Water, Wheels, Clay, Ceramics, and the movie Ghost: My Pottery Journey
For the last eleven months, I have been taking pottery classes at a local studio, and if you had told me that I would remain consistent with a hobby for this long, I would have laughed and probably looked at you a little wild, but here we are.
I decided on pottery because I 1. Suffer from Black girl boredom… its a thing! And 2. I felt like I needed to get out of the house and thought my social skills were trash. In all the instances when I had to interact with people, I felt my body getting hot, which was a sign that I was experiencing some sort of anxiety moving through me. I also wanted to learn a new skill and have a reward for learning that new skill, and ceramics was perfect. I’d learn and come home with a mug!
But something I didn’t really expect from starting classes was what they would teach me about myself. In one of my recent posts, I mentioned that I deal with perfectionism and how it starts to creep into everything that I do and stops me from pursuing or continuing tasks because they aren’t “perfect.” And the experience I am having with ceramics is so humbling and leaves no room for my perfectionist thoughts.
My first teacher, Conor, told us in our first class to leave all of that bullshit at the door and move slowly. Make pottery a practice like yoga, meditation, etc., and let me tell you, even if I didn’t want to listen or receive that message, the pottery wheel would 100% make my ass receive it. Watching someone do pottery will have you thinking that the experience is graceful, and while for some people who have had a lot of time and experience, it is, however, when you are little baby doe at the wheel, it takes so much power and concentration that I didn’t truly expect. And normally, that would stop me but a mix of Capricorn moon stubbornness and “I already paid for this” stopped me from quitting. Which ultimately laid to rest my perfectionism.
Now I’ll be honest I do have moments of “this actually is hideous,” but by that point, the piece is already done, and someone has already told me they love it, AND I FUCKING MADE THIS SHIT WITH MY HANDS!! Like no level of perfection is going to stop me from admiring the fact that I made this thing from a thought in my brain to reality in my hand. It's really cool and makes me proud.
I am about to hit one year of taking classes, and I am so happy that I stuck it out. I, lowkey, thought I wasn’t making any progress, but then I started posting my work to Instagram, and child, I came a long way. Follow it, by the way! @bykaeceramics I try to make sure I post what I am working on and what I complete on there.
Pottery has definitely become one of my favorite hobbies, and I’d like to keep it that way for now. I know folks have asked if I would sell things, and maybe I will, but then it’ll become a job, and ew, no thanks to a hobby becoming work. Yuck! So I’ll just give things away for now, lol!
-Kae
