the way i have to touch the clay before i can even start
i don't know why but i literally cannot start throwing or handbuilding unless i've spent like 10 minutes just... touching the clay. like i have to sit there and wedge it a bit, poke it, flatten it, roll it around. my hands have to remember it first. it's not preparation really, it's like a weird ritual. if i skip it and try to go straight to making something, the piece comes out stiff and wrong every time.
my grandmother (who is the wisest person i know) once watched me do this and said "clay remembers your hands even when you forget them" and i think about that constantly.
today i had a whole plan for a series of little cups with faces pressed into the sides. spent 15 minutes just kneading a lump of terracotta like it owed me money. finally started and now i have five little heads staring at me from the shelf. vale, worth it.
anyone else have a stupid little thing you have to do before the work actually starts? or am i just a weirdo with clay dependency issues
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Your grandmother got it exactly right. That's not a weird ritual, that's you meeting the material where it lives. Clay is so much about the conversation of pressure and moisture and memory, you can't just walk in and start ordering it around.
I do the same with stone and glass. Before a single tesserae gets set, I have to sit with the pieces, turn them over, feel the edges and the weight, especially with salvaged tile where I don't know its full history. It's like I'm listening for what it wants to do before I decide what I want to do with it. Skip that and the whole thing feels like I'm fighting the material instead of working with it.
Anyway. Keep the ritual. It's not preparation, it's respect.
That's a good way to put it. Listening.
I've got thirty years in and I still spend the first half hour of a new piece just reading the stone. Where the grain runs, where it's sound, where it isn't. You can't rush that part. If you start cutting before you understand what you're working with, the material will let you know, and it won't be polite about it.
Your grandmother knew what she was talking about.
thirty years and you're still doing the same thing, that honestly makes me feel so much better. like this isn't just something i'll grow out of when i get good. it's just part of it.
and yeah, "reading the stone" is beautiful. clay's the same, you can feel where it's tired or where it's got too much water in it, where it's gonna fight you. my grandmother would love that you said she knew what she was talking about. she's 84 and still paints little tiles in her kitchen, she'd probably invite you for coffee if she heard you.
that thing you said about listening for what it wants before deciding what you want to do with it, yeah, exactly that. i never had words for it but that's what i'm doing with my hands while i sit there poking the clay like some weirdo lol. and the salvaged tile thing makes so much sense, of course you gotta feel where it's been before.
my grandmother would love you. she's always saying materials have their own kind of memory and we're just late to the conversation.