function before fashion...

few things make me happier than creating something useful. back in the days before the law took over my life, i kept myself out of trouble by taking ceramics classes at the fleisher art memorial, this tiny community arts school in south philadelphia. and i wasn't bad, either. all of my pieces were made on a pottery wheel. i worked exclusively on the wheel for the following reasons:

1. i'm not an artist. to be really good at coil pots or slab building or any of the more manually dexterous ceramic applications, you've got to have some pre-vision of your finished product. i prefer to throw a lump of wet clay on a wheel and turn it into whatever symmetrical vessel seems to work out.

2. i'm impatient. on the wheel, i could make an average of three or four pots/plates/cups per class. and i also had time to trim the pots from the week before. so, i ended up with a lot of pieces that i was happy with and i had the volume to just toss the ones that i didn't like and still end up with a lot of work.

3. i'm messy. and i think dirt is fun. by the end of every class, my shirt, pants, arms, and even sometimes my face and hair, would be speckled with clay. you just don't get nearly as messy when you're making pinch pots.

4. i really really like math. i know it comes as a shock, but i'm a nerd. if i can find some nerdy/geeky/mathletic aspect of something, it automatically becomes dear to me. when you make something on a wheel, there are all sorts of calculations you have to factor -- you've got to get your clay perfectly centered or your piece will be a wobbly mess; when you make your indentation in the center (to make it a container/vessel/what-have-you) you don't want to go too deep or your floor will be too thin, nor do you want to be too shallow or you're going to end up with a heavy, clunky base; as you pull up the walls, you've got to be even and pull from inside and outside or things won't be consistent; if you find an air bubble you've got to get rid of it or it could cause the piece to explode in the kiln; and you need to learn at what point to stop because the clay has had enough. and depending on what you're working on (plate/bowl/cup), how you move the clay is very important.

it's so tritely eye-roll-inducing to say, but ceramics is very zen-like for me. it certainly has its moments of frustration -- sometimes the clay just doesn't want to cooperate and sometimes you end up sending a piece flying across the room because you didn't secure it properly while trying to trim it -- but for the most part it has been really gratifying. and you get to make something useful. i'm a total function-before-fashion kind of girl (almost to a fault) and i love the efficiency of creating something that serves a purpose.

why am i writing about this now? i just had my dinner -- vegetable soup -- in a lovely blue bowl i made all by myself.

the soup, however, came from a can.