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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

i know there's a "right" way to wedge. i've watched the videos. but my body just wants to do this violent ram's head slam every time and i swear the clay remembers the aggression. my left wrist has started clicking in a way that's definitely not normal. tried soft wedging yesterday like a normal person and the clay felt dead. like i'd been polite to it and it didn't trust me. had to go back and really put my weight into it before it started feeling alive again. my teacher from the course would be so disappointed. but also she had perfect wrists at 55 so maybe she was onto something. idk. anyone else have a bad habit you KNOW you should fix but it works so you don't?

Bought a kitchen scale to weigh out portions and got curious. Weighed all the clay I've recycled from failed pieces this month. 14 kilos. That's like a whole other person made of my mistakes. And that's just what I saved, not counting what went to the bin. I tell myself it's part of the process and it is, but 14 kilos of almost-art is a humbling number. My grandmother thinks I'm being "persistent" in a sweet way. The kiln knows the truth. Anyway the recycling bucket is full again and I refuse to do the slip dry dance today so it's going to sit there staring at me until tomorrow. The studio is 60% clay ghosts at this point.

ok so this is maybe silly but I need the group's help, I have a first meeting with a small gallery here in Valencia next week and I keep thinking about the wrong things. my first ever gallery visit two years ago I came straight from the studio, hands still grey under the nails, clay dust all down my jeans, and the woman was nice about it but I could feel her looking at my shoes. I got the show anyway (a tiny one, three pieces, corner of the room) but I've never stopped wondering if I should have made an effort. or if the clay hands actually helped, like proof I'm real. now I have this new one and I own one pair of decent trousers, and they're from my cousin's wedding. so what did you wear? full artist mode with the aprons and the paint on you, or clean clothes like a person with a job? did anyone ever get the show because they looked the part, or lose it? settle this for me, I'm genuinely split and the meeting is Tuesday

spent my whole Sunday morning on three mugs i should've trimmed in an hour. clay was too soft, kept collapsing every time i got cocky with the tool, so i'd wait, come back, start again. by the third one i just put on a podcast and gave in to the pace. the one good thing is i've learned to read the leather-hard better now. you feel it in the first pass, that little give. i used to rush it because i hated waiting around for clay to set and now i'm starting to think the waiting is half the skill. anyway the mugs look fine. wonky but fine, which is basically my whole brand. the kiln will have the final word thursday. 🫠

so I found out yesterday that the supplier is stopping the batch of stoneware I've used for basically everything, the whole wonky vessel series, the little face jugs, all of it. I buy it in 20kg blocks and I've got maybe two left before it's gone forever. I know there's other clay. I know. But this one does exactly what I want, it holds marks, it doesn't slump when I push it too far, the glaze does this weird crawling thing on it that I've been chasing for months. Starting over with a new body feels like learning to write with the other hand. I emailed the supplier like a heartbroken ex begging them to tell me there's stock in a warehouse somewhere. No answer yet. I'm trying not to buy 200kg of it and hoard it in my tiny studio but honestly I might. anyone else had their favourite material just vanish? how long did it take you to find the next one?

She came to the studio today. I've been sending her photos for like two years but she's never actually touched any of it until now. She picked up this lopsided little vessel with a face pressed into the side, one I almost scrapped because the glaze crawled weird, and she just held it for a minute. Then she said the glaze looked like the old robes on the figures from her village in Extremadura, the ones they'd bring out for Christmas, all blotchy and wrong but full of something. I don't think she knows how much that meant. She's the one person who never made me feel stupid for doing this, even when I was living off tortilla de patatas and rage. I made her take a piece home, the one she liked. She tried to say no. I won.

i built these three little heads last month, all from the same lump of clay, and i swear they were meant to be the same face. same pinch, same eye sockets, same mouth line. open the kiln this morning and two of them have the mouth pulled open like they're saying something, and the third one looks like it's asleep. same clay. same firing. i did nothing different and the kiln decided they were three different people. my grandmother came by and said the two open ones look like they're arguing with each other, which is fair, they do. now i have to price them and i don't know if i can sell the argument. it's mine now, in a way the sleeping one isn't. anyway the glaze crawled off one of the chins, so there's also that. friday.

For two years I filmed from the clean corner. One square meter of clean bench, nice light from the window, everything else out of frame. Neat little reels of a finished vessel turning on a banding wheel. Perfectly fine, perfectly invisible, about 400 views each and then nothing. In February I broke my phone tripod, so I propped the phone on a bucket of dry clay scraps and just filmed where I work, which is a disaster. Dust, a coffee cup from three days before, my grandmother's old knife I use for everything, half a head that failed in the glaze looking at the camera like it's disappointed in me. That video did 60k. Not a tutorial, not a before/after. Just me wedging clay and swearing in Valencian at a piece that kept cracking. Since then I film the mess and I stop deleting the boring parts. Saves went from maybe 20 a post to 60, 70. But here's the part that annoys me: comments went down. People save the messy ones and don't say anything. So I have no idea if it's working, I just know my DMs are fuller and my shop had 14 orders in March vs 4 in the whole autumn. I think what changed is there's no performance in it. Like people can smell the tidy version. But I also can't shake the feeling I just got lucky with the algorithm on one dumb video and now I'm chasing it by deliberately leaving my studio dirty, which is a very strange thing to be strategic about. Anyway if you film your work, do you clean first? I genuinely don't know anymore.

