pottery being touted as cure for perfectionism, more at 6

A query: do you want to make a bowl so ugly that you say to yourself “I didn’t even know a bowl could BE so ugly?”

A second query: do you want to fire and glaze and fire again that bowl despite your repulsion and then ask yourself months later “why didn’t I just squish it and start over?” before relinquishing it to the elements and using it to hold birdseed at the base of the cedar in your yard*?

9 out of 10 dentists agree that if you go to a pottery class you will be FORCED to confront your ingrained perfectionism even if you weren’t actually fully aware it existed. It’s exposure therapy! Highly recommend! As a bonus you will also be able to address the idea of a sunk cost fallacy in art where “I spent so much time on this bowl I hate that I feel a shame-fueled need to finish it instead of scrapping it” becomes “this isn’t going how I hoped, good thing I’m at the stage where I can just squish this clay into a ball and start over”.

Here’s the thing, even after you get better at pottery and have more skill at the wheel and a better hand and eye for building and glazing and decorating, you will STILL make weird, unfixable mistakes, things will still go wrong in the kiln, and you will come to accept that there are simply so many steps and so many variables that much of the actual final result of pottery is out of your hands and honestly? That’s freeing and lovely!

I recently returned to pottery class after a hiatus of a couple years**, and the first thing I made was a hand-built orchid pot. I love hand building for it’s tactile feedback and texture and organic nature and that you can more easily make shapes other than circles and let’s face it: it doesn’t hurt that when you hand build you don’t have to center something on the wheel***. Anyways I made an orchid pot. I’ve made some before, I really like them, I want to repot an orchid, I need a new pot, it’s my first project back after not working with clay for awhile, let’s start easy and ramp up. Guess what. Despite me carefully connecting pieces and taking my time and drying it slowly, it STILL came out of the bisque fire with a huge crack. Life comes at you fast!

Now an orchid pot is designed to leak so I’m still going to glaze it and fire it again and hopefully the crack doesn’t widen so much that it threatens the structural integrity of the piece. Now I’m just interested in the experiment of seeing how it goes and if it goes poorly: the fun thing about creative pursuits is you can just do it over again!

I’m already planning on making one or two more orchid pots. I have several other projects on the go in class that might work out beautifully, and might not work at all. When you decide and then fully absorb that things going wrong is fine, actually, it really opens your scope of imagination and you become willing to try more stuff. Among other things, I’m trying my hand at a style of pottery called Kurinuki and I made a many-eyed sculpture to hang on my wall. All my work might result in lovely new dishes and pieces of art to add to my house, or it might result in me saying “lmao what even is that” and either result is cool.

Let me be the one to remind you that before you can be good at something, you have to be willing to be bad at something, AND you have to be willing to separate your self-worth from being good at stuff. I love learning and stretching my skillset, and that means I make a lot of ugly bowls/botched sewing projects/tangled messes of beads and thread/balls of yarn that were trying to be garments. It ALSO means that I make a lot of dishes, clothes, art, and other items that I love and use and admire. It’s the first day of February which means it’s my birthday month and if you want to give me a gift, please go out on a limb and do something difficult and creative and make your own metaphorical shitty bowl. Ok love you bye. xoxo, Gossip Girl.

* at least the birds/squirrels love it!

** did you know that having a breastfeeding infant makes it hard to be out of the house by yourself for like four hours in a row? Weird, right?

***Also my husband continues to claim that we “have more than enough mugs” (is that even possible?), and that’s the size of thing I like to make on the wheel.