Embodied Practice in the Pottery Workshop
Bobs Village Gallery in Wisdom, North Carolingan is a production pottery. It is a small factory making craft pottery by hand. A craft industry, in this case it is run by Bob and his wife Molly. Ellen Dean and a few other employees take care of the duties in the gallery and the pottery workshop. Bob and Ellen work together six days a week, eight hours a day. That is the kind of dedication a craft practice takes. He had a pottery wheel, a Shimpo and sits in the workshop window throwing pots. It is a practice, a labour and it is really hard, dirty, cramp-inducing work. Ellen puts handles on, fires up the bisque kiln, loads the glaze kiln, tends the gas kiln, glazes pots for orders and helps in the gallery packing pots to ship out to galleries. See post https://talkingaboutartmphil.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/the-story-of-handle-man-why-practice.html for other stories about embodied practice.
This summer they have an apprentice, a woman called Andy. She is newly graduated from Green Mountain College and wants experience and to earn some money before her wedding in the fall. (She has her Mother’s 1660’s wedding gown and proudly shows it to Ellen in its tissue and vintage store box. What with the intensive and repetitive practice of throwing pots her forearms are so muscular she had to get the delicate voile sleeves widened.)
Andy is on piece work. She is on mugs, and throws them all day. Boards of 20 mugs stacked up around the studio. Bob can, on a good day throw 250 mugs all perfect, all almost exactly the same, that is the experience and skill of his practice. Andy has to learn Bob’s style, his mug shape, the correct thickness of clay at each part of the mug body. The correct foot, lip, waist and depth. Taking a 25kg bag of white stoneware clay and cutting it into exactly weighted cubes with a huge cheese wire. These are the skills of his practice that Bob passes on to her and she has to learn exactly.
Being on piece work means she had to be accurate, exact and fast. Bob at the end of the day walks round the boards of mugs she has thrown and randomly, slice them in half – this is the only true test to see if the mug has been correctly thrown. Of course whether it is or not, that mug is destroyed.
Practice. It is an art, an accumulation of experience, a judgement, getting your eye in, connoisseurship, expertise, deep physical knowledge, and knowing when it is enough, when it is just right, when to stop the process and how to avoid ruining a thing with overdoing it.
Image:Interior of the George E. Ohr pottery workshop, Biloxi, Mississippi
Image: Pottery workshop of Daniel Leș . Romania Maramureș County, Baia Sprie.