What Ceramics teaches you about life

10 principles ceramics taught me over the years.

1) Perfection is overrated

You don’t need to make a perfect pot to make a pot you can use.  I have lots of imperfect pots in my closets, and they work just fine.  In the same way that we’re not perfect but can go through life successfully all the same.

2) Good is better than perfect

Ceramics teaches you to stop before you ruin something completely. When you get better, you get closer and closer to perfection, but you will never reach it.  You learn to be happy with good.  Good is great.  A lot of potters I know are perfectionists, but they had to learn to live with their imperfect pots if they wanted to have a pot at all.  If you want perfection, you end up with nothing.

3) Letting go is part of the process

There is a lot you cannot control when you do ceramics.  Clay will warp, glazes you’ve used a 100 times will crawl, kilns will act weirdly.  You learn not to get attached until you get a finished product, and the finished product can break at any time.  Nothing is permanent.

4) Embrace randomness

One part I love about ceramics is that there is a fair amount of randomness to it.  Sometimes the clay will tell you what it wants to be and it’s not what you had planned, sometimes it will slump in a way you had not expected but will find beautiful.  Glazes will turn out amazing colors that you had not intended (or will turn out ugly!  It happens too, probably more often!) A lot of ceramic techniques actually play with random events like marbling clay or wood firing for example.  Unforeseen happenings will trigger amazing ideas you want to experiment with.   Embrace randomness into your life!

5) Patience is a virtue

Ceramics teaches you patience.    A loooot of patience.  I am an extremely impatient human being, but in ceramics I know I will have to wait a month or two in between the time I start a piece and I get it finished.   Depending on what you do and how your studio is set up, you could cut the time to a week, maybe, but you’re taking the risk of destroying your pieces.  They need to dry completely before you can fire them, and slow drying makes pieces less likely to break.  They need to get fired twice.  They need to get glazed.  There are a lot of steps that take time.   This is not slow living but slow arting!

Ceramics does not provide instant gratification, unless getting your hands in clay is enough to satisfy you.  You know, like kids who just want to make something out of clay and don’t care what will happen with it.  If that’s the case, you’re all set and very wise.   But if you want to show something for your efforts, aim for patience little grasshopper!

6) Being gifted can be limiting

I was not gifted at ceramics.  For years I struggled to center, to make my walls thin enough, my bases were as thick as bricks.  My bowls had a little indentation in exactly the same spot EVERY SINGLE TIME!   It was not pretty.  However I still loved doing it so I looked for ways to cover my mistakes and limitations.  That taught me to think outside the box.  For example, I started carving my pieces to take some of the weight off my pots.  I embraced wonky pots. Instead of getting rid of them, I would  experiment, using a decorating technique that would complement my pot, or try crazy glazing combos, then pretend the wonkiness had been intentional all along.    I learned a lot that way.  Perfectly symmetrical pots do not teach you anything.     I love putting asymmetrical handles on my pots these days, because every pot needs a little imperfection.  Someone who is perfect and never had to try very hard will crumble at the least opposition.  I learned to deal with my imperfections and turn them into a creative strength.  My pots are still not perfect, but they are mine and mine alone.   I learned to proudly be myself, limitations and all.

7) Keep calm and try again

Most of the time, your pot won’t turn up exactly the way you wanted it but once it’s done, you cannot change it.  It’s maddening. However, you should try again, and again, and again.  You will never get there, but you will get closer.  This applies directly to anyone’s life, for anything you want to achieve.  Just keep trying.   And maybe, at some point, you will look at your latest pot (dream) and think: “Wow, this is not exactly what I wanted, but it’s even better.”  Or “ Wow, I’ve learned so much trying to get this pot  (dream) exactly right, but now I realize I want something else, so I’ll try this instead.”    

8) You’re getting better

This point is linked to the previous one.  If you keep trying again and again, and getting closer every time, it means that you’re getting better.   In Ceramics as well as in life,  although you cannot achieve perfection, you’re always getting better.  It’s a long process, but you’re always learning.  I am a million times better than 15 years ago when I started ceramics, and yet I keep making progress every day, and if I keep doing it for another 40 years (If I am very optimistic about my life expectancy), I will still be learning and trying new things.  If you think about it, there are very few things in life that you can keep getting better at.   Most jobs, you will know inside out by the time you’ve done it for twenty years.  Another example: learning a language takes years, but at some point you are fluent and there is not much else you can discover, unless you start a new language (it will definitely take a lifetime if you learn a new language every time you’re done with the previous one).  If you stick with one language, there is a point when you know almost everything there is to know.  You will still learn snippets but they’re small and far between.    Art is different.  You always learn more and have aha moments all the time.  It’s why it’s so addicting.  Ceramics is thirty thousand years old at least, and yet you can still experiment and come up with something new.  I find this fascinating. 

9) Playing with fire

One aspect I love about ceramics is how fire changes the material from a plastic element into what is basically a piece of rock.  Glass and metal can be transformed in similar ways.   I was fascinated by alchemy as a teenager, and now I figured out how to turn lead into gold.  It’s really a metaphor about turning dirt into art. 

You can take the metaphor further.  Ceramics can be seen as a purifying and transformative experience, in the same way that we, as human beings, can go through fire in our life and be destroyed or become stronger, turning ourselves into pieces of living art in the process.  I am a very down to earth person in most ways, but the ceramic process almost forces you toward a philosophical interpretation.

10)  Center yourself

The first thing you learn when you take a wheel class is to center the clay. I love placing a a lump of clay on the wheel and making it turn round and round until it feels perfectly smooth and even. Centering clay is absurdly gratifying and completely empties your mind. It’s active meditation, a kind of self-hypnosis. In essence, you’re centering yourself while you’re centering the clay. And being centered feels wonderful. You can be too, even if you’re not doing it on the wheel. Apply even pressure with both your hands and lean in with your entire body. It takes time but you’ll get the hang of it.

NB: Religious interpretations of ceramics are also common, including the idea that Adam was created from clay, so I am far from the first person who interprets the ceramic process as a philosophical endeavor.