I suck at pottery, but that’s not the point

This past summer, I waited in line for three hours to see arguably one of the most famous sculptures in the world. The first hour was blisteringly hot. The second, it monsooned. During the third, a creepy man tried to hit on me as I pointedly ignored him by rereading the terrible book I had already finished on the train ride there. I began to debate whether it was even worth it to stay in line. But I did, perhaps due to the sunk-cost fallacy; or maybe I just felt particularly stubborn that day — I had made a point of visiting the most important art museums in every city I traveled to, so why stop now? Unfortunately, that mindset did not serve me well, because when I finally got inside the museum, I was soaking wet and deeply frustrated. 

And I suppose some of that annoyance carried over, because as I looked 16 feet up in the air at the face of Michaelangelo’s David, the only thing I felt was disappointment.

“It’s literally just tall,” I texted my dad, halfway through my third trip around the statue, hoping that looking at it from different angles would unlock that aha moment for me. He, along with pretty much everyone else in my life, had been telling me for weeks that I couldn’t leave Italy without seeing the Renaissance masterpiece. It was a marvel: so lifelike and yet fantastically exaggerated. It represented the artistic culture of Florence, the city I so loved and admired for all its artistic masterpieces. Replicas could be found all throughout the city on magnets, tote bags, postcards and T-shirts. 

I wasn’t surprised I didn’t agree with popular opinion, though — for all my love of art and architecture, I have never been particularly interested in sculpture or ceramics. 

My elementary and middle school art teacher, on the other hand, loved clay. For seven straight years, my class was shuffled in and out of the art studio, learning how to roll out and “score and slip” the clay. For their part, my parents were wonderfully encouraging. Every terrible pinch pot, 3-pound soap dish and misshapen “animal” was proudly displayed in our dining room for most of my childhood. For a long time, I’ve been wanting to try a pottery class, hoping that it was the sculpting that was the problem, not the medium itself. So, despite my previous dislike and obvious lack of skill, I had enough misplaced confidence to reach out to Yiu-Keung Lee, head instructor at Clay Work Studio, who invited me to join a pottery class. 

Clay Work Studio resides in the back of a strip mall off Plymouth Road, where dusty plants line the walkway from the parking lot and you can hear rain falling on the (also dusty) skylights. But tucked away in the corner is an artist’s haven. It’s a cozy, clean and efficient workspace, with sculptures and pottery in varying stages stacked on shelves, and within two minutes of walking in, there’s a sense of quiet anticipation. There’s a large table across the back with clumps of red clay drying on wooden boards, like hundreds of little drip castles. 

Lee introduces me to the instructor of the class I’ll be participating in, Kaylon Khorsheed. Khorsheed directs me to fill a bucket with water and grab my tools for the day: a clay-stained sponge, a rag and a wire. She speaks with the practiced cadence of someone following an ingrained routine. I tie my apron tightly around my waist and follow her instructions. First, Khorsheed says, we have to wedge the clay. The four other class participants and I cut off 1-pound chunks and begin to wedge using the ram’s head technique. Imagine you’re kneading dough, but instead of folding air into the dough, you’re pushing it out. I end up with a wonky-looking T, the corners rolled inwards like horns.

“Do it until you’re out of breath,” Khorsheed says.

She deftly shapes the wedged clay into a smooth cone, no more than 3 inches tall. We make several lumps, some more conical than others, and bring them over to the wheels.

Maybe it’s just my algorithm, but I’ve been seeing pottery throwing all over the internet recently. Every influencer and internet artist makes it look easy enough to create a shape at the very least. Sure, giant pots will flop over on them, or they’ll attempt something fantastical and the clay will fly right off the wheel, but I’m not there to make something whimsical and ginormous. I’m there to make a cylinder. Khorsheed makes that very clear.

“If you ever take classes consistently, your instructor is going to put you in cylinder boot camp,” Khorsheed says. 

She shows us cylinders cut in half so their walls and bottoms can be evaluated. Do they meet at a 90-degree angle? Is the bottom in that sweet spot between too thick and too thin? This takes practice, she says. You have to throw more than 100 cylinders before you can even think about moving onto a bowl.

The class watches as Khorsheed runs through the different steps firmly and efficiently. First, she centers the clay, raising the cone up and flattening it back down to get rid of any “wobbling” around the edges. When she’s created a small puck of level, centered clay, she locks her thumbs together, nail to nail, and begins to drill into the middle. Khorsheed then sticks her left pointer and middle fingers into the hole her thumbs have created and begins lengthening the walls of the cylinder, compressing the lip of the pot as she goes. The cylinder rises almost magically before our eyes, seemingly appearing out of thin air. It’s perfectly round, with perfectly thin walls and a perfectly thick bottom. 

