Curbing Muddy Overwhelm
I’ve been getting the bug to play with clay ever since we finished building my husband’s pottery last year. Okay, who am I kidding? I’ve always had a thing about clay.
It is magic mud with an ability to go from lump to vase with merely the need to spin it fast and touch it with your fingers…Or that’s how it has always appeared to me since I was a young child watching wheel throwers at their craft.
The truth is I’m relatively terrible at throwing or at least supremely untrained in its mysteries. My husband can easily throw 10 pounds of stoneware clay into a beautiful, giant pasta bowl. He’s been a patient and encouraging teacher helping me learn to center on the wheel, but even 5 minutes of it flares up all the neck pain that nearly a year of physical therapy endeavors to control. My solution is to play with slabs of clay. I suck much less at hand building.
I’m so used to pushing non ferrous metal around, listening to what it tells me it needs and collaborating with the material to push the boundaries of what it can do. Clay, on the other hand, is easily overworked. More than once I’ve lost my patience with it and exclaimed to a potter, “What do you mean the clay is tired?!? I’m not tired. I want to keep going. Why can’t I just anneal the clay so it can keep going too???” Alas, all a torch does to clay is make it more rigid instead of more supple.
Pocosin Arts has some great online classes in their ceramics department in addition to their metalsmithing ones. Last month I watched a fantastic class from Samantha Briegel and am signed up for another from Marissa Childers next month. I’ve been amazed and enthralled…and not so much as bought a bag of porcelain clay, despite both classes calling for it. If you guessed that makes me a lurking, demo watcher, workshop junkie without having tried any of the processes yet, you’d be correct. Still, I get so much out of watching how other people approach their processes even if I don’t get to try all of them.
As I contemplate the overwhelming world of possibilities of slab throwing, texture plating, screen printing, and teapot building, I’m reminded of how it feels to be new-ish in the world of jewelry design and metalsmithing, to be massively excited about all the possibilities…and to be massively overwhelmed at all the possibilities.
With hand building, I want to do it all, but the reality is I have little time to experiment and even less patience to fail, yet an infinite desire to combine all the things that I see into work of my own that feels satisfying to make. That’s a helluva tall order when I’ve yet to buy that bag of porcelain clay.
Being in that overwhelmed newbie space may not improve my ceramic skills, but it certainly makes me a better metalsmithing teacher. The challenge I love in teaching is creating new ways to break down information into achievable chunks so it’s easier for people to grasp my processes even when I’m not in the same physical studio with them.
We live in world where endless inspiration and options are merely a touch screen away. As we see artwork both ancient and contemporary, it can feel both exhilarating and depressing. Just as our creativity lights up with new possibilities, our fledgling skill sets remind us that success and satisfaction with our work takes, not only time, but tons of trial and error, and most of us feel such an urgency to explore and create that we don’t have enough time for the error part.
I’ve found the key to curbing the overwhelm lies in students’ having enough time to play and experiment in the comfort of their own spaces while receiving adequate support from me as they move through the vast learning that comes from both difficulty and ease. That’s been the biggest ah-ha of my re-pivoting how my online courses function. For my own demo lurking habit, watching once or twice and not knowing enough yet to ask questions is ok because I’m not trying to win the next series of The Great Pottery Throwdown. For transmitting my part of the metalsmithing lineage I’ve been part of for the last 34 years, helping more people create the work of their dreams without making them overwhelmed might be my greatest success yet.
Interested in how my Online School of Jewelry and Metalsmithing works?
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