My wife is a wonderful ceramicist. She started in London at the Leyton studio of Turning Earth, cycling there several evenings a week after work and most weekends. The house filled up with beautiful pots made with care, and I was in awe of her patience, skill and dedication.
When we moved to New York she joined another studio, Brooklyn Peoples Pottery, the working studio of ceramicist Alice Waters. Our Bed-Stuy carriage house started to fill up with wonderful work yet again, and I found myself increasingly interested in her practice.
Over the years, one of the things I’d most admired was her ability to work in a medium that had such long stretches between the conception of a piece and its eventual completion: sketching, wedging, throwing, drying, trimming, drying (again), bisque firing, glazing, glaze firing. Some of these steps had days or weeks in between them.
The medium I’ve most used to express my ideas is software, which is immediate and almost always a two-way door. It’s never done. Always malleable. I could make things quickly and rework what I’d made for eternity (in theory). With ceramics, this wasn’t true—at least once the piece had been fired, and especially once it had been glazed.
At some point, my wife suggested that I join her studio and make work of my own. After dragging my heels for a while, I signed up. I didn’t know if I had the necessary patience and perseverance that she seemed to possess, but I thought that I might as well find out. I attended class once per week and had longer studio hours on the weekend.
From the very first class, I was hooked. I wedged my clay, centered it on the wheel, opened it up, pulled up the walls and… fucked it up. Over and over again. I’d smush the wet clay back down into a misshapen lump, center it again, and just keep going. An experience I’d expected to frustrate me had liberated me instead, and I loved it.
I’d started that first lesson with a lump of clay, and I ended with a lump of clay that was a good bit smaller and good bit wetter. I had nothing concrete to show for the hours in the studio, and I didn’t care at all—I knew I’d be back, and that the next session wouldn’t be much different.
Over the next few months I’d slowly improve my skills, but the vast majority of my time in the studio was spent centering clay on the wheel, opening it up, pulling up the walls, and then… taking my wire and cutting the pot in in half, top to bottom. I was obsessed with the thickness of my walls and the consistency of my pull. Shape, chop, smush, repeat.
Eventually, I’d finish a few pieces—but that wasn’t really the point and isn’t the point of this post. It took months of slow progress and days or weeks of waiting in between steps to get anywhere at all. It taught me a new kind of patience. A new kind of care, craft and consideration.
My wife has inspired many of my best qualities, to be honest, and I’ll forever be thankful for all of them. This particular lesson is one that I’m constantly thankful for though, and makes me appreciate even more the care that she has for her own practice. The care that she has for everything that she does, actually—this is just one example.
There’s beauty and clarity to the slowness of ceramics and mediums like it. There’s meditation in the making and in the waiting. It makes you look at the world a little differently, and to appreciate more of the things around you. If you get the chance, try making something slowly—and like my wife, be kind enough to encourage others to do the same.