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Spinning
the Clay on the Wheel
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< accompanying images here > RECENTLY, I have been getting to know the life and work of the great 20th century potter, Lucie Rie. I am attracted to her humility, her simplicity. I love her deep bowls, with integrated feet and frosting-like, textured glaze. I love reading about her pristine throwing habits and workspace, and her lack of fuss throughout the process. She didn't spend too much energy smoothing things out or futzing with her pieces. She established her studio in London at the height of the second World War and found a way to continue creating her work despite bombings and materials shortages. Once a week, she carried her greenware on the Underground to be fired at a location across the city. Although her personality is compelling, and I have read every scrap of prose I could find about her, she nonetheless seems a blur behind the stature of her large-looming pots. They, not she, were the most important thing; she provided a channel for them to emerge. She was an empty vessel of sorts. Her technique was itself minimal; she used little water during the throwing process, stating, "If you use too much water, after two minutes you will not be throwing the pot, it will be throwing you," and confined her trimming tools to a razor blade, a metal kidney and a piece of steel pallet-banding. She skipped the bisque stage of firing altogether, painting her glaze straight onto greenware with a regular house-painter's brush. I think of her no-nonsense methods when my clay teacher, Darrell Finnegan, tells us we have it easy. During his career as a potter, he has attended master classes where students are asked to throw and then destroy a week's worth of pots. He says this is done to enable the potter to focus completely on throwing technique without the distraction of getting too attached and precious about the process. We shudder when he describes this scene of clay carnage—no matter how beneficial it might be for the these steel-hearted hopefuls to learn how to be detached from their pieces. As Darrell tells his "when-I-was-your-age-I-had-to-walk-20-miles-to-school-in-the-snow, barefoot, uphill-both-ways" stories, I notice my colleagues trying to look vacant and unobtrusive, gazing down at their few, fussed-over, cherished pieces, thinking, "Please, God, let him go easy on us." In my third year at the MIT studios, I was working on a large white stoneware bowl, deep and slightly flaring, whose form quoted liberally from a favorite Rie piece. I had trimmed and burnished it meticulously, and altered it into an oval. I signed the bottom, placed it upright on its tapered foot, and went across the hall to the sink room to get something. Darrell was in there, loading the kiln, and as I was reaching for a small sponge, Irit, who had been working on the wheel next to mine, came rushing in, nearly in tears. "Something's happened," she said. Looking around and behind me, I said, "Me? Are you talking to me?" She said, "I'm so sorry, something's happened to your pot. My foot accidentally hit the pedal on your wheel, and … " She trailed off. "How bad is it?" I asked, trying to sound lighthearted. "I think you'd better come and see," was all she could muster in reply. Darrell and I walked back across the hall with trepidation. It was quiet in the studio. The other students were craning their necks and looking toward something near the leg of the wedging table. There, some distance from the wheelhead on which I had last seen it, was my formerly pristine bowl, lying in an injured crumple on the floor. It had been thrown with great force from the wheel when Irit's foot accidentally hit my pedal, landing in the sorry heap that we all gazed upon now. My colleagues looked on with pity and curiosity, like rubberneckers passing a crash in rush-hour traffic. There, but for the grace of God, go I, their faces seemed to say. Irit felt terrible, and I could feel everyone watching me to see what my reaction would be. I have developed a bit of a reputation in the studio for being a cheerful salvager of things—admittedly because I have suffered more clay calamities than most in my short tenure as a potter. In the absence of anything resembling mastery of the medium, I think of myself as merely a facilitator charged with helping the clay be what it wants to be. My experience has been that if I go in with too rigid an idea of what I want a piece to be, something trips me up along the way; if my will is not in accordance with the will of the clay, and I try to force it, it politely declines to comply. Getting too fussy about trimming? After grappling to keep the piece on center, I'll find a chunk of sponge in the wall of the piece that leaves a gaping hole. Ha ha, the clay says. Gotcha! Becoming a control freak about glaze application on a favorite piece? I'll find that is the time the kiln decides to malfunction, or a piece of kiln wash falls from an upper shelf and gets embedded right in the center of my lovely new cobalt bowl. Sucker! the clay says—you just don't learn, do you? Although I recognize the element of faith necessary in an art form that requires a high degree of skill at all of seven or eight stages of production, I, of course, take it personally when my skills don't measure up and my plans don't work out. That is not exactly a bad thing. It's perhaps a message that I have the order of the universe, and my place in it, slightly wrong. So, I approached the injured piece, everyone watching, and did my best to take on a cheerful voice. "Oh, it's fine. I can definitely do something with this! No problem!" I hoped Darrell would do the equivalent of cops to rubberneckers, telling them to "move along, move along, there's nothing to see here." Amidst the continuing tense silence, I peeled the moshed pot off the floor. It looked like a large, misshapen pizza, folded in half. People pretended to return to their own work, and some wheels were whirring, but when I glanced up from the triage I noticed their pieces spinning and their eyes on my sad, dirt-encrusted clump of clay. My first instinct, so hard to correct, was to restore the piece to its original, symmetrical state. But the scrutiny I felt on me from all around the room made that instinct suddenly feel foolish. They were looking at me to keep a stiff upper lip, but forcing an obviously unsalvageable form into its previous symmetrical state did not fit the definition of brave or graceful. It was more denial than anything else. "That's it," I thought. "I'm going to go with this." I peeled one side of the rim from the rim opposite, and started sponging clean the dried clay and dirt that had pressed itself from the floor onto the surface of the pot. The shape that started to emerge was nowhere near round; it looked like some sort of undulating sea plant. The rim was puckered in just the right places, the dents rounded out to complement the rim's flares and dips. Before the accident, I had planned to add a decorative element that I use on many of my pieces—I call them the "pots with dots"—it's a slip-trailing technique, whereby I fill a tiny squeeze bottle with sieved slip, and pipe on a thousand tiny, sharp dots all around the rim. I decided to go ahead and do the dots with this piece, as planned, but now I used them to emphasize the puckered ridges down the sides, as well. Through my concentration I could sense that my classmates were glancing up at my progress. One of the best things about creating in community is that you can offer words of encouragement, pointers, excitement, consolation, or just praise to each other, and it serves as a lubricant to the creative process. I sometimes like to work silently, and we all seem to sense when that is needed, but I also love to talk together and hear from the others about what they are doing. The resulting piece, rather than a failure, is one of the best I have made to date. I am afraid to glaze it, in case I get in the way of this mysterious creative system once more. But then, I think I should give myself over to the process, do my best, and simply see what comes of it.
> You can see pictures of the "Triumph" pot here.
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