Clay Bodies
- Centering
The first and hardest step; without it the next steps will fail
Everything is too fast. I’m going so fast. I’m presenting at a conference, I’m writing the paper the night before, I’m running a marathon, I’m crying and walking on the highway by the Morton’s Salt girl. I’m leaving work early because I threw up again, I’m unable to remember what I need to give to whom, I’m taking my comprehensive exams, I’m taking the red-eye from San Francisco to New York, I’m cancelling plans, I’m skipping class, I’m aimless, I’m shivering, I’m a ghost, I’m buying canned champagne from Walgreens and drinking it while I walk to the MCA and no one ever notices.
In the studio I am able to stop and be still. The only things that move are the wheel under my hands and the clay through my fingers. In the studio most people know my face and not my name; we nod in recognition and then we go to our work. In the studio I am not a disappointment, I am not a bad researcher, I am not sloppy, I am not shameful, I am not letting anybody down, I am not the girl whose dad died, I am just another person sitting at the wheel.
- Coning up, coning down
Lift the clay
Penguin Foot is a teaching studio; all unfired clay is recycled in a continual process: slop to a bucket where it is sieved, remixed, dried, and extruded as ready one-pound units. Coning shakes out the discrepant hardnesses that slip through in the older clay, pushing the air bubbles and cracks out; a process of readying.
It seems intuitive, when the clay is harder, to push harder in order to generate movement. But doing this creates resistance between the rotating wheelhead and the pressure of the hand, and what is held stops moving and separates from the rest of the clay. When it is harder instead you must be gentler, more gradual in your movements, coaxing it into following your lead.
You cannot reattach what you lose. The pound I begin with diminishes, pieces of slip flecking away as I add water, chunks of the top of the cone pried off when I push too hard. I make small and smaller cups. I learn to notice when it begins pulling, to slow down and start again. Coning keeps going until the clay moves easily with you towards the center. There are no shortcuts, and to ignore a problem and move forward before it is ready means finding it later, worse, somewhere as you progress, being thrown off kilter permanently.
- Digging Down
Use your two index fingers to burrow into the center and create an opening half an inch from the bottom
In February, I ask my mother if I should sign up for next month’s class and she says yes, this is like the flu, it’s going to be fine. The last time there, in early March, it has a whiff of fear. I’m in to pick up some pieces glazed in celadon, but they haven’t been fired because I’ve gotten it too close to the bottom and it could run, sticking to the kiln. I wipe and leave a higher rim and put them back onto the glaze shelf and then I forget that I made them.
Now is the time I am supposed to write my King Lear. Now is the time I pick strange hours to walk so the streets will be free, try to email my students when they miss our Zoom class, try and fail not to look at Twitter. I make borscht and pierogi and medovik and pickled beets and use the pickled beets to make a pink martini. In the afternoons the sun hits my deck and I marinate in it. I feel guilty. I feel lucky. Everything is so awful hopeless powerless wrenching, and none of it’s directly touching me. I only lost one of my jobs, my Berlin research is derailed indefinitely but there’s work I can do remotely in the meantime. I was already spending most of my time alone and at home. Before everyone expected more, and now they’re understanding of these trying times and hoping this email finds me well. It’s easy to show up for class when it’s in my bed. It’s easy to turn off my video to vomit without anyone noticing that anything is going on. It’s easy to cry with a mask on. No one notices anything is going on.
Digging down means knowing how far is too far; how to stop before that moment that it is too late, learned only by going past it and trying again. Push too hard to the center of the piece and it drills all the way to the wheel, putting a hole in the bottom of the pot. There is only so much that can be sustained as the layer winnows thin and thinner.
My roommate is called back to work at the hospital and I drive the twelve hours back to my mother’s house to wait there until the lease is up. The studio has handbuilding classes on Zoom, selling ten-pound bags of clay to be claimed via contactless pickup; they email and ask us to consider supporting the instructors by buying their work. Everything is on the razor’s edge. I am donating to every GoFundMe I see.
- Opening Up
Hook your fingers and pull outwards, towards your belly button
I return to Chicago in July. The studio reopens in August. Now instead of open hours, every space is reserved by appointment; no more than twenty people are ever allowed in the building at one time. Between classes the instructors spray down each wheel and seat with disinfectant. The clay recycling process now includes a week where it is covered and left untouched, then disinfected and baked under UV rays before it is returned to circulation. The class sizes are lowered, the wheels spaced six feet apart. The studio manager’s big dog, Jim, can’t come with her to class anymore. We are awkward with the new protocol, putting tools into buckets full of bleach instead of back on the shelf, folding plastic covers to be UV-rayed, putting pens into a different cup after we use them. After the first day my shoulders are throbbing, out of practice. I throw nothing that I can keep.
Opening up reveals whether there were other, earlier failures to center the clay, to align the particles that will be revealed in an uneven thickness on one side. It continues the clay’s transition from lump to open object, the growing portion of the exercise, but the step before it has started to move up, when it has only widened.
- First Pull
Balance, steadying
The first pull builds the walls, a volcano shape, moving conically inward to counteract the wheel’s constant movement, the desire of the clay to flare outward instead of straight up. The width established by opening, now each movement will add height and shape, but as time passes and the clay is moved and saturated with water, it will be more delicate and harder to handle without breaking or moving. The first pull can still be corrected by the following ones, but this can only go so far.
To pull the walls of the clay vessel up involves the same gentleness as coning it: holding your hands steady and raising them together. To force the clay will give uneven spots, eventually tearing the top away into your hands. Relearning is a practice of patience, sensing where the clay and my body are in relation to one another and moving towards synchronicity. The more frustrated I become at breakages, the faster I try to get some steps out of the way, the more problems arise. I blunder when I think too much. Standing up, shaking out, walking, returning to the center, starting over. I tell myself each try is one step closer to consistency, to getting it right. The studio has us form our discarded clay into a clumsy arch which is placed on a table called the rainbow garden. This is to serve as a reminder, to allay these frustrations; every time I do this it is engaging in process, in practice, the rainbow following the rain.
- Building The Wall Higher
Lift the clay one finger-width per rotation of the wheel
After the first pull, the following ones continue on the path, lifting up, shaping into rounded and fluted forms, thinning the walls and evening the distribution of clay through the work. The wider rounded curves of a bowl. The cut-in foot at the bottom of a mug.
People have to repeat themselves more when we talk, muffled from the masks. Gradually, the new process is more familiar than the old. A pattern establishes. A week, then a month passes with no report of cases from studio users. I make a series of mugs, clunky, getting used to it again. I learn to make a plate, a different kind of handle.
- Fire
The clay is fired once, glazed and fired again at two thousand degrees. By undergoing this transformation it is safe for food, the glaze adhered to the stoneware, and hardier than before, ready to be used because of what it has endured.
The studio sends out an email about their planned transition to all-virtual classes again; they cancel the glaze appointments. My heart is quick. I made it through last time, but now I know what I’ve been missing. They made it through last time, but what if it isn’t enough? What if we can’t survive? How much longer will I be resilient; how much enduring before there’s nothing left at all?
Every step is perilous. I center something for the cone to break; I drill down to the bottom or open up unevenly, too much clay on one side or the other. The walls of my pieces flare out, lopsided and wonky. Cutting a piece off the wheelhead I slice through the bottom with my cut wires. I trim a piece too wet and it’s lopsided and bent, another is too dry and cracks. I overglaze a piece and it runs off parts of the rim completely. I try to add a second pound of clay and fail over and over again to scale up, wrists weak and forehead sweaty. Things are always going wrong.
The only thing to do is begin again. My body the anchor, my body the lever, to raise it up, to make it something.
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