During my senior year of high school in the height of the pandemic, when my classmates and I were still confined to our bedrooms, I routinely went for walks around my neighborhood during my lunch break and even sometimes during remote class — I mean, really, what’s the point of Zoom P.E.? On one of these walks, I was joined by a friend who had recently gotten into his early decision school to study film, which is probably why he felt justified in telling me: “If you don’t do something creative with your life, I’ll kill you.”

A joke, obviously, but it was easy for him to say. He was off to California in eight short months, to a school with long, loping lawns, perennial blue skies and José Clemente Orozco’s fresco on the dining hall wall. A compliment, then, attesting to his faith in my abilities, but I can’t for the life of me imagine why he felt that way. I didn’t create anything of substance in high school. I wrote a music review for the school newspaper and a poem or two a year for the literary magazine, but it wasn’t a real part of my life — my identity. I never considered myself to be an artist because I could never put paintbrush to paper and have the idea melt from my brain and onto the page. And trust me, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. 

Both of my parents studied art and art history in college. Every time I visit my grandparents, my grandmother shows me her latest painting, which I admire as she critiques imperfections I could never even dream of spotting. My other grandmother owned a dressmaking shop, and my great-grandfather wove baskets that line the cabinet tops of our kitchen. Even as young kids, my brother ran circles around me creatively, designing elaborate structures out of Magna-Tiles or, at the very least, bringing home a slightly less-misshapen pinch pot. Clearly there’s some sort of art gene that’s thrumming in my body, if only I could figure out how to tap into it.

Unfortunately, I don’t think pottery is my path to becoming a famous artist.

I made six bowl-cylinder hybrids during the two-hour class at Clay Work, and — despite Khorsheed’s patient instruction — I couldn’t really get the hang of it. I would “hug” the glob of clay with my hands, imagining the perfect pot that would come out of it and leaning into the gritty discomfort that comes when skin meets spinning granules of sand. If there was no pain, I clearly wasn’t putting enough effort into it, right?

Wrong.

“Be more gentle,” Khorsheed tells me, placing her hands over mine on the clay. She lightly pinches my clay back into shape, fixing the kink that my wayward pinky had nudged out of orbit. She lets go, and I rest the pads of my fingers as gently as possible on the spinning, half formed cylinder, but to no avail — my version of feather-light is still much too harsh, and the kink reenters orbit. Its effect on my cylinder is just as drastic as the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs. Perhaps Michelangelo deserves a bit more of my respect. 

“For me, (art) is about personal growth,” Khorsheed said. “And this is the only thing that I’ve really experienced that personal growth (in), like I can see it in my work. You could probably even see it too, from your first pot you made to the third one. … And so for me, that was really important, I wanted to continue growing.” 

It was true, I had noticed differences in each of my six pots. I had used too little water on the first and too much on the third. I had taken too long attempting to center the clay on the fourth and not enough on the second. The fifth and sixth were salvageable, with Khorsheed’s help and a new, dry wheel. Although none of my pots had come out as chiseled and proportional as Khorsheed’s five-minute demo, I had started to adjust my technique as I went along. It wasn’t so much a discovery of what to do though, more so what not to do. 

It’s possible that my disinterest in Michelangelo’s David wasn’t disinterest at all. No, it was probably something far more sinister: a skulking, green-eyed monster that maturity and manners mandated me to wrongly identify. His ability to spring forth an image from his mind —  fully, perfectly formed at that —  is something I’ve coveted since I theoretically mastered fine motor skills. The ability to make the mundane spectacular, even if only by tripling its size is, at the end of the day, what all artists are trying to do. 

“I was one of those kids who thought … ‘I can’t believe I’m going to art school!’” Khorsheed said. “I was, like, bad at drawing, never the teacher’s pet in art class. So for me, I would say just keep listening to yourself and do what you like to do. If you are exploring a certain medium like clay or painting and there’s something about it that catches you, that makes you feel free, do that.” 

Art isn’t about whether or not you’re “good” at it — which is easy to say, but harder to embody. It’s hard to keep working at something that feels foreign to you, especially when you’re not getting the results that you want out of it. But art, like anything worth doing, is a skill that takes practice. And there is no real perfection. For Khorsheed, she mentioned that each person who creates something, infuses it with their voice, making it unique to them and only them. That classic line that people often take when looking at modern art of “I could do that” is inherently flawed — you would draw an apple differently from how your friend would, let alone Picasso. 

At the end of our lesson, the class files into twin lines to wash our buckets and scrub our boards — all the extra clay, including the remains of two bowls so flawed they didn’t make it off the wheel in one piece, gets relocated back to the boards with the clay drip castles. At the end of the lesson, all of the clay will get wedged and used again. There’s no waste, no permanence — the clay that was a wonky oyster in my hands will turn into that perfect circular bowl in someone else’s. Inside the calm, warm studio of Clay Works, I can brutally mess up bowl after bowl and it won’t matter. Here is the place to make mistakes.

Statement Deputy Editor Lucy Del Deo can be reached at ldeldeo@umich.edu.

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