Years ago, my son and I took a pottery class one Saturday afternoon. I agreed to take him – he wanted to try the wheel but was too young to go alone. I had no real expectations of the class, but as soon as I gripped the lump of clay and tried to centre it on to the plate, I was hooked. There was something primal about having my hands and clothes covered in smears of white. It brought me back to making mud pies as a child.
My son seemed to understand the properties of working with clay in a way that I didn’t but I still managed to cobble together some small pieces and left them to be fired, my name carved in the bottom. When I collected the glazed pieces , I laughed with the studio technician at how neat my son’s bowls were compared with my wonky ones. She suggested enrolling in a longer course but regular classes weren’t possible at that point in my life, so I shoved my indelicate pots to the back of my cupboard and forgot about pottery for a while.
With my youngest child now in his last year of school, I have more time for committing to something weekly. Feeling the dance of age, I’m keen to learn new things. As soon as I can afford a six-week beginner’s pottery class, I book it in with a friend.
We turn up to an old warehouse studio for the first class, nervously clutching our op-shop aprons and ratty towels. Before we receive our bags of clay we go around the room and introduce ourselves, explaining why we have enrolled. I’ve always found this daunting, and can feel my heart racing as I think of something to say. I explain that I am there to create intuitively; to stop overthinking and just play. Others talk about being burnt out or close to it. They are mostly nurses, emergency doctors, social workers, occupational therapists and mental health practitioners, and have signed up hoping pottery will help to calm their nervous systems, reduce stress and allow them to be in their bodies.
Our teacher begins to introduce us to the basics: how to centre, how to drop in, to widen, to pull up the walls. We watch her demonstrate and my adrenaline is pumping. I cannot wait to start. Finally, with our knees jammed tight around our wheels, our arms locked in position, we lean close and try to make something intentional. I discover quickly just how hard that is. Walls sag, lumps break off, pots collapse. The studio is filled with nervous laughter, appreciation for a neighbour’s efforts, and a general amusement at how difficult it all is. I soon burn through six balls of clay, making one uneven bowl after another. At the end of the two and a half hours, we clean our wheels – and ourselves.
We keep nothing from that first week. There is no urgency to make something quickly as there was in the taster class I did with my son. This course is about learning, about getting a feel for it. For me, it is about letting go of expectations. I know that it takes thousands of hours to master a new skill and yet I am frustrated at how clumsy I am, at how my hands won’t work as I want them to.
It isn’t until I let go of any expectation that everything I make will be worth glazing, that I truly begin to learn. And then it becomes less about the finished product and more about the process itself. Each class, I concentrate so hard that I bite the inside of my mouth and leave with a stiff neck and aching elbows. The next morning, I can feel the pull of new muscles. As we slowly start to improve my friend and I walk home at the end of each class, covered in a splatter of crusted white dust and grinning at each other.
By week three, I manage to make something resembling a pot. By week four, I make a sort of coffee cup with thick squat walls. My plaster board is now populated with small pots I intend to turn in week five, when we learn to cut away the dried clay and shape our pieces. In week six, we learn how to glaze and how to dip our pots into vats of thick colours that will change in the heat of the second firing. I have seven pieces to glaze.
They aren’t perfectly symmetrical, the walls are too thick, but they will each find a function in my house. As I keep learning pottery, they are a reminder of where I started.