Life Lessons Learned from Pottery
OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS
| 8.28.23
I’ll introduce original artwork including paintings & prints, outside of ceramics. I will still offer pottery but focus on merging the written word via muses, insights, and inspiring pieces with symbolic artwork. This is nothing new, as a young artist I spend countless hours writing poetry and illustrating with pen and ink. Pottery has been such a gift in my life, but as all cycles I see myself focusing on what lights me up in this moment vs. doing what I think I should do. This will be a slow transition, I won’t be pivoting fully just yet.
LIFE LESSONS FROM POTTERY
Patience is one of the most profound gifts I’ve acquired over the years and I have to thank pottery for this. From the get-go pottery takes so much pervasiveness, the process itself is a lesson in waiting. Time learning the wheel, the wait watching pieces dry slowly and thoroughly, testing glazes and clay bodies, it is all a waiting game. Finished pieces take weeks sometimes months to complete. I have been humbled by this aspect in so many ways.
Learning to let go - you’ve been working on a piece or project for weeks, you’ve invested your energy into making it come alive. And then it’s finally time to open the kiln only to reveal an absolute disaster. Your heart sinks, and your mind starts racing trying to backtrack on what went wrong. Then in a split second, you shift, it’s time to dust yourself off and begin again. This is also the feeling you get once you begin selling your precious creations, the pieces you put your heart and soul into for weeks are now gone to their new homes. You learn to let go, nothing is forever, and the process is ongoing.
Finding your voice - Through exploring various styles you slowly reveal your authentic voice. It is never a finite destination but rather an ongoing journey that twists and turns. Finding your voice is one of the most thrilling feelings, but still, it’s met with constant self-doubt. You can feel stuck doing something you are known for, it’s easy to forget you can pivot at any moment in time. You don’t owe anyone the reasons for your shift.
Releasing perfectionism - there’s this constant tug between perfection and organic. The pull between exacting craftsperson and free-form artist is very much alive within me. Pottery is truly never perfect, no two pieces will ever be exactly alike, and that is the beauty in it all. When you spend so much time fixating on your creations you can start to obsess over the details to a point of insanity. Perfect does not exist. The person that picks up your mug only sees the beauty, in what makes it imperfect.
Beginner's mind/forever student - the deeper you dive the more you realize you’ve only but scratched the surface. There is a saying in pottery that it takes 20 years to become a potter. The more I learned throughout the years the more I wanted to learn more. There is too much to understand. This is true with everything in life, we are always learning, evolving, and growing. Pretending to have a hold on anything is just foolish.
Trust the process - Not everything you create will work and sometimes what you think won't work out is your most monumental piece. On many occasions, I’ve created something that felt disappointing, months or years later the work resurfaced only to give me excitement for a new idea. The process is organic, and truly out of our hands. The more we open ourselves to surrendering the greater the gifts we receive.
Learning from mistakes is the most valuable lesson I’ve experienced some pretty brutal mistakes, one of which was overfiring a kiln and frying the heating elements. Every time I had a massive fail, I cried, scooped myself back together then tried to figure out what went wrong. These failures were sparks of interest that fueled my research. I grew more from these perceived failures than the successes. They hurt at the time but in reality, they are the catalyst for greatness.
