A crooked little vase.
What if enjoyment is the goal?
For the past six weeks, I’ve been taking a hand building1 pottery class. Every Wednesday, as I pull out my stool and sit in front of a deep brown slab of clay, I am struck by the same humbling revelation: I’m kind of bad at this.
“Are you at least having fun?” My husband asked when I came home downtrodden after the second class. Fun wasn’t the word I would use to describe the experience. I just looked at it him. “I mean, I hope you can enjoy it.”
Enjoyment, I thought, hadn’t been the point. Nearly every time I start a new thing, I implore myself to just keep trying, keep practicing, keep going with the goal of improvement. I’ll assure myself I’m just a beginner, but I can get better. Then, when I don’t, I quit altogether. The same thing happened when I walked into the pottery studio on the first night and was handed a 25-pound bag of clay. I panicked. Then, I studied the faces of the seven other women in class. Could they look at their blocks of wet mud and see oblong plates, squatty little teacups, and sangria pitchers adorned with intricate handles? I had no idea how to cut the clay, let alone roll it out, and create geometric shapes that would somehow be usable pieces of ceramic. My clay buckled in the slab roller during that first class, I didn’t accurately cut the bottom of the vase when I returned the following week, and I probably did something else incorrectly because the entire thing is lilting to the side like a sad little leaning tower of Pisa replica.
Listen, I’m bad at a lot of things:
Standing up straight.
Winking.
Whistling.
Floating.
Singing.
Remembering birthdays.
Making small talk.
Reading a map.
Responding to a text in a reasonable amount of time.
Packing everything into a carry-on.
Throwing a frisbee.
Math.
Parallel parking.
Reapplying sunscreen.
Rolling my r’s.
But here’s the deal: Not being able to carry a tune in no way prevents me from singing along to all my favorite songs at concerts. Sinking like a rock doesn’t keep me from arching my back and splaying my arms when I am in the ocean on a hot summer day. I don’t skip dinner parties due to my aversion to small talk. So, did I have to eventually be good at something to derive value from it? Not at all.
And I did enjoy my time in the studio. I liked the physicality of molding wet clay with my hands until shapes appeared, pinching pieces together, and smoothing uneven edges with my fingertips. It all felt so … primal. I loved walking out into the warm evening with dried clay on my white cotton t-shirt and an idea for how I’d like to glaze my berry bowl. So, one class at a time I showed up to the cool room filled with the smell of damp soil, took my place on the small metal stool, and listened to music the instructor played to break up the otherwise studious silence. As Cat Stevens sang “Peace Train,” I learned how to score my clay and apply slip2 to the roughened edges. I rolled out small snake-like shapes to create coils and pressed them into the seams of my bird feeder. I gave up on perfecting the outcome.
After a few classes, I felt confident enough to attend open studio; a three-hour time slot offered a few times a week during which students are allowed to work on personal projects. By that time, I understood the basics enough to roll out my clay and cut shapes using various templates, so I thought I’d give it a try. I pinched together a small bowl, then a larger plate. I stamped out a few circles I thought could be used as coasters. Later in the week, when my instructor looked at the plastic sheet covering the various projects I created and asked, “Are these finished?” I looked at her for a moment. Finished means they’re ready to dry on the rack for days before applying glaze and firing them in the kiln. It means you can’t manipulate the wet clay anymore. I considered that she may not like my creations. It’s an internalized pressure, really. No one else in class cares if I am “good” at pottery. There is no passing grade. This will not go on my resume. Then, I remembered the joy I felt digging my hands into mounds of wet clay earlier that week, how I pinched together a tiny dish and pressed a stamp in the shape of a fish to its center because I just felt like it.
“Sure. They’re finished,” I said.
She smiled. “Well, what are they?”
“I don’t know,” I told her, surprised by how quickly my self-perceived ineptitude fell out of my mouth. And I didn’t. I learned - after I created my projects - that my clay was going to shrink by about 12%. I didn’t even know clay shrunk. The bowl could be used for soy sauce when my husband and I get takeout sushi, the plate could be a trinket dish, and the circles could be coasters. They could also shrink into unrecognizable shapes once they were in the kiln. So, I don’t know was the truest response. And I was surprisingly okay with that.
Of course, this class improved my pottery skills, which had been nonexistent just six weeks prior, but at some point I can’t exactly nail down, improvement became the by-product of pleasure. When I sat down on my stool for the final time, I looked at what was left of my hunk of clay and felt proud of myself. I even felt proud of my crooked little vase.
https://home.howstuffworks.com/green-living/pottery3.htm
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