Mixed Clay
It’s fun to play around with mixing clays. It’s always a surprise, how it turns out- since the spinning potter’s wheel creates its own beautiful swirls and contrasts, and it’s revealed only when the potter trims away the outer layer of clay that has been mixed with water and muddied. A very cool process to experiment with.
This time, however, in the interest of cutting time corners (see previous post) I didn’t really investigate the qualities of each of the clays I was using— a very soft red clay, and a firm white clay— I just slapped them together and got to work making some little bowls. It was a difficult process. To throw consistent pots, getting the clay to a homogenous texture makes things WAY easier… but I didn’t want to wedge it much beforehand for fear of losing the cool unpredictable striations of the two working together.
And, in my case, they didn’t work together very well. The throwing was lumpy, bumpy, and frustrating, and the trimming was a big challenge. Leaving me to ponder this idea of mixing…
As an ethnically mixed person, with ancestry from the middle east as well as northern europe, it’s always been a question and a struggle to figure out how to mix the two. I wind up feeling pulled in one direction or another, not knowing which box to check, and never really getting to land in either one. As I was throwing these little pots, I could feel the white sections, firm and sturdy, and the red sections, smooth and pliable. Confusing. And led to some weird and wobbly pots. But, as I do, I came to some clarity about it.
Mixing, whether it’s clay, culture, ancestry, whatever— isn’t about finding some perfect center place where all the streaks and flecks disappear. It’s about learning how to have all of it, bumpy and inconsistent, aligned and misaligned, grooving and clanking, in the very same body. Clay body, human body, earth body. We learn how to move from one texture to another and still being okay. It’s not supposed to be simple, that’s the very nature of it.
It feels so satisfying and unsurprising when clay, this gift from the earth, offers insights into the human experience. I’m so grateful for that, over and over again.
