There is something especially humbling about sitting at a pottery wheel, elbows braced and back hunched, pressing into a wet, thwacking ball of clay with all your might in an attempt to get the clay “centered”, only to have the entire ball of clay fly off the wheel and smack into the wall behind you, like a pound of chocolate ice cream flung artfully from a scoop. Making pottery oscillates between moments like that one–one of sheer disappointment and chagrin–and moments of feeling a euphoric sense of ingenuity at finding just the right glaze formula, or being able to miter the edges of a slab of clay just so. It is like traveling for weeks to get to the end of a rainbow knowing full well that there is an equal chance of finding either a pot of gold or a lake teeming with piranhas and taking the chance anyway, because the potential for gold is too alluring to pass up.
Margie, my community college ceramics professor, was a force of nature. She had eyeliner so perfectly smoky and perpetual that it seemed as if she could have been born with it penciled across her lids, and she regularly described the slimier aspects of clay-handling as being “mush-guh-gush”. She was so tall I had to crane my neck to look her in the eye, and had hands just as large, but the way that she could flit her long, nimble fingers over a lump of clay and reveal a perfectly sculpted vase seemed like a sleight of hand trick. She could gracefully and exactingly carve a paper template with a razor blade in one loose, fluid movement– a gesture infused with the attitude “so what?” Genuinely, she made even cutting paper look cool.
For all the seemingly effortless talent Margie had, she was also a beacon of encouragement. For one project, I made an array of fruits out of a two-inch-thick block of clay. This piece took the form of a rectangular slab with strawberries, bananas, and other assorted flora carved into relief like a 3D still life. Once fired in the kiln, however, the project looked seriously, concerningly disturbing. Somehow, the matte pink glaze I had chosen for the background underneath the fruit looked like congealed oatmeal. The banana appeared to be slowly, agonizingly melting, and the seeds that I had painstakingly carved into the berries had all but vanished in the firing stage. When I looked at the piece, I swore I could hear it asking me to put it out of its misery. Really, I couldn’t help but to cackle at this thing. But when Margie saw the piece, she immediately complimented me on the way I had chosen to juxtapose matte glazes with glossy glazes, and commended my carving work. Whether or not she had been grasping at straws, I’ll never know, but it made me feel as though maybe, somehow, I could become good at this.
For weeks, I churned out pottery in varying degrees of success. Sometimes red glazes would go into the kiln looking red and unexpectedly come out green. Other times, mugs that had seemed perfectly centered on the wheel would end up horrifically slanted à la the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The heart-soaring feeling that would accompany pulling a satisfactory piece from the kiln room shelves slowly began to outweigh the disappointment of a bad piece. But Margie’s announcement that the final project of the semester was to be a master copy might as well have induced heart palpitations. I could still barely count on myself to make a soup bowl that didn’t turn out the size of an espresso mug, never mind create a copy of a professional potter’s work. I pored over years’ worth of art featured in Ceramics Monthly magazine for inspiration, eschewing life-sized hand-built ceramic statues of wolves and four-foot tall vases until I came across the work of an artist named Ron Meyers.
Ron Meyers’s work consisted of the same sort of broad, loose strokes that I had admired Margie’s ability to create. His collections boasted ranks of hand-built and wheel-thrown dinnerware, all adorned with faces of roosters, cats, cows, and other assorted animals depicted in broad, painterly lines. The glaze on some of the mugs was ever so slightly smudged in a way that they looked almost burnished or patinated. Though the forms of his pieces undoubtedly bespoke incredible talent, his work seemed to be esteemed for its imperfections, something I had yet to come across.
With Ron Meyers’s work as the inspiration for my master copy, I felt like an adrenaline-high mad scientist. I made a series of wheel-thrown dinner plates, and, on their faces, I painted cats that looked sleepy, cats that looked mischievous, and cats that looked downright demonic. I found freedom– freedom in creating not for the sake of perfection but for expression. It was as though I could feel my creative brain growing with each piece. This feeling was one I had never experienced in my prior schooling, where my younger self had striven to get high grades simply to avoid being grounded, and my adult self had striven to get high grades simply to feel like I wasn’t wasting my own money on college courses.
While I continued to move through the entire catalog of ceramics courses offered by the community college, I quickly learned to let that feeling bleed into the rest of my college experience. Even the most eye-bleedingly tedious research essay contained pockets of this feeling; finding exactly the right course to back up my argument after reading dozens of pages of peer-reviewed articles could bring it on. Scouring the library reserves between the five colleges to find incredibly rare translations of Old English texts for a final paper not only felt like the challenge of a lifetime, but now felt like something I was born to do. Perhaps this feeling was something like the antithesis of self-doubt, something like “I am smart, my brain can do (what feels like) the impossible”.
Through ceramics, I learned not only unshakable patience and the ability to accept being bad at something, but also to revel in the process rather than the result. I have learned not to look at school just as the means to an end (a degree, a higher paying job, a career change), but as the privilege to be able to stretch my mind beyond what I thought it capable of. This newfound love for challenging my brain and allowing myself to be bad at new endeavors will follow me as I begin applying for MLIS programs during my final year at UMass. People regularly ask me what sort of librarian I aim to become, and I always tell them, “I’m not quite sure yet– I plan on letting the process tell me where to go.” Regardless of where my path as a future librarian will take me, my love for ceramics and the lessons it has taught me will endure.
Below: Ceramic cat dishes inspired by Ron Meyers, plus handbuilt mushroom tea set and handthrown bowls, made by Lindsey Colby in 2023.
