Lose yourself in Clay, even if it’s just for the weekend

The challenge: make 10 small clay objects in 18 minutes: one minute each for the first five pieces, two minutes for the next four, and five for the last.

Ariela Kuh, a ceramic artist with a brilliant demeanor and a yellow apron, set a timer on her iPhone as she explained the exercise to the 14 of us who attended her workshop last month at the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine.

“Remember what it was like to touch clay as a child,” he advised.

As I prepared 10 tangerine-sized balls of clay, images from childhood came to mind: the blue shelves in my pottery after-school program, the terracotta bulbous vase my mother made in one of the myriad patient facilities. with cancer in the previous months. the death of her, the little elephant in the center of a red ceramic plate that my tiny hands had fashioned sometime in the mid-1990s and was now gathering dust.

“Go away,” Mrs. Kuh said, and there was no more time to think. Clay shapes appeared and multiplied, each bearing a vague resemblance to the last, like snapshots of evolving sea creatures, all shells and tentacles. When the last phone alarm went off, he was giddy with the uninhibited joy you experience when you let go of perfectionism.

land meets water

“Clay is the opposite of a cell phone,” said D. Wayne Higby, artist and director of Alfred University Museum of Ceramic Art in Alfred, NY “This is real, it takes up space, it’s dirty. There’s just this physicality that’s very different from what we experience six or eight hours a day sitting in front of a computer.”

This could partly explain the recent resurgence in popularity of pottery.

Clay educators, artists, and industry experts from across the United States told me of people flocking to pottery classes and workshops, studios trying to rein in expanding waiting lists, and potters amassing a huge following. online. (There is even a TV show for hobbyists: “the great pottery launch,” a production in the style of “The Great British Baking Show”, broadcast by Max.)

And perhaps because it provides a tactile alternative to the flattened reality of the screen, Clay continued to attract new devotees even as much of the world ground to a halt during the Covid lockdowns.

“Sales of pottery wheels have doubled and tripled during the pandemic,” said Bryan Vansell, owner and president of the lagoon clay company, a leading provider of clays, glazes, and equipment for potters in the United States. “The pandemic brought people back home, put people in their garages and office spaces to turn into studios.”

Now, many of those potters seek to share their passion and get their hands dirty with others at summer residencies, classes, and workshops at places like Watershed.

“All of our programs fill up, sell out, and we’d love to do more,” said center director Liz Seaton, who uses gender-neutral pronouns. Lawyers by training, they recently left their job as policy director at the National LGBTQ Task Force in Washington to turn his lifelong passion for ceramics into a career. “I like to build things. One of the reasons I took this job was the challenge of getting this organization to a point where we have year-round facilities.”

Watershed was founded in the mid-1980s on the site of a former brickyard. Its 54 acres of rolling hills quickly became a haven where potters could deepen their understanding of the environment and of each other. During the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1990s, Watershed invited people living with the virus to explore the creative and therapeutic potential of clay.

In my own search for the magic that happens when land meets water, I had left my ceramics studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side behind for a long weekend at the Watershed, along a section of the coast where the fingers of the earth seem to grasp the ocean.

A vision in the woods

Pulling off a stretch of US 1 lined with pottery store signs, I turned onto a country road on a crisp spring morning. I was greeted by the sight of a spotted pig chasing birds, ears flapping in the sun, on the family farm next to the Watershed. Sheep and their lambs bleated, and a herd of brown cows stared at my car.

The timeless beauty of its bucolic setting did not betray the transformation that the center had recently undergone.

In a clearing in the woods, the former wooden chicken coop, which served as a ceramics studio until 2020, had given way to a gleaming corrugated metal building: Watershed’s new state-of-the-art ceramics facility. It was equipped with 35 workbenches, numerous electric potter’s wheels, and a glaze spray station, as well as sophisticated water and air filtration systems. An adjacent shed contained six types of ovens, including electric, gas, and wood. Nearby, several gray cubist modern cabins, quietly hidden among the trees, had sprung up to serve as accommodation for the program participants.

Watershed currently hosts artist residencies, professional development programming for teachers, and public workshops. Historically, operations have slowed down during the winter months, but with the opening of its new winterized spaces and construction of a remodeled common building to begin later this year, it is firmly on track for Mx. Seaton’s dream of a year-round operation.

