The challenge: Make 10 small clay objects in 18 minutes – one minute each for the first five pieces, two minutes for the next four, and five for the last.
Ariela Kuh, a ceramics artist with a cheerful demeanor and yellow apron, set a timer on her iPhone as she explained the practice to the 14 of us who attended her workshop last month at the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine.
“Remember what it was like to touch clay as a child,” she advised.
As I prepared 10 mandarin-sized balls of clay, images from my childhood flashed through my mind: the blue shelves at my after-school pottery program, the spherical terracotta vase my mother made at one of the myriad cancer facilities in the months before her death, the little elephant in the center of a red ceramic plate that my little hands had molded sometime in the mid-1990s and was now gathering dust.
“Go,” Mrs. Kuh said, and there was no more time to think. Clay forms appeared and multiplied, each with a vague resemblance to the last, like snapshots of sea creatures undergoing evolution, all shells and tentacles. By the time the last phone alarm went off, I was reeling from the uninhibited joy that comes from letting go of perfectionism.
Earth meets water
“Clay is the opposite of the cell phone,” says D. Wayne Higby, an artist and director of the Ceramic Art Museum at Alfred University in Alfred, NY. “This stuff is real, it takes up space, it’s gross. There’s just a physicality that’s very different from what we’re sitting in front of a computer for six or eight hours a day.”
This could partially explain pottery’s recent resurgence in popularity.
Clay educators, artists, and industry experts from across the United States told me of people flocking to pottery classes and workshops, studios trying to get a handle on growing waiting lists, and ceramists amassing huge online followings. (There’s even a television show for craft enthusiasts: “The Great Pottery Throw Down,” a production a la “The Great British Baking Show,” which streams on Max.)
And perhaps because it offers a tactile alternative to the flattened reality of the screen, clay continued to attract new devotees even as much of the world ground to a halt during Covid lockdowns.
“Pottery wheel sales have doubled and tripled during the pandemic,” said Bryan Vansell, the owner and president of the Laguna Clay Company, a leading provider of clay, glazes, and equipment for ceramists in the United States. “The pandemic brought people back home, put people in their garages and offices, spaces to turn into studios.”
Now many of those potters want to share their passion and get their hands dirty with others at summer residencies, classes, and workshops at places like Watershed.
“Our programs are all filling up, they’re sold out, and we’d love to do more,” said the center’s director, Liz Seaton, who uses gender-neutral pronouns. Lawyers by training, they recently quit their jobs as policy director at the National LGBTQ Task Force in Washington to turn their lifelong passion for pottery into a career. “I like to build things. One of the reasons I took this job was the challenge of getting this organization to a point where we have year-round facilities.”
Watershed was established in the mid-1980s on the site of a defunct brickworks. The 54 acres of rolling hills quickly became a haven where potters could deepen their understanding of the medium and of each other. During the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1990s, Watershed invited people living with the virus to explore the creative and therapeutic potential of clay.
In my own quest for the magic that comes when earth meets water, I’d left my pottery studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for a long weekend at Watershed, along a stretch of shoreline where land’s fingers seem to grab the ocean .
A vision in the forest
At a stretch of US 1 littered with pottery store signs, I turned onto a country road on a crisp spring morning. I was greeted by the sight of a spotted pig chasing birds, ears flapping in the sun, on the family-run farm next to Watershed. Sheep and their lambs were in the bay, and a herd of brown cows stared at my car.
The timeless beauty of its rural setting did not betray the transformation the center had recently undergone.
In a clearing in the woods, the old wooden chicken shed, which until 2020 served as a pottery workshop, had given way to a sparkling corrugated iron building: the new Watershed state-of-the-art ceramics factory. It was equipped with 35 work tables, numerous electric potter’s wheels and a glaze spraying station, as well as advanced water and air filtration systems. An adjoining shed contained six types of oven – including electric, gas and wood. Several modern huts—cubist and gray, tucked quietly among the trees—had sprung up nearby to serve as shelters for program participants.
Watershed currently offers residencies for artists, professional development programs for teachers, and public workshops. Operations have historically slowed down during the winter months, but with the inauguration of the new, winterized spaces and construction of a refurbished commons building commencing later this year, things are well on track for Mx. Seaton’s dream of a year-round operation.
