When you enter the Art Department at Lehman College you can find, at the end of a long hallway, the ceramics studio. The spacious room is clean but you can still see traces of last night’s session like the kitchen of a famous restaurant. The left side of the room is an assembly line of pottery wheels, and long worktables make up the right. At any time of the day you may find a group of women in the studio working on their pieces or simply chatting about their grandchildren. The presence of these older ladies not only kindles mentorship but also a sense of community, one that is typically rare on a commuter campus. The personal and communal process of ceramics and its ability to teach empathy is the reason I am emphasizing the importance of this physical art in the digital age.
The reason I, a 22 year-old undergraduate student, decided to study this craft is because the medium teaches me the virtues of patience and understanding, virtues that are very difficult for a millennial to learn from our otherwise self-serving instant-gratifying age. Other than the electric powered wheel and kiln, the ceramic process today is not much different from that of five thousand years ago. The mastery still lies solely within one’s ability to overcome the process by submitting oneself to it, adaptation of the artist rather than the technology. Technicity (in the Heideggerian sense) of the artist in surviving the domination of technology in the relation between artist and artwork. This is also a physical refinement, for ceramics requires the full engagement of the artist that demands a presence of body and mind. By physically adjusting to fit the forms of the clay, one is actively practicing empathy. Being empathetic of the clay means to know when and why the clay is acting a certain way: when the clay is too soft and cannot be pulled too high, when the clay cannot support its own weight and collapses, when the clay is too dry to stretch the shape. All of this knowledge demands the keen sensitivity of the artist and their ability to detect the needs of the clay.
My first day on the wheel consisted of frustration and self-doubt. I struggled over and over trying to center a lump of clay while the older ladies looked on with bemused understanding. Eventually I was able to position my arms, back, hips, and shoulders all in a miraculous alignment and locked myself in a formation to center the clay within the palms of my hands. As the wheel spun infinitely fast, the clay and I were in a tight spiral of safe and secure flight, everything else in the room faded to darkness. Now every session on the wheel feels like a familiar conversation with an old friend, a living and breathing partner that I must be minutely attuned to. After four years of working with clay I have found and kept many little wisdoms such as the importance of consistency and the infallible rule of being “gentle, yet firm,” insights that I now apply to life beyond clay. Because a clay body is in constant contact with its environment it is affected by temperature (fire) and humidity (water). When the human body is in discomfort or the human mind in aggression, we immediately internalize the cause and assume it is something we have consumed rather than considering the fact that we are animals of our environment of an ecosystem. The clay has taught me to be aware of my surroundings and my relation to the space I occupy.
