Observation
Observation is a skill necessary for all sorts of careers including medicine, the hard sciences, and soft sciences such as psychology. Observation is a foundation skill also required for healthy relationships and learning.
All of us have some level of observational skill, but as a person creates art --- be it in clay, paint, or some other art form --- they are also engaged in the act of observing. Sometimes this is less apparent than other times, but it is always present and active as we create.
To practice art is to practice observing.
Analysis
From the foundation of observation, those who partake in making art (including pottery) are also engaged in forming analyses. Besides the more familiar analysis forms such as logic and deduction, there is a right-brain form of analysis that differs from these left-brain forms. The arts help train these more subtle forms, which is often confused for "instinct" or "gut knowledge".
Pottery, however, does not stop with spatial and relational analysis forms (two of the more right-brained based forms). Because pottery is not only an art, but also a craft based in a lot of hard science, we have the added benefit of learning to analyze using both our right- and left- hemispheres of our brains.
Concept Building
We work best in a world in which we can build and hone our mental, conceptual frameworks. The arts help in that process, involving the right-brain and its perceptual skills as well as the left. Just as we learn concepts from books and teachers, we also do conceptual learning when making art.
In fact, many of our concepts begin in a vague, foggy realm. It is here that the arts really can help us hone those concepts, begin to grasp what it is we are trying to access and define. Creating art helps pull all the pieces together, integrating those loose ideas into something our more concrete left-brain can understand.
Problem Solving
Art and pottery making both train us in other forms of observation and analysis, and help us bring together more complete conceptual frameworks. Because of this, these creative activities also inherently increase our ability to do problem solving.
"Thinking outside the box" became a catch-phrase we have probably all heard. What was really being said was, "use your right-brain --- the side most accessed when making art --- and its ability to come up with creative, 'intuitive' solutions".
The more you work the right side of your brain, the more likely you can dazzle others with your creative, innovative problem solving.
Personal Identity
Did you realize that, given little or no encouragement, a person may not build more than a rudimentary sense of self? Our sense of personal identity is often left at a fairly surface level, based on external definers. I am XYZ's daughter. I am work at EFG company. I own an MNO car.
Making art (and pottery) can both add dimensions to who we saw ourselves as being (our self-identity). Further, and probably more importantly, making art allows us to explore and develop concepts about who we are. After all, "personal identity" is just another way to say "concepts about who I am".
Self-Expression
Besides as a means of exploring who we are, what use is there to creating art and pottery in terms of expressing ourselves?
Self-expression is perhaps one of the most important tasks we as humans have. Without the ability to express ourselves, we become stilted and emotionally and psychologically brittle. We must express our thoughts, our feelings, our hopes, our dreams, and sometimes our nightmares.
To express these things is to allow us to see them from a different angle than while they remain within us, unexpressed. We can explore them more fully, develop our understanding of them, and even enjoy them more. For the wounds we inevitably take, self-expression through creative activity can also act as an agent of healing.
Exploration of Possibilities
Along that same line, creating art (and pottery) allows us not just to express the ideas we come up with about who we are, but also about who we might be. Creating art allows us to explore possibilities in all sorts of ways...possibilities of self, but also possibilities of the world around us, the past, the present, the future, and everything in between.
One of the greatest gifts we have as humans is to be able to imagine things that we cannot see. We can say and explore "what if". In other words, we are not chained to reality or limited to what we already know and have experienced. Creating art allows us to engage our imaginations in a way very few other activities can.
Improved Communication
One of the truly interesting things about creating art is that it pulls non-language-based concepts and ideas into a form that then, afterward, allows us to put those things into words. In other words, as contrary as it may seem, working alone in your pottery studio may actually make you better at having clear and meaningful communication with the people around you at other times.
Making art (and pottery) is a form of communication. It is a non-verbal form of communication. It also often at least touches on things that we hold dear, thereby opening us for for more explicit forms of communication.
Community Building
I love getting together with other artists and potters. It is exciting to be with people that "speak the same language" and who understand the problems I wrestle with --- they have "been there," too!
Making art (as long as you don't lock yourself in the studio) makes us better communicators. It opens a channel to talk to other people and build stronger relationships. This not only effects our relationships with close family and friends, but moves outward into our relationships with the greater community.
Fun!
All these logial, "serious" aspects aside, let's not forget that making art and pottery is also simply, and often purely, fun. It gives us pleasure and a sense of satisfaction to create things.
Having said that, I also need to acknowledge that making art is also work --- it can take some serious energy! But it is pleasuable work. It is playful work...and sometimes it is just plain out and out play!
Without pleasure, play, humor, and fun in our lives, we begin to emotionally disintegrate. Stress will overcome us and eat us alive. Even if there were no other value to making art and pottery, this one aspect, by itself, would make everything we do in our studios more than worthwhile. That, with everything else, is the value of art and pottery.
Resources
Creative and Mental Growth, 8th ed. Viktor Lowenfeld and W. Lambert Brittain.
"Art and Kids", Robin McClure.