Mold clay and bending time
“I like some organic shakiness,” Ms. Kuh said as she drew a freehand rectangle from a piece of clay and curled the piece into a cylinder with seemingly effortless effort, then did the same with a circle and turned it into a cone. “I am not a rule follower. There’s a reason I didn’t become a woodworker.”
The three-day class I attended focused on building geometric objects from slabs of clay and then using them to assemble more intricate creations. Unlike wheel throwing – which involves shaping clay on a spinning disc – this technique, known as hand building, can be used to create a wide variety of shapes and larger works.
As we broke into 25-pound bags of clay, the smell of damp soil filled the room and an instructive silence, broken occasionally by the sound of hands slapping the material and dropping it to give it the right texture .
A sign proclaimed the studio a zone with no cell phones and no clocks. As I bent down, squeezed, and brushed the gray dough into my hands, a smooth and cool feeling spread from the tips of my fingers to my head, collecting there, then drowning out fears and washing away my sense of time. Shapes of clay shifted on the canvas-covered worktables and trapezoids of sun crept across the polished cement floors.
A medium containing masses
Watershed is far from the only place in the United States where potters can breathe in the fresh country air while discovering the craft and its traditions.
Founded in 1929 to provide Appalachian women with a means of making a living, the Penland School of Craft in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina draws artists and crafters with an array of programs in a variety of media. Summer clay workshops generally last between four and 12 days, with participants living on the 420-acre campus and focusing on a range of functional and decorative aspects of pottery.
A three-hour drive east, the town of Seagrove, which has one of the highest concentrations of working potters in the country, advertises itself as America’s Pottery Capital. The area is home to more than 50 pottery shops, studios, and galleries, as well as the North Carolina Pottery Center, a museum dedicated to the craft. Seagrove is home to eighth and ninth generation potters, as well as a growing number of young apprentices and clay artists.
Tilting the scale from the utilitarian to the artsy has long been the mission of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, in the foothills at Helena, Mont. Nearly three-quarters of a century after de Bray was founded, the world seems ready for its contemporary take on clay.
“Somewhere in the pandemic,” said the foundation’s current director, Rebecca Harvey, “whatever that hierarchy was, whatever that line between arts and crafts was, seems to have just evaporated.” She pointed to the growing number of artists, galleries, and museums — including the Metropolitan Museum of Art — that have begun to embrace clay work in recent years.
For those interested in exploring, the Bray offers two-hour experiential classes open to the public in July and August. Pieces are baked at the end of each class and are ready for pick up two weeks later. From 2024 there will also be short workshops throughout the year. Artist residencies and symposium-style programs are underway.
Helena is home to a vibrant ceramics community. Each summer, local artists open their studios on the two-day Montana Clay Tour. On June 14, the local Blackfoot River Brewing Company will be having a party and a special “Bray beer” on tap to kick off the weekend.
Fun over productivity
Ms. Kuh trimmed away the excess from a shell reminiscent of an oversized dumpling, slowly infusing it with the delicacy of a curtain fluttering in the spring breeze.
It was the last day in the workshop and she was putting the finishing touches.
“Everyone has a different favorite part of the process. I really like this refining part,” she said as she shaved off ribbon after ribbon of drying clay. “It’s like writing. I like the editing part.”
Because the firing of ceramics takes so long, we would not put raw pieces of clay, also known as greenware, in the kiln, but rather pack them up to transport home.
After flying to Maine and knowing that this type of clay would melt in the high-temperature kilns in my New York studio, I realized early on that my pieces would not return with me. The thought was oddly liberating.
Like many hobby ceramicists, I was drawn to pottery because of the purpose it gave me: making planters for my friends, bowls for my family, a small cave for my fish, trinkets for my girlfriend.
I looked at the objects in front of me. One resembled a muscular set of shoulders with a long and lean neck; the other reminded me of a volcanic mound or tubular coral reef. What use could I get for it?
Maybe it could be vases or lamps. Or maybe their only function was to bring me closer to the joy of play that I had so rarely felt since childhood.
And why shouldn’t that be goal enough, I thought, as I dropped my creations into the bin, where bits of clay go to await their next adventure.
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