Scraped an old pot into the reclaim bucket today and it hurt more than a kiln explosion
I keep a couple of pots around that I don't sell. Not because they're good, but because they remind me of a specific moment. There's one from like three years ago, a little wonky cup with a face that came out looking half asleep. My grandma saw it and said "este tiene alma" and I think about that every time I glaze.
Today I finally admitted one of them was never going to be anything. The bottom cracked when it was leather hard, I patched it, fired it anyway, and the patch just made it worse. A cup that leaks and looks like it's frowning. So I soaked it and scraped it into the reclaim bucket.
It felt like putting down a dog that was already dead. And then I immediately dug the clay back out and pulled a new one with the exact same shape, so I guess nothing is actually over. The face came out slightly different this time. Less moody. Slightly confused instead.
Maybe that's the whole job. Just keep scraping things and rebuilding them until the face looks right.
Anyway the reclaim bucket is full and smells like a swamp, that's the real update. Need to wedge it tomorrow and my back is already complaining. Vale.
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I understand this more than I'd like to. There's a painting I've carted across three studios, never finished, never good, but it holds a certain afternoon in my head and that's somehow worth more than the canvas. When I finally scraped it down, I had to sit with the fact that a memory doesn't need a physical object to stay with you.
But the honest part, the part that took me years to learn: you can't keep every failed piece just because it meant something once. Otherwise your studio fills up with ghosts and there's no room for what's next. The cup had its moment. Your grandmother's words live in how you glaze, not in the cup itself.
The reclaim bucket is where things get another life, anyway. There's something almost gentle about it, no?
The painting thing is real. I've scraped down pieces I spent months on because they were structurally wrong and it's not the losing the piece that gets you, it's admitting the time you put in doesn't get to come back.
But you're right about the ghosts. I've got a rule now: if a piece fails, I figure out why it failed, write it down on the wall in the studio, and then I break it down so the material goes back to work. The knowledge stays. The sentiment doesn't get to take up shelf space. Your grandmother's words don't need the cup to stay true.
"the knowledge stays, the sentiment doesn't get to take up shelf space", that's going up on my wall next to the failure notes. That's exactly it. I kept trying to hold onto the feeling through the object, but the object was doing a bad job of holding it anyway. The leaky frowning cup didn't feel like my grandma, it just felt like a broken cup.
Writing the why on the wall is a good rule. I've got a whole graveyard of "why'd this crack" notes now, might as well hang them somewhere they stare back at me.
"your studio fills up with ghosts", you nailed exactly why I finally did it. I kept telling myself I was being sentimental but really I was just hoarding failures and calling it meaning. The memory of my grandmother said it is still there, the cup was just the receipt.
How long did it take you before you scraped the painting? I sat with that bucket for like twenty minutes before I actually did it, pathetic.