Every semester the Union Art Department has a Pottery Sale at the SUB. The central hallway is lined with bright displays covered in colorful ceramics. Dishes, bowls, and coffee mugs abound, each with their own bright glazes.
The sale is a fantastic opportunity to buy a Christmas present for my mother, who is not the easiest person to buy presents for. My siblings and I often get gifts there. (Perhaps you’ve done the same.) For all that, I had never considered what, exactly, went into making the pottery.
The answer to that question was much more involved than I had anticipated.
I had something of a preconceived notion that making a piece of pottery is grabbing some clay—whatever that is—tossing it on a wheel and then out comes a pot. Heat that up, somehow, and there’s a mug. Maybe that’s just me, though.
Whether it’s me or everyone makes little difference, because it is certainly wrong. In talking to Associate Professor of Art Paige Ward Moore, I learned what it takes to do pottery and what those pretty pieces on the tables in the SUB really are.
Moore explained how the process of making ceramics actually works. At Union, students first start by mixing their own clay for the semester. As I learned more about the process, it quickly became obvious why pottery is an art and not a science. While emblematic of the craft, pottery isn’t just done with a wheel; the wheel is one of a myriad of possible tools. At every step of making a vessel, the artist has a dozen choices of tool, glaze, clay, kiln and anything else they could conceivably want to use.
The amount of time a piece takes to make cannot be easily tracked. From start to finish, it may take a week or two. However, not all of that time is spent actually working on the piece. Much of it is waiting for it to dry and to fire.
“There’s a lot of managing time and thinking through like, okay, I threw the pot on Monday, I won’t be able to trim it until Tuesday. It won’t be dry until Thursday,” Moore said, “I could load it, but then it won’t come out of the kiln until Saturday and then I’ll have to glaze it and then it’ll take another three days for that glaze firing.”
Careful planning and scheduling are essential to mastering ceramics. Figuring out days and availabilities and then weaving that in with a student’s already busy schedule cannot be easy. But the reward is worth it.
There is also a certain amount of risk involved. All of an artist’s work and time could be ruined by a single mistake or imperfection. The result ranges from cracks to explosions. Moore expressed that these incidents only lead to more caution and attention to detail in the future.
Mistakes like those lay the road to being an artist. Moore said, “You can watch those videos all day long, but you will never learn how to throw unless you do it yourself and you spend hours doing it. You have to develop the muscle memory, and that’s true for any form art making that requires physical, technical skills.”
She shared a story from her mentor where someone asked him how long it had taken to make a handle. The man looked at her and said simply, “30 years.” Moore explained that it probably took the master potter only about five minutes to make the excellently crafted handle, but it took him 30 years of learning, practicing and working with the clay to be able to do it that fast.
This story captures what mastering an art really takes: time. Not time thinking about making a pot, not time planning a novel, not time looking at things you want to paint. What you need is time spent actually sculpting, writing, painting or doing whatever art you do.
Learning how to master any craft—especially one with as many moving parts and things that could go wrong as pottery—takes time. Time some people say would be better spent elsewhere, such as making money or spending time socializing. After all, why spend ten years learning how to throw a pot and then weeks making one you like when you could just buy one from Amazon for twenty bucks? Next-day shipping is a little faster than years of practice and hard work, after all.
When asked that exact question, Moore’s response was simple and immediate. She said, “Because it celebrates the humanity of our experience on this earth. And every coffee cup that I have is touched by a different human hand, and it will only be shaped in the way that specific human hand will be able to shape it. And so, it is kind of romantic, you know.”
Moore has a truly impressive number of handmade coffee cups. In her office there is a shelf with at least two dozen cups, each with their own cubby. Each cup coffee carefully placed. She said, “So every coffee cup I have, it represents a person to me, the person who made it. And when I have a cup of coffee in one of my coffee cups, I’m having a cup of coffee with the person who made it.”
Each and every cup in her office and the many others she undoubtably has is the culmination of years of work from an artist she knows. They are memories cast in ceramic, little bits of humanity and relationships that she can hold in her hands. Art is not just the creation of beauty, it is the preservation of humanity and divinity and everything wonderful that exists between them and between people.
So next time you’re at a pottery sale, don’t just see pretty pieces. Look closer. Know that in every one of those pieces is hours and days of work layered onto years of practice. Don’t just see beautiful, perhaps overpriced, decor. Instead, you can try and see little slices of humanity cast in clay and fired in experience.
Be the first to comment