Making vessels out of the powdery clay that I dig up on the farm has become a ritual. I add water and plunge my hands in, working the earth and water together with my fingers. Stirring, coaxing, mixing. It takes me back to my childhood when we spent summers at a lake, where we found a clay deposit that we made into a bathtub with buckets of lake water. We wallowed, bathed, rolled, delighted in the sun-warmed mud. We made little pots and pies. We laughed and squealed and went home with strange splotches of sunburn where our flesh wasn’t covered in a protective layer of clay. Now, I encounter a brief moment of the same exhilaration and abandon, immersed to the elbows in the mucky stuff.
I took my wild clay to the wheel. Its qualities are very different from store-bought clay and it was surprising to find that I could form it at all, considering how brittle and touchy it is with hand building. But it works. Not in a way that commercially produced clays do. Some commercial clay bodies are forgiving even when things are off-balanced and poorly centered. And some, like porcelain, are so delicate and touchy that it takes a very skilled potter to be able to coax a form without it collapsing in a pile of tears and white mud.
As I try to find a way to describe how different this clay is, an old friend comes to mind. When I was a young woman I lived with a guy who wanted to get a wolf hybrid, and because we were young and naive, we did. We discovered that wolf hybrids are not dogs. Ultimately, she became more of a mentor and friend to me than a pet. Even though she chose to be a part of our ‘pack’, she was not to be tamed. If she wanted to wander, no fence could keep her in. If she didn’t think your idea was a good one, she did not go along with it (and often she was right). Her locus of control was somewhere both very far off and at the same time deep inside of her. She was the embodiment of instinct and love.
This clay reminds me of her. With commercial clay, I can hold an image of a vessel in my mind and mold it to my liking. With the right skills, it’s generally obedient and accommodating. But the wild clay is, well… wild. It decides what shape it will take. It decides how much of my meddling it will tolerate. If I am not present and centered, it certainly won’t be. It demands all of my attention, and that I turn off the rule-based part of my mind that is constantly trying to get between me and this wet lump of Earth spinning between my hands. It says, “Let go”.
I have to close my eyes and shut out everything but the sensation of the rhythm of the pulsing clay. I have to ask it to invite me in, and only together do we become perfectly centered. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like cooperating, and I must acquiesce. I have to ask it what it wants to become, and ever so consciously feel what it is telling me. In order to understand what it’s whispering into my hands, I must expand into it’s presence.
vessels sitting on their bats, fresh off of the wheel. I sprinkled them with mica that I collected on my travels last winter.
This is what the wild clay is teaching me:
Every vessel holds a spirit. Some are wide and welcoming, some are closed and like to have a safe, dark, round space to inhabit. Some want an infinite space inside the little pot, to dance the universe in and out of being.
This clay spirit is teaching me that it likes to inhabit round vessels. I was inspired to create spheres, and at first I thought that it was MY idea. But it reminded me that that isn’t how inspiration works. As my mind always does, I jumped to another idea after making a few spheres. I wanted to make taller rounded shapes, pushing the size and volume and finding its limits. The clay said, “No.” I would pull a tall cylinder up, but as soon as I began to slightly ‘belly’ it out, the cylinder widened way out, forming itself into a short ball shape. I tried again after adding some sand to give the clay body more stability. “No,” it said. “I am a sphere.”
It’s telling me that my job here is to make bodies for the clay spirits to inhabit, not to produce pottery. This isn’t about my will. If I want to invite inspiration into my creative process, I need to accept that I’m not alone, and I need to surrender to that. I wonder what other wisdom it will fill me with. Who, indeed, is the vessel?
