a blog about #pottery

It has been a little over a year since I first started handbuilding abstract-shaped dinosaurs out of clay at the local pottery studio where my partner is a member. It began with this one piece that a friend of the owner had made and we all coveted.

At a friend’s birthday party at that same studio, I decided to try to handbuild a similar long-necked dinosaur. It’s such a small object, after all. How hard could it be to form such a tiny amount of clay into the right shape?

I was immediately humbled.

After hearing my partner and the studio owner talk about how much they loved and wished they could steal that original dino on the shelf, I decided to try again with more of a plan.

I rolled some speckled clay into an oval and used a needle tool to cut out the spaces betewen the legs. I pinched the legs out into longer points and then gently tapped the body feet-side-down until the feet flattened out into cylinders from cones. I rolled out a cone that I attached in the back for a tail and a long cylinder that I squared off and attached in the…

My partner and I attended a pottery workshop at a studio outside of the city this past weekend. When you do pottery in a city, space is a premium. It’s common to feel anywhere from cozy to a bit claustrophobic in a busy art studio. Most don’t have any outdoor spaces, and even if they did, there would likely be restrictions on how openly you could do alternative firing techniques without creating significant risk to your neighbors or the general public. You can hardly even use outdoor grills in a lot of neighborhoods in my city, even if you have a back deck or patio for them.

For these reasons, we drove an hour to a much larger ceramics warehouse that had a large outdoor firing yard where you could have open flames, smoke clouds, and gas kilns. There, the head of the warehouse ran a Raku firing workshop for the dozen potters and their plus-ones all day. It was sunny with no clouds and was surprisingly windy all day, but it was overall a lovely time.

Raku originated in Japan. There, the piece was removed from the kiln while still very hot and it was left to cool in…