Pottery Beyond Pots

One of the first pieces I made in pottery class.

I got to take pottery lessons some years ago, wherein I got to learn from awesome, incredibly talented artists who were brimming with so much love for their craft that they just had to share it with others. The passion and energy that emanated from them could not but light up an answering flame in me and their other students as they guided us through the world of clay and introduced us to the alchemy of fire and earth.

But it happened that during my play with clay, I very seldom made pots. Clay is such a beautiful, incredibly tactile medium, a pleasure to work with, fascinating in its contradictions. It begins buttery soft yet heavy, dries up hard yet brittle, and fires up red-hot only to mellow down to a cool, wonderfully touchable solid. It is on the one hand amazingly obedient and in that it submits itself to be held and molded and formed into pretty much anything. But it is also stubborn and intractable because it has its rules of gravity, physics, and chemistry that just won’t be bended, which can very often lead to pain and frustration.

So it’s partly due to my impatience with gravity and my lack of skill, and partly because I got to love clay and wanted to make other things with it that I didn’t make pots. And in that environment that I was in, that was okay, great even. And sometimes too, I observed, even the best potters take a rest from making pots.

Here are some of their works.

Guitar by Jon Pettyjohn, one of my teachers

From the Cornucopia exhibit of Tess Pettyjohn's (another of my teachers)

A ceramic chess set by Hadrian Mendoza

Terra cotta birds by Ugu Bigyan

Piece by Nagae Shigekazu in Slip-Cast Porcelain

Lovers by Camille Mendoza

Squared Circles by Catherine White