Clay modeling and bending time.

“I like a bit of organic originality,” Ms. Kuh said as she freehand drew a rectangle from a sheet of clay and seemingly effortlessly curved the piece into a cylinder, then did the same with a circle, turning it into a cone. . “I am not a rule follower. There’s a reason I didn’t become a carpenter.”

The three-day class I was attending focused on how to build geometric objects from clay slabs and then use them to assemble more complex creations. Unlike wheel toss, where clay is molded onto a rotating disc, this technique, known as hand building, can be used to make a wide variety of shapes and larger works.

As we broke into 25-pound bags of clay, the room was filled with the smell of damp earth and a studious silence, punctuated occasionally by the sound of hands slapping and dropping the material to give it just the right texture.

A sign proclaimed that the studio was a cell phone-free zone and there were no clocks. As I bent, squeezed, and smeared the gray mass into my hands, a soft, cool sensation spread from my fingertips to my head, pooling there, then drowning out anxieties and obliterating my sense of time. Clay shapes morphed on the canvas-covered worktables and trapezoids of sunshine slid across the polished concrete floors.

A medium containing multitudes

Watershed is far from the only place in the United States where potters can experience the fresh country air while exploring the craft and its traditions.

Founded in 1929 to give Appalachian women a means of earning a living, the Penland Craft School In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where clay was designated the “official art medium of the state” in 2013, it attracts artists and hobbyists with a variety of programs in different media. Summer clay workshops typically last between four and 12 days, during which time participants live on the 420-acre campus and focus on a variety of functional and decorative aspects of ceramics.

A three-hour drive to the east, the city of Seagrove, which has one of the highest concentrations of working potters in the country, bills itself as the ceramics capital of America. The area is home to more than 50 ceramic shops, studios, and galleries, as well as the North Carolina Ceramic Center, a museum dedicated to crafts. Seagrove counts eighth and ninth generation potters among its residents, as well as a growing number of young apprentices and clay artists.

Tipping the scales from the utilitarian to the inventive has long been the mission of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, in the foothills near Helena, Mont. Nearly three-quarters of a century after Bray’s founding, the world seems ready for its contemporary take on clay.

“Somewhere in the pandemic,” said the foundation’s current director, Rebecca Harvey, “whatever that hierarchy may have been, whatever that line between art and craft may have been, seems to have evaporated.” She pointed to the growing number of artists, galleries, and museums: among them, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — who in recent years have begun to embrace clay work.

For those interested in exploring, the Bray offers two hours experience classes Open to the public in July and August. The pieces are fired at the end of each class and are ready for pickup two weeks later. Starting in 2024, there will also be short workshops throughout the year. Artist residencies and symposium-style programming are ongoing.

Helena is home to a lively pottery community. Every summer, local artists open their studios for the two days Montana Clay Tour. On June 14th, the local Blackfoot River Brewing Company is having a celebration and a special “Bray Beer” on tap to kick off the weekend.

Pleasure over productivity

Ms. Kuh was trimming excess material from a container reminiscent of an oversized dumpling, slowly imbuing it with the delicacy of a curtain billowing in a spring breeze.

It was the last day at the workshop and he was putting the finishing touches.

“Everyone has a different favorite part of the process. I really love this refining part,” she said, cutting ribbon after ribbon of dry clay. “It’s like writing, I like the editing part.”

Due to the time it takes to fire the pottery, we would not be putting raw clay pieces, known as green pottery, into the kiln, but rather wrapping them up for transport home.

Having flown to Maine and knowing that this type of clay would melt in the high-temperature kilns in my studio in New York, I soon realized that my pieces would not be coming back with me. The thought was strangely liberating.

Like many hobby potters, I had been drawn to pottery for the sense of purpose it gave me: making planters for my friends, bowls for my family, a little cave for my fish, trinkets for my girlfriend.

I looked at the objects in front of me. One looked like a pair of muscular shoulders with a long, thin neck; the other reminded me of a volcanic hillside or tubular coral reef. What use could I have for them?

Maybe they could be vases or lamps. Or perhaps its only function was to bring me closer to the joy of playing that I had felt so rarely since childhood.

And why shouldn’t that be purpose enough? I thought, as I tossed my creations into the recovery bin, where the clay remains await their next adventure.

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