Working the Clay

I keep returning to stoneware because of what it allows to stay in the surface. It's a forgiving clay in the studio, and an honest one after firing — it holds a fingerprint, a tool mark, an uneven pass of the hand, and keeps most of it through two firings without asking to be smoothed away.

I build slowly, usually starting from the shoulders and working up toward the face last. By the time I get there, the character of the piece has usually already decided itself somewhere lower down — the tilt of a shoulder, the weight settled into a torso. The face is less something I plan than something I recognize once enough of the rest exists to hold it.

Most of what people notice as "style" is really just what I chose not to fix. A slightly uneven jaw, a seam left visible where two coils met, a patch where the engobe sat thinner than elsewhere. None of it is a mistake exactly — it's more that smoothing it away would take something out of the piece that I'd rather keep in.

Stoneware rewards that kind of restraint. It fires to something solid and quiet, without the shine that would make every one of those small decisions disappear.