clay story

I was honored yesterday with the chance to demonstrate ceramics for about 44 local talented and gifted (TAG) middle school students. Their teacher arranged for a trip to the college I attend. I was lucky enough to be "in the right place at the right time" - my secondary art methods class - (a class where we learn about standards in art education as we move toward the goal of teacher certification). My secondary art methods instructor is also the art department head, therefore he had the job of picking out college students to demonstrate the art department for these middle school students. In his mind our job was simply to demonstrate what we do here as students. The speech he gave us was along the lines of; they would ask, "Oh, you're a college student? What do you do here?" and we would then demonstrate our chosen medium - mine was clay, others were drawing, sculpture, an actual painting class, and an actual photography class.

When the first group of about six young people arrived, one of the adults with the group, a student teacher, told me there were not enough chaperones from the middle school so would I kind of keep an eye on them while they're with me? The groups had a schedule and knew to move through all the different stations according to the time, but I realized if I could not think of something to say, the students would just be standing around for fifteen minutes! By babbling my way through the first twenty minutes or so, I developed a speech I could reproduce on demand as each new group arrived.

I admit I was not prepared to explain the entire studio. I believed I would just be doing demonstrations. As the first two groups arrived and left I trimmed my pots (from Tuesday when I was practicing,) and talked about the clay mixer, glaze recipes, why we should always take good notes while glaze testing and firing. I showed them test tiles, I explained about reduction atmosphere (gas kiln) versus oxidation (electric kiln) and the different kinds of glazes and colors you can expect from each. The third group was more fun because I finally felt ready to throw. For children I can do anything so the idea of throwing for an audience was not such a problem.

Talking about someone else's studio was a problem though. I really have not had any classes here and frankly, I am a little surprised. The wheel heads do not have pins. Here is what this means: Wheel Thrown means, I use clay on the pottery wheel, which turns, and I make a pot. Bats are the round, pancake-flat boards I prefer to use, upon which I throw my pots. (A person can put a bat on, throw a pot, remove the bat and pot to another location, put on another bat, and continue until the bats are all in use.) Pins keep the bats on the pottery wheel. The pins poke up from the round, turning part, which is known as the head of the wheel. The bat has two holes, and those holes fit over the pins.  Therefore, since there are no pins to secure a bat on the wheel head, students throw directly on the wheel head. This means you move by hand the perfect vase you just worked so hard on (...you move it carefully we hope!) from the wheel to whatever you put it on for storage. It's not just the pin-less wheel heads that bother me. There are blobs of clay up on the walls. The chemicals look disorganized. Disorganized tools sit in buckets on a shelf. There are no traps beneath the sinks. The clay mixer is right there in the same room as the wheels. It is just messy. Is it possible that a college where I am spending about as much as I used to gross in a year doesn't have the same budget as NLU, which, when I went through orientation was touted by the PREP guide as the 12th cheapest school in the nation? I mean really. I walked in and began to explore and thought, Please. Someone just give me this studio. I can help!

The fun part is, I really could help that poor neglected studio. I have a professional clay background. I have no idea the exact number of credit hours I have in ceramics. I guess I could look. Okay I looked. I have 18 credit hours. 3 in beginning wheel thrown ceramics, 15 in advanced ceramics. We threw, glazed and fired for production. The art department hosted a student sale each Christmas where the ceramics students of the 90's dominated, setting up tables of beautifully displayed work. The months leading up to that sale, the studio looked like Santa's Workshop. NLU was a ceramicist utopia. We built our own raku kilns, we mixed huge amounts of glaze, and we had a huge professional slab roller, a spray booth, a separate room for the mixer and the bags of chemicals and other magical clay making powders. Oh, and a pug mill. (Even the local high school here has a pug mill but not the college?) We had rows of wheels, with shelves neatly built over each wheel along the wall. NLU people, from what I have observed, we had a model-perfect clay studio! It was truly good.

Wow. Rhapsodic Digression into a past life. Okay. Then.

