Ceramics has an initial barrier, which must be confronted by everyone that approaches it. The act of centering the clay on the wheel, equalizing its inconsistencies, so that it can be pulled into a pot, a bowl, a plate, is the most difficult aspect of the entire process and evidently it begins before any piece of pottery can be formed.
It is not easy for most to conceptualize how to color a three-dimensional canvas with edges, curves, and multiple sides.
Patience develops into great aptitude of authorship in treating the material as more than dinnerware.
Interestingly, the additional movements taken in bringing the objects to their final forms involves a play with the material that centers on a balance that is made by the eye as opposed to a leveling instrument.
With the malleability of clay there is a great potential in the amount of ways one can manipulate and direct it. It is also a material that goes through a process of beginning as something soft and ending as something stable.
While verticals are always vertical and a 2x4 placed perpendicular to the ground will stand up, an early problem to face is how building a three-walled structure can stand as a set of held right angles.
It provides a space for lucid thoughts to develop as the hands fall into place with/in the clay.
Art is serious business. It is also the place in which one can seriously expose his/her most outstanding traits if he/she does not expose them outwardly. But what about the student who has that outgoing quality, that friendliness and infectious sort of behavior; perhaps the artwork he/she produces will be double the exposure.
Imagine the functionality of a concave that couldn’t hold more than a single tear.
In ceramics, using the wheel requires a meditative touch and sculpting requires attention to detail.
To set a president for quality versus quantity, and clarity in choice versus confidence in craft.
A great deal of ceramics is created in a single sitting.
Working on the wheel is always a challenging experience for someone new to it and it takes some time with your hands in the mud before you find ways to grab hold of it.
Replicating a handmade form multiple times in any material is nearly impossible. With motivation and perhaps outside encouragement one might be able to lessen the differences and “flaws” between the original and the copy. But why bother? Push the clay to its limits and extend errors into new avenues of possibility.
Because the quality of the substance is malleable, it, in cases, takes some time to find one’s strength and direction. Staring at a hunk of clay initially draws up questions somewhat relatable to beginning on a blank canvas: A brush has not manipulated the surface. The hand with its fingers is the brush and bristles. Compositionally, do you fill the space with detail and/or symmetrical balance?
It is usually a great relief to see a student struggle to the point that it is almost hoped to be seen unconditionally. Behind struggle lies a problem or set of problems that will have to surface and be discussed either out loud amongst peers or individually with the material.
The hands: the points at which an idea connects with the yet-to-be-formed mass.
As the size increases you soon discover a dexterity that is startling to you. This type of shock is the sound of self-discovery.
We often stare at the blank material before we push into it and turn it into something negotiable, something directed, something representational in some way or another. Many times the object that comes at the end of the process would have the look of something in the world; it has qualities that we could name. “That is a bowl,” or, “this is a cat” are examples. It is difficult to know when enough pushing has been applied to the initial piece of untouched clay, and at times the most accomplished artwork remains in a space that is just before the naming process. What is left is an object exhibiting a quality that encourages questioning on the part of the viewer; he/she has to ask him/herself what exactly the art means to be. And perhaps this nameless quality is intentional as opposed to a mere inability to articulate and represent clearly.
When working with a piece of clay you cannot expect to end up with precisely what you hope for. Because there is a push and pull in the material, the outcomes of a project may be synonymous to the outcomes of a learned experience.
To be able to rationalize two-dimensional characters in object form is not immediate.
Not centered on making, but in being creative and expressive.
The tie to the creative object is closely tied to the personal; and with a sense of accomplishment in developing something through stages to its final outcome is rewarding. Emphasize and encourage an altruistic attitude towards creation. Whether this be in the form of working collaboratively with a peer(s), making something in wet clay and allowing someone else to glaze it, creating a project directly related to a peer, and/or giving your finished artwork and pottery to another once it was satisfyingly complete.
At a certain point it becomes unclear what I could say should be authorized as your `work because you are always moving and engaging here and there on things.
The process and movements of a course can be far more rewarding to learning than the products one can show from it.
Ceramics is a multi step process, which has two definite large steps: the initial moving of wet clay and glazing. The first of these two is most often more of a concern for students as the material is still malleable and full of potential directions. It takes a shift of mindset to come back to a thing, which was once full of movement and life, and next, a thing that has turned brittle and static. It is as if the thing was dead and petrified. And this is the right place to think of the object, as something still. It is through the addition of color that the thing could be revived; chromo-CPR we could say.
Ceramics is an art form that encourages within its very set up a solitary sort of arrangement when it comes to creating. Each student has his or her own wheel to sit at with his or her own water, bucket, tools, and piece of clay. The important reaction to all of this imposed personal space is the recognition of all the other wheels around you with peers working at them.
The learned direction is built on a reflection of the process.
Creativity needs character driving it. More importantly a classroom requires this very same arrangement and it is usually through disciplinary measures in terms of character that creativity is never able to surface. If the structure is flipped though and a course is founded in creativity how might character develop?
I’ve attempted to transpose a philosophical wandering in regards to the act of ceramics to the student’s moral, technical, and logical prowess he/she demonstrated in class.
Much of ceramics is an exercise of ups and downs. Pulling a bowl from a mound of clay works analogously, and hopefully not ubiquitously obvious, to the course of learning one must place him/herself in order to personally recognize ceramics. It is a tactile behavior and your hands get wet with the clay. What needs to be developed is the strong handshake with the material, not binding and not light. With each mound the directive is to secure that job with a well-mannered formation of salutations. The handshake is a thing learned, it’s behavioral, yet it works only through the personal touch and confidence in that hand reaching out and meeting its counter.
During a discussion of how an asymmetrical form could be carried out, inspected, pushed further, or left alone, the notion of a mispronunciation in language shifts its connotation in dialogue away from a negative position into a recognition of individual direction.
A cup connotes on its own that it is a thing to be held. And depending on the case, an artwork may beckon remission from such an act. Pottery has the ability to remind the user that a cup is to be held perhaps because it comes from a process of holding.
