Drawing the Chicken 10: Working with Limitations

Or: Life Lessons from the Pottery Wheel, Part 1

I have been doing pottery since college (um, 16 years ago!), and I set up a tiny home studio at the end of my driveway 5 years ago. And then, while I was a writer in residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2018, they were kind enough to rent a pottery wheel from the University and set up a studio for me in the basement. Over my 6 months there, I worked on finishing an intense manuscript of poetry, and then starting an even more intense set of interviews for my ongoing oral history of women raised by single women, upstairs in my studio in the morning. And in the evenings, I would take the elevator into my basement room, and work in the opposite medium: words floated by me, but clay was real, graspable, grounding in the realest sense of the word. I’ve since some to think about my writing and pottery as two complementary ends of my creative spectrum: folks often ask me how the two practices are similar for me, but in my head and hands, they work precisely because they use opposite parts of my brain and body.

Photo Credit: Daniella Domingues

Over the last year, though, I fell out of touch with clay. It started with realising that I was using the wrong clay body for the kiln temperatures I can fire to, then trying to figure out what to do with the existing clay before moving on to something else. Finally, I gave away the old clay to a friend and ordered something fresh for myself, but by now there were so many new things to get overwhelmed by, such as needing to redevelop all my glaze recipes for the new clay. I got stuck in an endless loop of overwhelm (remember that inertia post?), and my clay practice fell to the wayside for over a year.

This past Friday, I decided on a small step. I had to go into my studio and make one mug. Just one. Just enough to break through. Because now that one mug will pull me back into the studio tomorrow to be trimmed and handled, and then a few days later to be carved, and each time, I will clean one work surface or wash one set of tools, and slowly my studio will become a working space again. And then, as my hands got back into the rhythm of water and earth and air and movement, I remembered what I love most about this particular medium: its limitations.

I know, I know. Limitations have a bad rep, as if they are the antithesis of possibility. But hear me out.

My words, even my paintbrush, can feel infinite. I can create whatever I want to, layer one word or colour over another, and I’m limited only by my own capabilities. I can pick up a piece of writing years later, and it will have waited for me to bring my new insights and skills to it. I can move seamlessly from form to form, or change my mind about a piece halfway and still use the work I’ve done so far.

But clay has a will of its own; clay will tell you when you are ready to work with it further (how dry, how soft, how fragile, how able to hold more weight, etc), and it will change its mind with the seasons and not have any concern for your busy schedule. To give you a sense, the most basic mug will go through these steps:

• Wedge and prep the clay when it’s just the right consistency— if it’s too wet, dry it out on plaster; if it’s too dry, dip a few layers in water and wedge them into the uniform whole.

• As you prep each individual piece, cover it with plastic or it might be too dry to work with by the time you’ve made them all (especially in a Delhi summer)

• Make the basic cylinder form on the wheel, constantly mopping up any excess water before it weakens the clay, but also constantly adding in a trickle of water to keep it from drying too much to work with.

• Cut cylinder off the wheel, cover tightly with plastic and allow to dry slowly for anywhere from 1-3 days depending upon the weather (even longer in some monsoon!).

• Now it will be “leather hard”— dry enough to hold shape but malleable enough to still be altered. Put it back on the wheel and trim away excess clay, give it shape, and if you want to carve or add handles, do that now.

• Cover it again with plastic and let dry further (if you’ve attached handles, extra important to dry slowly so that the joint is as strong as can be).

• Once it’s completely bone dry (and super fragile— you could break it just by picking it up too strongly at this point!), it goes into the first firing at about 800 degrees centigrade. If you had air bubbles, or if a part of the pot was still damp, it might explode on you.

• If it survives this firing, you get to decorate, glaze, etc and put it into another firing at about 1200 degrees centigrade. Now you’ve handed over to chemistry— your glaze could run and ruin your pot, or the mix of two glazes that you thought would work beautifully can turn out not to like each other’s company, or so many other things.

Phew, I am tired just writing those steps out. And we haven’t even talked about all the ways clay will resist you on the wheel itself — you might want to make a really shallow bowl with a really wide flare, but if the clay cannot support its own weight, it will collapse. You might want paper thin walls for your cup, and you might end up without a cup. The material is in constant conversation with you, making demands, acceding to requests, fighting, yielding. Some of this gets better with time and practice, of course, but it’s always a relationship, always a conversation. You can never set the terms all by yourself, and you certainly cannot ever set a timeline of your own to the process.

If you have never worked with clay, at this point you might be thinking it sounds like a very annoying craft form. It is, sometimes, but it is also the most wonderful craft form. Because that constant conversation with a material forces growth. You can get lazy in a poem, you can get lazy on a canvas, but if you get lazy with a pot, it will (literally) blow up in your face. The limitations imposed by the material force you to examine and adapt, and often to end up with something you wouldn’t quite have thought of all on your own. Like any good relationship, it helps you grow.

And the more I think about this, the more I appreciate it as a lesson for all my other creative practices as well. For instance, I’m always imposing artificial limitations on student writing, just to see where their brains will go if you block off the easiest route. What happens if you have to say all of what this piece says but in 1/3 the number of words? What if you can only say what this piece already says but you have to triple the number of words? What if I forbid adjectives? What if every sentence must start with a different letter? All of these “rules” are of course arbitrary, and yet, they spark more creativity and insight than telling someone “blank page — fill if with whatever you like!”. Limitations breed creativity.

And after all, poetry traditionally was precisely that — an exercise in limitation (“express your deepest feelings, sure, but do so in a carefully prescribed rhyme scheme and meter”). A lot of younger poets find this cumbersome, embrace free verse instead— and as someone who also writes in free verse for the most part, I get that. And yet, I’m also convinced that there’s no better training for free verse, or prose for that matter, than writing in form — a ghazal, a sonnet, a sestina, whatever you choose. Searching for words to meet the rhythm and rhyme patterns will yield images you didn’t know were hiding in some crevice of your brain. Working against clear boundaries will force a more dynamic relationship with your words— it will keep your writing from getting lazy. And, as Agha Shahid Ali declared about writing a very long, very formal poem about his mother’s death, it will give you a container for feelings and expressions so big that you could otherwise only speak of them in cliche. You can reject a specific form eventually, but if you use its training in limitations, your writing will open up in a whole other direction.

And isn’t that true for life as well? If you think about a creative life as a life of intention and building, a life of not following traditional social scripts but building the specifically meaningful and beautiful life that you seek, haven’t we all found more of those ah-ha moments when we ran up against a social limitation we wanted to refuse? Haven’t those been the moments that clarified us to ourselves (and often to those around us?). But this post has gone on too long already, so I will come back to this larger theme of a creative life next week!