Studio Potter

Back when I was just out of college, trading labor for studio space, I had a friend named Susie. She'd taken all the available pottery classes at the state university across town, and had talked her way into independent study credits at my college, for the same reason I was mixing glazes and pugging clay. We were both crazy about pots.

We spent most of our free time at the wheel, experimenting and struggling in about equal parts. She had a classic vase form that she kept repeating, trying to perfect. (I have one of her better efforts in my collection.) I'd had a slow start, but now that I'd mastered centering, I wanted to try everything. We both were looking forward anxiously to a future away from school, and making nervous jokes about studio potters.

Studio potters were boring. They made the same pots over and over, all identical. They measured constantly, they were robotic and uncreative and everything we were never going to be.

Now days, I call that a production potter. And guess what? I am one.

And it's not what I expected, not boring sameness. I have a relationship with all the forms I throw, and each one, each series, is a little different.

Mugs are easy, mugs are quick, two minutes and lift and on to the next. I know it's time to take a break when I pull a mug wall too thin at the bottom and it starts to twist or tear. But mostly I love to see them line up in even ranks on the ware board, ready to march off to the kiln. After I add handles, of course. Pulling handles is the penance for the ease of throwing mugs.

Soup bowls are a balancing act. I refuse categorically to throw them on bats, so every bag of clay is an adventure. If the clay is too soft, I can't lift them off the wheel; too firm and I throw them too thin and wide. I love soup bowls, but sometimes they don't love me.

I also have a love-hate relationship with pitchers. I love the mouth, the spout, the tapering neck and full belly. It's the relative proportions that give me grief. Top-heavy, bottom heavy, spouts that tear and have to be patched, delicate as wet tissue.

Casseroles, lidded forms, covered crocks are when I feel closest to the studio potter stereotype. I weigh out the clay to the ounce, wash off the calipers and squint a lot, trying to get a fit that doesn't involve trimming the lid later. Sometimes I succeed.

Serving bowls and pasta bowls are my reward for a day of small things. They're big, fun to throw, and fill up the space so quickly. I burn through clay on big bowl days, fill up the racks with my sense of accomplishment.

I always leave dinner and dessert plates until the end of the run, because I know they're easy. I use a no-trim form I learned at a summer workshop years ago, open with a knuckle and compress with fingers and sponge, at least seven times back and forth like a record player tone arm. Yes, I still count.

And yes, there are times when it's boring and repetitive, when I'm throwing against a deadline and think fondly back to the days when I had six balls of clay to throw, and all possibility ahead of me. But there are times when it's relaxing, meditative, and the pots spin up off the wheel with the ease of muscle memory and practice. And I hardly ever measure at all.

I last saw Susie in 1985, when I left for graduate school in Oregon. She'd moved to Minneapolis, taken a job in retail, but continued to throw. I sold her my little 18" electric kiln, and she'd set up ware racks in a spare bedroom. To throw, she covered everything in her kitchen with plastic drop cloth and rolled her wheel out on the checkered linoleum.

It's thirty years later and I'm back in Minneapolis visiting, and wondering about Susie. Wondering if she still makes pots, if she may even be--horrors!--a studio potter.