Meanwhile back in the rather average pottery studio of my current life, I began to explain to my new students about wedging the clay. Always wedge your clay, the air bubbles are bad. Do you know why? Yes they knew why.

But then I harped on it. During firing air bubbles expand within the confines of the rigid clay, and blow holes out the side of your pot. Nobody's happy when that occurs! The clay shrapnel can wipe out your neighbor's pots too, plus the person firing the kiln for you ends up cleaning the mess. Boring.

I started to wedge. "Wow, you make it look easy," they said. It's all about practice. You didn't start out writing your name perfect right? Better to wedge and wedge and wedge. I showed them how, and then I started to learn from them. "Sometimes the clay is really hard though! Or sometimes it's way too soft! We hate it when the teacher spends soooo much time making us watch her do the project, and we're just sitting there, and then she yells at us because we didn't have enough time to finish our projects!"

I sat down at the wheel and began to throw. I revealed tricks for centering. First make a nice ball and bang it down in the exact center of your wheel. Always jam your left elbow into your left thigh, use all your muscles to push against the clay on the wheel. More muscles than you think you need. Use extra muscle. Use the top speed of your wheel, and really push the clay around like you mean it. So I centered the clay, I pushed it up, I pushed it down, I showed them how applying pressure to the side or the top will change the way the clay moves on the wheel. I talked and talked and talked. They asked questions and I talked some more. It was so easy to sit there and talk about what's important when working with clay. I screwed the pot up on purpose so I could dissect it and show them the problems. I took a wire and split it into a cross-section. "Here, the wall was too thin, that's why the top part caved into the bottom."
"It looked pretty like that!" they said.
"But it was a mistake. I've noticed in the past few days I've left the bottom part of the pot too thick, then the middle of the wall gets too thin while the lip is still too thick. So I'm wondering why I make that mistake. Every mistake gives us a chance to take it apart and learn from the mistake. Here is the thickness the clay should be, about 1/4 inch. So, where it's too thin, somehow I'm doing that wrong."

(I think I get distracted and don't make the pull up the entire cylinder. I pull about half way up, then I start at the bottom again, leaving the top alone till last. Keep in mind, it's been years since I've thrown any clay.)

"Why did you cut it up? You should have kept it!" they said.
I  had to laugh, because I could do no wrong. The most ridiculous errors I made were celebrated as beautiful artwork by these students. So I told them about Peter Voulkos and Paul Soldner. (These guys are a whole other post, assuming anyone would want to know about them, plus they have their own websites. No need to re-hash Voulkos and Soldner here.)
They asked what would happen if I threw something at the pot while it was moving. So I did that. Now it had a nose. They sat there and had fun. The next group would come in and the current group would want to stay and continue their conversation about clay.

Someone asked what was the largest pot I had ever made. Honestly, I never make large pots. I make pots like this:

I flew off a horse and broke my wrist in 11th grade so centering huge amounts of clay is uncomfortable. I did tell the story of the kids in my class at NLU. One student would get a huge amount of clay on his bat, the other would stand between him and the counter behind him, and brace him by putting his foot on his back. That was how he centered the huge lump of clay. Then he would make a bowl the size of which reached mythic, Paul Bunyan proportions. It was one big popcorn bowl!

The students challenged me to make a big pot. So we gathered up some clay and they urged me to use more. I wedged this huge lump till my wrist hurt, and started to pound it into a ball. I plopped it down on the wheel head and started to center. The students cheered me on as I finally pulled up a clumsy, 1/2" thick-walled cylinder. We began to talk about the pot and what it should be. One boy wanted to touch it, so I suggested he experiment with how the clay moved when he pushed into the side. Eventually it got wobbly and they asked if I could fix it. Really once part of the wall has been compromised, it is impossible to return it to the same thickness as the rest of the wall. This creates a situation where that part of the wall is weaker than the rest, so when we push on it, it bulges out more. 

The biggest reward that day was the student sitting to my right, "You make this fun!" she said.
The experiment worked, I thought, I really am a teacher.