides.
“Some of the things she’s made, most artists would not attempt in clay,” said Terri Maloney-houston, a studio artist who lives on the Northwest Side.
“Clay is soft and floppy, and the things she does definitely take some engineering. She’s very precocious with her materials and has a willingness to push her boundaries.”
Maloney-houston first met Hanna when the latter attended a summer ceramics camp that Maloney-houston hosted for area teens at the Woodward Park Community Center. Though her pupil was only a rising eighth grader at the time, Maloney-houston said Hanna had the drive of a college student engrossed in a ceramics major.
She said she has seen that talent and the desire to improve grow stronger as she has mentored and worked alongside Hanna the past four years. Hanna now helps her teach ceramics to elementary school students at Woodward Park — where she spent about 15 hours a week throwing and hand-building clay before the pandemic — and Hanna often is the one who adult ceramicists turn to for advice during open studio time.
Hanna admits that if a day passes without an opportunity to touch clay — to throw it, pinch it, glaze it or even recycle it — she isn’t very pleased.
And though she has always been an artist — she made tape sculptures when she was only 2 — when she found ceramics, she knew she had discovered her passion.
“I like how ceramics works,” said Hanna, who operates out of a studio that takes up half her bedroom. (Her kiln is in the pool shed.) “If you add water, it makes it smooth. If you take it away, it makes it dry. And how versatile it is with all the different glazes. It’s a really cool art form that is underappreciated.”
It doesn’t hurt that most of her work is purposely functional.
“You can drink out of my art,” she said. “That succulent over there is in one of my pots.”
Despite the practicality of the art form, one of Hanna’s teachers at Fort Hayes, Megan Evans, has charged her to think more sculpturally, and she thinks her pupil is finding her voice.
“She did this tea set that was all about the bottom of the ocean, with coral and shells,” Evans said. “She did a sloth hanging off of a tree. I see nature as one of those things that is constantly coming up in her work — that transformation, evolution, things die off, rebirth.”
Dawn Mccombs, owner of Glean in the Short North, has sold Hanna’s artwork in her shop since early 2019.
“The mushroom mugs she makes, they barely stay on the shelf,” said Mccombs, who also enjoys stocking Hanna’s honeycomb-inspired vases, cat earrings and teeny tiny 1-inch pots packaged as “A Little Bag of Pot.”
Hanna’s pieces typically cost anywhere from $10 to $60.
“For her age, she has a tremendous work ethic, and she has perseverance,” Mccombs said. “This is a craft that is quite suited to her, and people are drawn to her because she’s exceptionally talented.”
As Hanna looks past graduation, she hopes to become a ceramics instructor as well as a full-time artist.
She has a passion for working with those with disabilities because one of her two older sisters has cerebral palsy. She regularly makes pottery to donate to nonprofits for fundraisers and has taught pottery to the special education classes taught by her mothers, Tiffany Hanna and Cheryl Kempf (who recently retired).
Both parents said she has always been the creative one in the family.
“She’s always been — since a young age — finding ways to express herself,” Tiffany Hanna said. “When she found pottery, it took off.”
Continued Kempf: “Even as a little kid, she had to be creating something. If you tried to interfere with that, she was not a happy person.”
Her recent surge in popularity certainly will help keep her busy.
Hanna has a knack for marketing herself, her teacher Evans said, and she will probably be able to pay for college — Hanna is leaning toward applying to Ohio University — from the success of her pottery business.
Hanna admits she has always had a penchant for capitalism, manning a lemonade stand, selling flip-flops she decorated and drawing henna tattoos for a fee as a youngster.
Though several festivals where she sells her works were canceled because of COVID-19, her online presence has blossomed, allowing Hanna’s creations to be sent all across the country. And with most of her schoolwork being online these days, it affords the teen more time to focus on her passion.
“I want to continue to expand my business,” she said. “I do love teaching and I want that to be a part of my life, but I want to just teach ceramics. … I’m not too interested in other media. Ceramics is where I can have the strongest impact on people.”
“She’s always been — since a young age — finding ways to express herself. When she found pottery, it took off.”
Tiffany Hanna one of Quinn Hanna’s mothers