Pottery Paradise Makes Failing Fun

“I feel like failure is a really bad word, but there’s a lot of failure in pottery,” said Megan Smith, the teacher of Centering With Clay: Focusing on Pottery Foundations, a seven-week-long class for adults at Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street. 

Smith’s goal for the first class on Tuesday wasn’t that her students make the perfect pot; that seemed unlikely, seeing as most of them were beginners. Rather, it was to lay the foundations, and instill in them a fundamental truth of all art: practice makes progress, and failure can be fun.

Smith came to Creative Arts Workshop as a student and became a studio potter. She has been teaching classes for about five years. ​“I like the community, and I love that we have access to gas kiln firing,” she said. ​“I really do enjoy teaching here. I really like the students.”

She didn’t know what level her students would be at when they entered the pottery studio, so she adapted her lesson plan to suit their needs. ​“I usually do quite a bit of differentiation depending on what people need out of the class,” she said. ​“Some wheel throwing, some hand throwing.…Just getting people accustomed to working with clay, which is predictably unpredictable.”

“It’s really incredible to see their growth with their pots, and just their growth mindsets,” Smith added. ​“The growth that you see is really exciting.”

The studio on Tuesday was a pottery paradise, perfumed with the earthy scent of clay. Smith started her lesson by asking the students about their hopes for the class. Katy Wilson wanted to make something practical, like a bowl. Hunter Sun wanted to make a model or a toy. Michayla Savitt said that ​“making something that doesn’t explode in the kiln would be a good goal.”

“Do you know what makes things explode in the kiln?” asked Smith.

“Bubbles?” said Savitt.

“No, that’s a myth. It’s things not being completely dry,” Smith explained.

Smith then asked each of the students to make a pinch pot out of clay, to get a feel for its texture and heft. First they made a ball, then added a hole, then pinched it open with fingers positioned ​“like a hand puppet,” as Smith said.

She added that looking at handmade objects was a good way to learn about pottery. ​“The other day, I did a classic pottery move,” Smith said. ​“I filled a pot with water, and then I turned it over to look at the feet, and water went everywhere.”

Next, she taught the students the art of wedging: aligning the clay particles and preparing it for the wheel. All the clay the class used was made in the Creative Arts Workshop by claymakers there. The students learned spiral wedging, in which the right hand presses the clay into the table, compressing it, and the left hand pulls it back towards the potter.

Smith then performed a demonstration of how to make a basic cylindrical pot. She made it look easy, but the students soon realized, when they sat at their own wheels, that it was anything but. Soon, they were facing skirts (too much clay at the base of the pot), mushroom tops (too much clay at the top of the pot), and other problems.

“I always feel like pottery is like when you see Bob Ross on TV, and he’s painting a pretty little picture,” Smith said. ​“And then you try it and it’s actually really hard.”

“It’s abstract,” joked Savitt, looking down at her lopsided first attempt at a pot.

Savitt had done pottery before, but not for roughly a decade, and never wheel pottery. ​“I thought I’d try it out. I needed a creative outlet,” she said. ​“It’s a good chance to laugh at mistakes.”

“I’ve been wanting to take this class for years,” said fellow beginner Niki Katsara. ​“I like how messy it is, how bad I am at it, how you only work with your haptic emotions and you don’t know how it’ll work out.”

Roland Coffey and Joseph DiMaggio had taken a pottery class with Smith before, and both decided to return for more practice. ​“Since this class is primarily about centering clay, I wanted an opportunity for more time at the wheel,” said Coffey.

“I work what feels like a really high pressure job, and while I’m here I can forget and just think about clay,” added DiMaggio. ​“There’s still so much to learn.”

Katy Wilson agreed that pottery could be therapeutic. ​“I decided to come because I feel I have a hard time switching off,” she said. Instead of scrolling endlessly through her phone, she wanted to do something productive. ​“I wanted to make an intentional effort to step outside and do something different,” she said.

“It’s kinda fun making mistakes and trying to solve them,” Wilson added.

Smith referenced the children’s cartoon The Magic Schoolbus, in which a character says to ​“make mistakes and get messy.” ​“That’s pottery in a nutshell,” she explained.

Wilson’s friend Hunter Sun accompanied her to the class. ​“I had no idea about this. I was signed up for this, but I’m rolling with the punches,” he said. ​“It’s different. It’s different to anything else creative you do. With drawing you can erase and restart, but what happened with this one” — he gestured to the lump of clay on his wheel — ​“It got lopsided and I’m just trying to work with it.”

“We’re not striving for perfection,” Smith told her students. ​“If you want perfection, you’d go to Crate and Barrel or something. It’s about the process.” Clay is a medium that encourages failure, because the wrong shape can be folded back into a block, and the potter can start again. It’s a learning process, and for the students at Creative Arts Workshop, learning was half the fun. Whether they came away from their first class with a bowl or a lump of clay, they had learned that the journey is worth more than the destination, and using your own two hands to create something new is its own reward.