11/15/2022
It's been a while since I shared how I got into pottery.
When I started at I was a double major in Christian Studies and Graphic Design. I think I was in the GD program for a whopping 30 hours before I decided it wasn't for me. I did stayed in the art program, just Studio Arts instead of GD. I had little to no formal art training. STEM had always been my stronger subjects. Yes, I think I had always been creative, and my close friends and family saw that in me, but up until college I really had no desire to pursue anything in the arts besides doodling in the corners of notebooks.
My first semester was the worst 3 months of my, at the time very short, life. I struggled in my art classes and finding ways to communicate what I was experiencing. I was terribly lonely, failing to make new friends in a new place. I was very depressed--and very in denial about it--and lost. Things had never felt so bleak. I was ready to drop out.
I had opened up a sliver of what was going on to my advisor, . I don't know if Mark ever knew the depth or the weight of what I was feeling, maybe he did and knew exactly what to say. Maybe he didn't and it was chance or fate or divine intervention that he said all the right words. He encouraged me to take a ceramics course with him. To me, it was my last ditch effort. After the class I would drop out.
I didn't. Instead, I feel deeply in love with clay. I spent every free moment I had in the ceramics studio. Each class was 3 hours long. I would take a brief break for dinner, and then head back to the studio until 2, 3, sometimes 4 in the morning. I would throw until my hands bled and wake up and do it again the next day. For the first time in a year I had felt so alive, so inspired, and had such a clear direction of my life. I took a ceramics course every term of college after that.
It's poetic, really. Clay; essentially mud. Dirt and water. Through pressure, support, pruning, and extreme heat can be turned into a vessel. Something that holds, and can be held. Something that can be poured into, and pour out. Something of value. Clay, in a way, did the same thing with me. From dust we come.
