Clay

I never will forget getting a ball of clay for the first time.  I was in seventh grade.  The clay was cold and made my hands feel chalky and dry.  It didn’t do what I wanted it to do and my first attempt at a pinch pot sucked.  I crushed it and tried again.  And again.  The clay got all dry and cracky and I remember feeling tears on my lashes, but even back then, I just didn’t cry.  Drawing was so much easier.  I could make an eyeball look real with different lines and strokes, or make a box pop off the page, or draw a horse running across a desert.  My clay pot looked like something a six year old made while playing in the mud.

When I got my schedule my freshman year, I was kind of surprised to find myself in Ceramics 1.  I didn’t remember listing it as an alternative.  I didn’t want to take that class, but changing my schedule didn’t occur to me.  That wasn’t a thing that anyone did.  Ever.  I was gonna have to suck it up and deal with it.  I liked the teacher anyway, and I figured maybe it would go better the second time around.  I got lucky.  The class fell in the weeks before Christmas, and our art teacher decided to break with her formula of pinch pots, coil pots, and slab pots and have us make copious Christmas ornaments.  Cookie cutter style.  Easy.  I made candy canes, trees, snowmen and stars.  I carved in them and trimmed and sanded and painted them bright reds and greens and golds.  I didn’t have to make damn pots, so I left with a slightly more friendly feeling toward clay.

As I became an upper classman, I spent more and more time drawing and painting.  I worked with my art teacher designing the large backdrops for the school plays and spent most of my free time in the art room working on my portfolio for college.  By the end of my senior year, Ceramics 2 was the only art class I hadn’t taken, so I thought I’d give it a try.  It was my last class before graduation.  The assignment was to create a creative container and the object it contained.  The girls in my class had awesome ideas.  One girl made a boom box and little cassette tapes to put inside it.  Another one of my friends made a sheep and little sheep to go inside it.  I could not think of anything.  So day after day, I played with my clay until I had like this cone, funnel shape.  My art teacher took it out of my hands one day and held it up to her chest and asked me if I was making a boob.  Everybody laughed, except me, I burst into tears.  I honestly think my art teacher felt bad, she let me draw the rest of the time, but that sealed the deal; I hated clay.

When I started teaching art nine years ago, I took some classes to refresh my skills.  One of the ones I took was sculpture and the dreaded clay came back.  My professor sliced off chunks of clay for us and told us that we needed to build something inspired by the human body.  Really.  I can’t make this shit up.  I was not going to make another breast, but I had no idea what to make.  The women at my table immediately got started.  I sat and watched them smooth water on to their pieces and indent and pull with their fingers.  I picked my wedge up and started making grooves in it with my fingers.  I didn’t think.  I just made ridges and dips and valleys in the surface, keeping it as smooth as I could make it.  After an hour or so, I held it up and turned it slowly in my hands.  I showed my table mates–“it’s an ear, from this angle, and this one, and this one.”  Van Gogh would have been proud, or maybe I should say Picasso would have been proud.  It was definitely an interpretive ear.  My professor liked it and I got an A, but most of all, I learned that with clay, you have to feel, not think.

I probably would have avoided clay altogether when I started teaching elementary, but there was a kiln in one of the classrooms and the kids kept pestering me about when we were going to make something with clay and fire it in the kiln.  I didn’t even know how to turn on a kiln.  I found an instruction book and read about how to operate the kiln.  I went to the local ceramics shop and plagued the owner with questions.  She patiently explained the difference between Cone 05 and Cone 5 and gave me some tips.  I hoisted a bag of clay on my hip, dropped it down on the table in my classroom and had the custodian show me how to slice it into wedges.  Then I passed it out to the first graders.  All of it, with no instructions.  Kids were delighted.  They pounded and pulled and made the biggest, muddiest mess possible.  They made a lot of things that looked like penises  they called volcanoes.  I giggled, because somedays I’m not mature enough for my job.     And most everything crumbled or exploded in the kiln.  I called up my old art teacher and she spent a few hours reteaching me pinch, coil, and slab methods.  She taught me about glaze.  I poured over clay books and magazines and I went to all the clay workshops at the art educator conferences.  And I practiced.  I made dinosaurs and sea turtles and snowmen and masks.  I got to the point where clay wasn’t scary anymore and my skills are slightly better than a fifth grader.  And the best part is that when I get a little perfectionist artist and the tears come out with the clay, I know what to do to help him or her.

The summer before my parents died, I took a wheel class from a woman in Westcliffe.  She had a little studio, high on a hill, facing the Sangre de Cristo range.  She’d leave the door open and I’d feel the mountain air ripple across my skin as I spun the wheel and pulled the walls of bowls out of lumps of clay.  Hours would pass and my thoughts would fall away.  It’s the closest thing to Zen that I know.  I gave my dad my first pot.  He was thrilled.  He said, “Can you make another one like this?”  I laughed and said, “Not on purpose.”

Last year, I didn’t do all my clay projects with kids.  I was too sick and gone too much.  My muscles in my side and shoulder were damaged from my surgery and radiation and wedging clay and rolling out slabs for the little kids hurt too much.  This year, I’m making it up to the kids.  My PTO bought a slab roller for one of the schools and I’m getting prepared to introduce some new projects. So on the outside it’s business as usual, but on the inside, I have felt like I’ve been going through a soul crises.  Like I’m broken  and it’s hard to find the strength to put myself back together.  All my old ways of soldiering through things don’t seem to be working and I have been trying to figure out how to find a little peace.  A few week ago, I was looking for an old book in the garage and I passed by the pile of my mom and dad’s stuff, that I still haven’t dealt with.  On the top, was that pot that I’d made for my dad.  I picked it up and remembered his sheer delight when I handed it to him.  I asked Shayne to pull out my wheel from the corner of the garage and I signed up for a clay class at a new studio in town.  Maybe in the process of centering a lump of clay, I’ll find my way back to centering myself and begin to rebuild the walls of my soul.