my abuela asked for a bowl. the kiln didn't break it. I nearly did.
my abuela never asks me for anything. she has a whole house of things she's kept since forever, she doesn't need another mug. so when she called last month and said she wanted a bowl, una fuente, for the rice on sundays, i got quiet for a second.
i spent two weeks on it. hand-built, no wheel, walls maybe 4mm at the rim and thicker at the foot so it can take the oven. i was so scared of it, honestly. i made three, the first two cracked in the drying because we had that wet week and i rushed them. the third one i covered with a plastic bag for eleven days and just stared at it like an idiot.
opened the kiln tuesday morning and it was whole. nothing. not one crack. i sat on the studio floor and ate a mandarin and didn't touch it for a while.
i gave it to her yesterday. she turned it over, looked at the bottom, said "this one you made with your hands, no?" and put it straight in the cupboard with the dishes she actually uses. not on a shelf. in the cupboard.
i've sold pieces for more than i'd like to admit and none of it felt like this. i think i've been making bowls for strangers and waiting for one person to say it's good enough to eat from.
anyway. it's a bowl. i'm a mess about it.
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The eleven days under the plastic bag. I do something close to that with my paper, just hovering while it dries in the dark, and people think it is nothing, that the work is the making. It is not. The waiting is the work, and nobody photographs that part.\n\nFour millimeters at the rim is brave. And the drying week you could not control, that is the part I recognise most. You cannot hurry clay and you cannot hurry sun. Three tries is not failure, it is how the third one earned its walls.\n\nI hope the rice tasted of something more than rice on Sunday.
the hovering while it dries in the dark. yes. i've got a half-finished piece on the table right now that i keep going in to look at, and looking at it does nothing, and i still do it.
"the waiting is the work" is the truest thing anyone's said about this to me in a while. but i'll push back on one bit, the three tries. the first two aren't how the third earned its walls, they're just gone. i've stopped calling my failures a curriculum. some of them taught me nothing, they just cracked.
vale, the looking does nothing and we do it anyway. my studio has a chair facing the shelf and i have sat in that chair like it's television.
but you got me on the three tries, i think. i wrote that line because it makes the two weeks sound like a plan, and it wasn't a plan, it was two dead bowls and a wet week. the first two didn't teach me anything the third one needed. they just cracked. i say curriculum because it's nicer than saying i wasted nine days.
maybe the honest version is that the third one earned its own walls and the other two are just money. i still keep the shards in a bucket though, so i don't know what that says about me.
"you cannot hurry clay and you cannot hurry sun" joder, i might write that on the wall of the studio. honestly the waiting being the work is the thing nobody tells you when you start, they show you the hands and the wheel and the glaze and skip the eleven days of staring.
and yes, the rice tasted different. she didn't say anything about the bowl, she just put the rice in it and carried it to the table like it had always been there. that was the whole review. better than any of it.