pots of thoughts, thoughts of pots

My pottery workshop finished on Friday. I learned a lot. Most of the things I learned were not related to clay. I learned that my capacity for managing myself around new people is not entirely robust and two days is about my limit. After that I found everything got increasingly more overwhelming as the week went on. It wasn’t intolerable, I just got tireder and tireder and more prone to thinking about bursting into tears for no discernible reason. I have the bandwidth of a fractious toddler. I need a lot of quiet time to think about what I've done.

In terms of making pots I also learned quite a lot. I had imagined that I might love throwing on the wheel. It was important to me to prove that I could do it, but once I had done that, I found I wasn’t that into it. In order to make the kind of pots I would actually want to live with and use, I reckon I would have to put about five years of effort into it and I probably still wouldn’t be that thrilled with my output. I made some things and they were fine, but they didn’t light me up from the inside. They were technically ok but creatively dead.

What I really enjoyed was making things using coiling, pinching and slab building techniques. I made some reasonably frightening pots, but making them made me happy. We shall see if they survive the kiln. I have a feeling they may blow up, but that’s ok. It will save me having to think about where the hell to put them.

As I was making them I spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of person that I am and how I like to express myself. I confirmed to myself that I am pretty chaotic. I like to make things on the spur of the moment. I like to experiment and to see what happens if I do things this way, or that way, or if I put this and that together. I like to freestyle. I also like to work quickly.

Clay really does not like to freestyle. Clay also likes you to take your time. There are lots of steps and lots of firings and lots of waiting for things to dry. There is a lot of measuring and a constant need for smoothness and evenness. I am not an even person and I am 100% not measured. I am much more uppy-downy. I can learn to be smooth and even, but then what I make would not be an expression of who I am. I learned that I don’t want to make ‘a’ bowl. I want to make ‘my’ bowl. I want the things I make to express aspects of myself and clay is not the best medium for where I am at in my making life or my life, life.

Pottery requires an enormous amount of discipline and planning. To get the best out of it you need maths and science and the ability to do some engineering. This is not me at all. I really admire people who can do all these things. I love ceramics but what I learned is that I love other people’s ceramics better than my own. I really enjoyed the course and I will definitely do more pottery in future, but it is not where my creative destiny lies. That was an excellent thing to learn.

What I am learning with every creative thing I attempt is another way of perceiving the world. Clay requires you to look at the world in a different way to cloth or paper or wood. Using it affords you the opportunity to connect with life differently. It demands that you behave in ways that you wouldn’t normally. It asks you to see the world through shape and texture and malleability. It needs you to think about form and purpose. Clay interacts with the world in ways that nothing else does and if you pay attention to it, it shares its gifts with you even if you don’t end up making your friend Matt a lovely serving platter because it is way beyond your skillset.