Last night was my first pottery class at Genesee Center for Arts & Education. I was greeted by 25 pounds of clay, a tool kit, and Ezra, my instructor. After a quick building tour we pretty much jumped right in, learning to wedge clay in using the ram's head technique to prepare and unify the clay. We grabbed a wheel, got some water, put on our splash guards and away we went!
Islapped my ball of clay on the wheel and began slapping it to center it on the wheel. This already felt good! Centering te clay means getting it ready to make it into a nice little flan shape on the wheel. Grab the sponge. Wet the hands. Turn on the wheel and watch the clay spin. As soon as I put my wet hand on that ball of clay, I realized that this was going to be the equivalent of playing with mud for 3 hours every Wednesday night! YES! As a kid, my favorite pastime was making mud pies and seeing how dirty I could come home. It was fab.
So, after centering and mounding we began to open up the piece. It's all about pressure. speed, and focus; being sure to push with a certain part of your hand and not the other. Pushing with the top part of the hand creates a ridge that throw the whole piece off. Okay. So the clay is opened some. Then you open it MORE. At a certain point the clay just opens. You see it right before your eyes uniformly spread. Then it's time to pull it up.
This is where things went horribly wrong for me. My cylinders kept becoming bowls. I couldn't figure out the pressure of the lift to make it come straight up, applying too much pressure to the inside. I made some beautiful bowls that eventually turned too thin and wobbled off the wheel, resulting in the return of the clay to it's original ball.
If nothing else, this is going to be a cool experience. Like anything else, it takes practice and diligence, which means regular trips to open studio. That's not going to be easy, but I think it is going to become a place t refocus.
Learning to throw pottery is going to teach me so many important lessons and it's fairly parallel to life....learning to center. Opening up just enough. Learning to not apply too much pressure before it all becomes too weak and you have to start all over. Life is pliable; sometimes it starts one way, but with motion, water, and pressure it becomes something else completely... It's all a balance. It's all about learning to balance. Learning to find the right combination to make something beautiful. Until I can translate these lessons into my own life, my life will continue to be a giant ball of out of control mud that warps into a bowl because I apply too much pressure at the bottom.
Okay. I'm seeing it.
No comments:
Post a Comment