What I learn from doing ceramics

I used to have a lot of houseplants and obsessed with having the best pots for my plants. But I could not find any planters that are good enough, the stuff that were sold in shops and online are the same, either they are not in the right size, the right shape, the right color or the right price. So I decided to make my own pots  – and I signed up for a hand-building pottery class. I was hooked and I’ve been practicing ceramics more and more, I went from doing it in a tiny corner in my house, to having my own little studio. How I started doing pottery is quite random, and I am sure many other people try out pottery for similar reasons, but just like when I practice other things on a regular basis, the more I work on my ceramics, the more I discover about myself.

Patience

When I just moved to Portland, I started learning about watercolor and I’d been doing it for a year. Every weekend I spent a few hours working on one piece, I found those hours very satisfying – mentally. But I had a lot of other things I needed to do on the weekend, I realized that it was not practical to spend all my weekend mornings painting. So after one year, I “concluded” that painting was too time-consuming for me right now, I should find another hobby that would take less time, like working out, dancing, or something else – an activity that has a set amount of time to complete. I abandoned painting and was ready to explore the next thing.

Then I was hooked with pottery, which – ironically, is much more time-consuming than painting. If I work on a medium-size sculpture, from start-to-finish, from opening a bag of clay to finishing with colors, it usually takes about two months. Along the way, anything can go wrong and it will take extra time to troubleshoot: for example, it may take too long to dry (you probably cannot troubleshoot this issue), (or it dries out too quickly), you want to wait to make more stuff to load the kiln, it cracks in the kiln, so when you take the sculpture out of the kiln – you will need to fix it, etc. But – when things take time, the only thing I can do is to wait. I cannot shortcut, I cannot make the time go by any faster; I cannot put my sculpture under direct sunlight to make it dry faster. With painting, I have to wait for 15 mins between steps. with ceramics, the wait time can be days or weeks. Knowing that I can only wait forces me to slow down, to think more, and to pay more attention to the details and the process when I wait. I became more patient, I was reminded that great things take time, that I should not forget the bigger picture and shortcut the process. The wait builds up more excitement and the final results are so worth it. Of course, if the final piece does not come out as expected, the disappointment feels worse. But over time, I learn that it is unavoidable, it is a part of the learning curve, and I will keep learning, like we never stop learning in life, I need to figure out what went wrong and make a better piece next time.

Ceramics: the collaboration between the eyes, the brain and the hands

There is always this strange chain of collaboration: what you see with your eyes is different from what your brain knows subconsciously, and what your hands are trying to build are different from what your eyes see. In other words, you see one thing, your brain tells you another thing, and your hands build something else. I’d experienced this with painting before, it took some serious effort to be more conscious to draw what you see instead of drawing what your brain is telling you what it is. For example, I was drawing a portrait of a lady with high cheekbones: my eyes saw that her cheekbones were high, my brain subconsciously told me that the illustrate the cheekbones, I should add more shades or colors on where the cheekbones were on the paper; but in reality what I should have done was adding colors under the cheekbones area so that the cheekbones would appear brighter, signifying that they are higher. With ceramics, particularly sculpture, the story is similar, except that your hands are building a 3D object vs a 2D object in painting.  A typical scenario would be when I worked on a sculpture of myself, my eyes saw that my face (and any face) has a certain depth, there were lower points (closer to my ears) and higher points (cheekbone) on my cheek. But the stereotype in my head was telling me that because I am Asian, I have a flat face, so what my hands were doing was drawing a flat face on top of a thick block of clay. That was a funny discovery when I analyzed my ugly sculpture. I am fully aware of what goes on in my brain, but it will still take me a lot of practice to overcome this kind of stereotypes.

Making beautiful things

I think about myself as a normal (sometimes a typical) young lady who works in marketing, has an office job, who cares about dressing up, wants to look good, eager to learn new things, occasionally I have a chance to enjoy fine things: fine dining, fine clothes, fine traveling, etc. Looking goods makes me feel good and prepared, and to me, that is essential whenever I step out of my house to go to work.  Since I started doing ceramics, I often find my clothes, my hair, my face and hands covered in mud, and I am not bothered by that. I still enjoy wearing more fashionable outfits to work, but also enjoy putting on my allover to go to my studio. I don’t care less about myself looking good, at the same time I care more about creating nice things with my hands. And knowing that I actually can make beautiful things, from an idea in my head, to literally carving it with my bare hands,  make me feel happy and proud. 🙂