As you come to understand clay and its limitations and possibilities, you will learn to work with it in partnership. Clay has its own voice. Harmonizing your voice, as the craftsman, with clay’s voice produces some of the most spectacular pottery.
In spite of, or even perhaps because of, the vast number of possibilities in forming clay objects, the potter must respect the science of clay and ceramics.
Potters are, in their own way, practical physicists and chemists. Through trial and error, and then passing that knowledge down to others, potters have built up a store of knowledge based in the physical sciences.
In ancient times, a potter may not have had the term “coefficient of expansion” to understand the stresses that pots go through while being fired. Even so, the ancient potter knew, just as potters do today, that heating up the kiln too fast will result in the ware inside breaking. We don’t have to know the scientific language to know we don’t want more pots to end up in shards!
During the Middle Ages, alchemists could have done very well if they had visited their local potter. Who else at that time had a better idea of what certain metal oxides could and would do when heated? Even back then, potters used the principals of chemistry every time they developed a new clay body or a new glaze.
Potters, as craftsmen, have a noble heritage.
That heritage is still very much a part of pottery today. It lives in the potter’s skill at managing the stresses that the clays and glazes go through. It is in their skill at creating glazes that fuse to vertical surfaces. It is in the manual dexterity they demonstrate as they carefully apply clay embellishments to a pot. It is in the strength and sturdiness they show as they center twenty pounds of clay on the wheel.
Craftsmanship is the backbone of ceramics and pottery. Without the technical skills potters use as a matter of course, even their most artistic projects would be ruined. To be fully manifest, pottery as art must be based on a foundation of pottery as craft.
