This Month at Green River Pottery: January 2008
Time and Money
It’s always great to return to routine after the holiday. I look forward to the moment when I’ll return to the studio as much as—more than—I look forward to the break. It feels good to resume work, though sometimes it goes slowly at first, and stiffly. I hesitate. I’m timid. I forget that it takes a little time to break back in, to renew my connection to the clay.
Yesterday I made it to the studio by 8 in the morning. I worked steadily, mostly on a single piece, into the early afternoon. It was a big piece, a jar I threw in two sections and then joined together. I added handles on either side of the neck, fattened and incised the lip. I had struggled a bit to align the two pieces of the vase as I joined them, to get the whole form centered with itself, and in that struggle I overcame that initial hesitation and stiffness. I was back in the groove. Suddenly though, around 2:30, as I ribbed the inside one last time, wanting to fill out the form and add as much empty space to its interior as I could...the whole thing collapsed. It fell in on itself, landing partly on my arm, falling back to the wheelhead in a torn-up jumble: lobes of wall, stretched pieces of handle more beautiful than they’d been before, fragments of the high shoulder, the lip, dented ovals. I looked curiously at the inside of the bottom, suddenly exposed to the light—that part of the vase that would have remained the most unreachable, the most unknowable, had the vase survived. There at the bottom were my finger marks, preserved; there were the tracks of the wooden rib ascending, recording the slow turning of the wheel.
My first impulse was to save the piece. To keep working on it somehow—as a wall collage, as pieces to attach to another vase. Sometimes this works, but in this case it felt right to let the vase go, all of it, all at once. I don’t do this often enough: put everything in to a piece, and then at a certain point, decide to let go of it, completely. Not try to salvage.
It occurred to me that often when I salvage a piece, or simply keep an imperfect one, unwilling to smash it up and make another, what I’m really trying to do is salvage my time. I’m trying to re-gain control, to ensure that the time I spend in the studio isn’t wasted.
This is a bad impulse, this urge to correlate input to output, to make sure I have something to show for my time. When I indulge it I indulge the mechanistic approach that, while it keeps me in control, leads to mechanistic pots—pieces lacking a kind of independent existence, an organic spirit. These pieces are place-holders, essentially—just things. They help fill the kiln, they fill out the display shelf.
I thought about all this as I squeezed together the folds of the failed pot—25 pounds more for the scrap bucket. I considered that while I might be a little out of shape for throwing, returning to the studio after the holiday break, I do have a fresh perspective on something more important: the creative process is non-linear, not output-oriented. I might work for an hour one day, and produce something fantastic; nine hours of hard labor the following day might yield nothing. Beginning potters have an easier time accepting this, I think, and as a result many people’s first pots are lively and memorable creations—really worth having and keeping. Experience and technical mastery have an insidious way of wedging themselves between the potter and the creative process. It gets harder, the further along I get, to work hard in the studio without producing something saleable, something good. This is the reason why it’s common to see pots made by an excellent potter, someone who’s been at it for years, that seem repetitive, satisfied, lifeless. Eventually this potter burns out; he or she gets a repetitive-use injury, or decides that there’s no money in pottery, or that clay doesn’t get the respect it deserves alongside the other fine arts.
This is a fate I wish to avoid, and experiences like the one I had yesterday, though admittedly disappointing, are a great reminder. As the new year begins I’ll try to remember that it’s okay for my throwing technique to get a little stiff, a little hesitant—it’ll come back—I’m far better off worrying, instead, about the things I need to let go.
