Pottery as a Sport
(your hands are used for both)
Over the past week, my YouTube recommendations have been filled with pottery videos. It’s not like I’ve ever done pottery or necessarily searched for it recently, but I’ve watched a lot of these as they kept showing up.
Seeing a talented ceramicist with infinitely more patience than I do bring an object to life from a chunk of clay is probably the closest thing to magic. A ceramicist considers the conditions of their environment, kiln, the heat needed to fire a certain type of clay, how glazes behave on certain surfaces, the function of their creations under different circumstances, and so on. One mistake could completely ruin its structural integrity, function, or look. Every clay piece has to dry a certain amount between trimming, glazing, and firing. These slow and meticulously calculated steps are repeated for every batch of objects created.
Pottery requires so much physical involvement it is as close to a competitive sport as it gets. Ceramicists talk about warming up before making a large batch of objects like they’re warming up for a game that’s starting in half an hour.
There’s something deeply intimate about handcrafted items, especially when they rely so much on the involvement of one’s hands. These objects began as ideas, materialized by someone who cares about them like a friend. Once finished, you can feel the indentations and grooves left by an object’s maker. You get to know them without needing to meet them. You know exactly where their fingers have been, where their thumbs have pressed to create this item that is now in your hands. The shapes of bowls are made to be lifted, and handles on mugs are made to be held. Everything is intentional.
Is this not the same as hockey? I’ll get back to this in a bit.
Sidebar: I’ve expressed the idea of hockey players’ bodies being tools (weapons) enough in my paper that I am starting to sound like a broken record. The sudden influx of pottery videos I’ve watched gave me a new direction to take this, though. It’s not the same thing again, I promise.
Art and sports have so many similarities it becomes difficult to draw a solid boundary between them. Dancers and gymnasts exemplify this the best, they are incredibly strong athletes who combine sport and artistic expression.
Within the context of hockey, I think its connection to art is less clear, but it’s there. Aesthetic pleasure is found in seeing an athlete with an “ideal body”. Athletes find pleasure in physical exertion, or winning a game, if you want to be specific. The statement “looking good” seems to be expressed more often during practices at a rink than at a studio when artists are asked to describe their completed pieces. Hockey players “work on” their bodies through conditioning, while artists work on their creations repetitively to refine details. It is more or less the same process that can be highly monotonous, mundane, or painstaking. I could be talking about an athlete or a ceramic teapot if I described something as “sculpted”, “defined”, or “good-looking”, really.
Pottery is a labor of love, but it feels more like a labor of faith to me. One can only have so much control over their creations because the kiln ends up taking control anyway. Everything is baptized in flames. Nobody knows its final form until the very end of the making process. I wouldn’t be surprised if ceramicists had a “kiln god”, or some kind of superstitious ritual for whenever they fire pots. Hockey has that too, the often-mentioned “hockey god”. Sometimes a game goes so awry you can only leave it up to fate.
It’s fascinating how so many things end up like a religious experience. It’s always about the routines, the belief in an entity with power over your material reality, the blind faith put into something or somewhere. Trusting the process becomes less of a suggestion and more of a requirement. It could also be a prayer. What else is there to do when it’s the only option?
(Now back to whatever I said I would return to.)
Ultimately, an object is just an object. It only means something if you allow it to. A machined object is the opposite of something handmade, but I’d argue you could still connect with it as if it were.
Maybe this is how it feels for an NHL player to win it all. Forget looking at the scuff marks, dents, or scratches on this trophy anymore, you’re allowed to touch it now. Its unconventional shape is meant to be lifted. These ridges are meant to be held onto. This is to say you know exactly where your childhood idols’ hands were during the peak(s) of their careers. You dig your shaking thumbs into the impressions left by the people you essentially worshipped like gods. For a moment you know more than just your body. It is heavy in your grasp.
Your brain WOW
You have made pottery in the past. We have some of it here.