Guest Blog by Black Bear
Going to pot
This past summer, I finally fulfilled a long-held dream of taking a class in wheel-thrown ceramics. I am, as in most things, a cheerful amateur about my involvement with clay; I knew it would be difficult, and that I wouldn’t produce anything of true beauty and style in an 8 week course at the local Art Center. I’d not worked with clay since I was 10, and I have no illusions about being innately talented at something as challenging as wheel-throwing. But when my friend J-the-Curator suggested we take this class together, I jumped at the chance to finally get my hands dirty (both literally and metaphorically.)
The first thing we learned was that our teacher was kind of annoying. She had one of those voices, you know? The second thing we learned was that she was the wife of a friend of mine who works at another museum, and so saying “Jeez, you’re annoying!” might have had unintended repercussions. So we let that go. But the THIRD thing we learned, on that first day of class, was how to slab-build a coffee mug.
Wheel-throwing, as I said, is hard. So to first familiarize ourselves with our new friend, clay, we started off by rolling out slabs of it, cutting a round piece for the bottom and a rectangle for the cylinder. We then stamped patterns in the wet clay with various textured objects from the teacher’s toolbox. Handles were added, and the mugs were put up to dry. As you can see, mine is in fact mug-shaped, but looks kind of like an alien with a horrible skin condition.
By week two, though, we were READY. Ready to start wheel-throwing! Ready to face the challenge! Ready to… fill the air with un-bloggable obscenity as we discovered that clay is, in a word, mean. You wedge up a ball of the stuff—wedging meaning you smush the clay over and over to mash out all the air pockets and get all its little granules aligned in a similar direction. Then you get a bowl of water, and a few tools, and an apron to protect your clothes, and you sit down at the wheel and slap the ball of clay down in the center, and then everything just goes to hell. You may think you have that clay centered, but you don’t. You turn on the wheel, put your hands around the clay, and the clay immediately becomes a force of powerful resistance, shoving your elbows violently into your stomach with every rotation, with the intent of eventually turning itself into a useless, asymmetrical blob. This is not your future coffee mug, this is a malevolent entity made of mud and slime and solid rock, and it will not be tamed by your feeble amateurish efforts.
Now, before you suggest that I’m exaggerating (I never exaggerate) I’d like to point out that I am not, generally, a total weenie in the strength. I have rather large hands, and while the rest of me is sadly out of shape, I’ve got pretty muscular arms and shoulders. And yet, the stiffness of the clay plus the power of the electric wheel means that getting it to shift around at ALL once the wheel’s in motion is surprisingly hard. I’d spend 15 minutes hunched over the wheel, elbows planted firmly against my belt buckle, knees braced against the catch basin, periodically sluicing water over the thing to make it more pliable… and at the end of the 15 minutes I’d have to scrape the whole thing off, dump it back into the scrap bucket, and wedge up another lump of clay to start over. Even after 8 weeks, centering the clay on the wheel was about the hardest part of the whole process.
However, as you’ve probably suspected, I eventually did get a little better at it, else I would not have been able to move on to the next seemingly impossible stage of wheel-throwing: opening it out. Every vessel has an inside and an outside surface (obviously) and so to turn your solid lump of clay into something that can hold things, you need to open it out into a cylinder, or something like one. You do this by shaping the lump upwards a bit, then finding its center by resting a finger gently on top of said lump. If your finger is off-center, then it’ll move around with the rotations of the wheel. So you find the spot where your finger can press lightly down and leave a perfect fingertip-shaped spot atop the clay without wobbling around. Then you just continue that process, and push your first two fingers down into the lump until you almost reach the bottom, and there’s the inside surface of your vessel (no matter what its final shape is going to be.) This, too, turned out to be harder than I’d anticipated, not least because my fingertips are double-jointed—this came up recently in the forum thread about string instruments, which also give me trouble. It wasn’t until Week 5 of the course, during which I’d struggled mightily with making cylinders whose inner surfaces did not at all match their outer ones, that I had a breakthrough—we had a substitute teacher. The sub looked at all of us, shoving our fingers into the clay with varying degrees of capability, and said, “Huh. I’ve never done it THAT way.”
Herein lies the great moral of this—or any—art class. There are always a million ways to do something, and all of them are right if they work for you, and wrong if they don’t. In this case, I discovered that his method of opening out a vessel worked far better for me; he used the side of his hand rather than his fingertips, which ends you up with a more flat plate/bowl-like shape to work with, but once you’ve got it opened you can do whatever you like with the sides, including bring them back up to where you wanted them in the first place. Clay on a wheel isn’t really a solid, once you’ve added a little water and got it centered and spinning. Or it’s both a solid and a liquid at the same time; it’s infinitely malleable, and its shape responds to even the lightest touch. My love of all things tactile is completely and utterly served by this art form, and in short order I produced a series of small bowls, each slightly less chunky than the last.
This little guy weighs about 4 lbs. Well, maybe not quite that much. But definitely thick.
Sure, I meant to make a pouring lip on this one. It certainly wasn’t that I accidentally mushed the edge of it when I was trying to get it off the wheel.
Hey look! It’s pink! We’ll call this one “The Hellgoddess Bowl.” *
So by week 5 I was finally producing things that didn’t make me cringe when I put them on the drying shelf. But then came the endless mysteries of footing, trimming, glazing, and firing… but we’ll save those for another post. It’s my hope to start doing some ceramics again this winter/spring, so if y’all are interested, perhaps we’ll make this an ongoing series. Anyway, the upshot here is, never be afraid to be BAD at something. There’s nothing wrong with being an amateur as long as you’re enjoying the process! ** 8 weeks of playing with clay didn’t make me a potter, but I had a great time being mediocre at this art form over the summer, and I hope to work up to being fair-to-middlin’ over the course of the next year… if I can just get the stupid clay centered.
* Huh.
** A couple of years after I started tower ringing again I found myself ringing with my old ringing master, he who can ring ANYTHING. He’s kind of a legend. He asked me how I was doing. Since I’d just been ringing badly in his company I said er, um. Er. Um. And he said, are you enjoying it? Yes, I said–sheepishly. He said, that’s all that matters. He meant it too. So. Yeah. You guys, listen to Black Bear and my old ringing master.
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