This semester, pottery lessons became my Thursday-night getaway. I’ve improved fast, on the wheel and off. Here are three non-ceramic-related lessons I’ve learned with my hands in the mud.
1. Patience
If you’ve taken a pottery class, you know what I’m talking about when I say centering tests your patience. At the beginning of any project, after throwing your clay on the wheel, you start the laborious process of centering the clay. This involves pushing your clay into the middle of the bat, with techniques such as coning, until the muddy blob is more reminiscent of a cute little even and tidy shape.
For me, this is the most boring part of creating, as my mind often races from idea to idea about what I want to make out of this material, and this lengthy, tedious process stands in the way. I see my fellow classmates churn out pretty piece after piece, and I want to speed through to get something done. The rub is that if centering isn’t completed correctly, no finished project will ever look quite right. The edges will be uneven, the rim will be wobbly, and on and on and on.
After creating many ugly bowls and cups with these features, I realized I needed to slow down and focus on exuding patience in this hobby. I can’t say I’ve fully perfected this, but the more I learn, the better my pieces come out.
2. Embracing the Imperfections
Pottery is hard. I can fully admit that after watching some TikTok videos pre-pottery class, I was relatively confident that within a few weeks I’d be making display-ready ceramics. It’s safe to say that didn’t happen. As mentioned above, many of my finished projects are lumpy and awkward and not ready to be sold for hundreds of dollars each. At first, this isn’t that frustrating, but as time goes on and I didn’t feel I was getting much better, it began to wear on me. This hits especially hard when you have specific ideas in mind, but not the technical skills to obtain them.
But a looming task was ahead of me, Christmas gifts. I realized it’d be awful if I spoke to my parents every week about how much fun I’d had learning pottery, but didn’t have any of the aforementioned pottery to gift them at Christmas. But, I’m also the type to give a handmade gift, and immediately feel guilty about its quality, pointing out everything I did wrong.
So I had to get creative. Bowls with uneven rims now became matcha bowls with spouts to even out the sides. A mug that was a little oddly shaped was transformed into a pibble mug. What began as a frustration turned into a fun opportunity to highlight each ceramic difference and turn flaws into fun.
3. Letting mistakes go
After a three-hour open studio session, I accidentally cut right through the bottom of two of my bowls. I was majorly bummed to say the least, as I was pretty excited with how these bowls came out. But I had to move on, and I decided to recreate them, with each turning out much better. I learned to leave more clay at the bottom, and I came out all the better for it.
This isn’t anything new. I’ve found that a large portion of my projects in the beginning ended up with me throwing broken clay in the reclaim. Piece after piece fell apart after I put too much pressure in a certain spot or accidentally clipped a section with my thumb. This would get under anyone’s skin, as after spending a seriously long amount of time centering your clay and working on your piece, it does not feel good to finish without a product. Alas, we persist, learning more each time, and each “failed” project contributes knowledge to a better project in the future.
I’m not going to be a master potter any time soon! But as long as I can take classes, I will continue to improve and learn more things about myself in the process!
