Starting Pottery

This year, Stephanie and I took it upon ourselves to start wheel-throwing classes at a local pottery studio. We actually meant to do this last year, but life was a bit hectic, and we figured it best to wait until after the holidays.

Steph had experience making pottery in school, but this was almost entirely new for me. At least, the wheel was. In sixth or seventh grade, I had the honor of working with clay in art class. I pretty much hated it. It was messy, dried out my already dry hands, we were always using newspapers (which gave me goosebumps when I touched them), and the class was only an hour. An hour did not seem like enough time to get set up, do something meaningful, clean up, and go back to a desk afterwards. I made a fish (I need a picture of that) – it was just a rectangular prism with some olive shaped eyes and a couple fins slapped on, and a ‘hand’. It was incredibly rough, and the only good part was the thumb – which the teacher did for me, and then complimented me on the following class.

I’ve been finding it incredibly fun. I had a suspicion I would really enjoy working on a wheel, since it is very machine-like. The clay is spinning, and through applying pressure in certain ways, I can influence the shape. Hand-sculpting seems intimidating, because the possibilities are endless–having just a few options to choose from really helps not overwhelm me. In the first class, we learned how to center clay, and shape that clay into a bowl. Centering is fun–you throw your clay at the wheel roughly in the middle, throw some water on it, and start to ‘center’. I am a total beginner so I’m almost definitely saying things wrong here, but this process alternates between two steps: Pushing in, and pushing down. You basically follow:

• While not centered:
• If clay is sticky:
• Slop it up
• Push in (at the base)
• If tall:
• Push down (at the top)

This process is repeated until your clay exhibits circular symmetry. Depending on what structure you will ultimately build, this can impact what shape you center into–but most commonly, this appears to be a dome or cylinder.

Centering makes sense to me, although I am still struggling. Today I tried using 3 lbs of clay (previously 2.5 lbs was highest) and it is a bit less forgiving when centering. I keep running into this issue where I start forming a hole in the center, and no matter how much I work it, it doesn’t seem to go away. My teacher called this ‘volcano-ing’, which seems appropriate.

Then after centering, you do the gotdamn. For a bowl, the gotdamn is making the center cavity. To do this, you take your two index fingies and pull towards yourself, until you get to roughly the size you want. After this, you pull the walls up – for this step, you are creating height. Because this is a bit more delicate, you slow down the wheel. For a bowl, the process follows:

• While not done
• If clay is sticky:
• Conservatively slop it up
• If not desired height:
• Pull walls up
• If desired height:
• Pull walls out
• Compress rim
• Soak up excess moisture

The process of pulling up involves applying pressure on the inside and outside wall of your clay simultaneously. You do this while very slowly moving your hands up from the base to the top of the clay, hence pulling up. Pulling in or out refers to varying the pressure applied, as opposed to an equal pressure. Soaking up the moisture inside the bowl and compressing the rim helps for stability of your structure.

The first couple of times I did this, this process confused me. I forgot steps and ended up trying to create a bowl from my initial cylinder/dome with one process–something like:

• While not done
• Slop it up
• Make hole in thing
• If not bowl:
• Pinch it kinda to slant the walls

I was kinda confused as to why it wasn’t really working, or why my bowl walls were so thick but only an inch tall. Once I watched again and got some coaching though, I figured out the actual process (I think, I still might be missing something). But I can make a bowl now at least!

I think the essence of what I want to say is how I view throwing, and why I like it. I feel like I am a PID controller and my body is a nice robot. If hardware wasn’t a limitation (haha), I feel like I could program a robot to do this. Being able to think about it with such a straightforward set of actions makes it easy to track my progress and experiment–what changes if I apply pressure in a different place for a different length of time? I rarely find myself getting lost in activities, but this is something I have fully lost myself in. That disconnect from life is really nice.