There's this little vessel I made like three months ago. Handbuilt, sort of egg-shaped with a neck that bends too far to the left. I underfired it by accident and the glaze came out this weird milky grey instead of the deep green I wanted. Honestly I hate looking at it. It sits on my shelf and I keep meaning to recycle the clay. But every single person who comes to my stall picks it up. Like, reaches for it before anything else. I sold four others just like it this weekend at the market in El Cabanyal and I don't understand why. One woman said it looked "honest." I don't even know what that means. I'm not complaining exactly, it's paying for more clay. But it messes with my head a little, like maybe what I think is a mistake is actually the thing that works? Or maybe people just like weird egg shapes. I don't know. Anyway if you're reading this and you bought the grey egg thing from me on Sunday, I hope you like it more than I do. genuinely.

ok so nobody warned me about this part of clay work. you make a bunch of little eyes to press into faces later, right, tiny balls with a pinch line for the lid. that's it that's the whole eye. and then you wrap them and they need to stay soft so you put them in the fridge like some kind of serial collector. there's a ziploc bag in there between my roommate's yogurt and the leftover paella with like thirty human eyes in it. he opened it once not knowing. i've never seen a man move that fast. anyway i lost count so now every eye is a little surprise and honestly that's fine. they're all the same pinch but they come out different anyway. like the clay decides. today i found one that looks properly scared and i'm keeping him for a mug handle.

opened the bisque firing this morning and there's this little jar I threw last week, nothing special, just practicing a taller cylinder, and somehow during the drying a face appeared in the cracks. like two eye-holes where the clay pulled apart and a mouth line. I didn't carve it. it just happened. now I can't unsee it. it's sitting on my shelf staring at me while I eat my toast. my grandmother would call it a "compañero", like the clay decided to keep me company. thinking I might lean into it for the glaze firing. give it some iron oxide around the eyes. make it properly unsettling. the kiln gives you gifts sometimes, even when you weren't asking for any.

A gallery in Russafa said they'd take three of my pieces. Three! I read the message on the bus and missed my stop like an idiot, walked back the whole way grinning at nothing. That's the news. But the strange part, the reason I'm posting this instead of just telling my grandmother: I said yes, hung up, and then went to the studio and couldn't touch the clay for two days. Just stood there looking at the shelf. Everything I have left is either sold or cracked. I have six weeks and a kiln that has betrayed me before and will again, I know this, and instead of starting I cleaned the whole studio top to bottom like my mother. Which tells you exactly how scared I am. My grandmother asked why I wasn't happy and I said I am, I'm terrified, and she said "good, that's the correct amount." Vale. So there are two new ones on the board now, a figure with the face half sunk into the shoulder and a tall vessel I keep turning so the warp faces the wall. Six weeks. I'll write here when the first one comes out, or when it explodes, whichever.

Market yesterday, this woman comes over and starts pressing her thumb into every single vessel. Every. One. I counted the marks on three of them after she left. Not firm clay, they were fired pieces, so it didn't do damage, but the psychic damage was real. She looks at me and says "just making sure they're solid, you know how these things crack." Then buys nothing. Tells me she'll "come back with her friend who actually collects." I don't know why that one got to me so much. I've had people shake my pieces like they're testing avocados. Fingernails on the glaze. One guy licked a bowl once, which was weird but honestly less insulting. But the systematic poking, like I was selling her a suspicious melon, that really stayed with me all afternoon. At least she didn't say her nephew could do it. Silver linings, vale.

ok so against my better judgment I started filming the studio work. vertical, phone balanced on a bucket of grogged stoneware, the fancy one. seven videos in and here is what I actually learned. the timelapse of me building a vessel got 400 views. the one where I talk through what I'm doing, 90 views. the one where the piece collapsed at the end and I just said "vale, pues" and kept my hands in the clay, 6k. six thousand. on a collapse. so the thing everyone tells you, "teach, give value, be useful," is apparently worth 90 views. me failing quietly is worth 6k. I don't know what to do with this information. am I supposed to build failure into the schedule now? break things on camera for the algorithm? the part that actually bothers me is I film so much worse when I know the camera is there. my hands get self-conscious, I over-explain, I do the little laugh. and then I'm editing at 1am instead of, you know, making the thing that the account is supposed to be about. anyway I sold two pieces from the collapse video, so. maybe the answer is just keep failing where people can see it.

ok so this was not a design decision. my tabla de amasar, the board I've wedged on since the course, finally split down the middle last month. it was pine, my uncle made it, I'd oiled it maybe twice in three years like an idiot. so it's gone. and I have not replaced it. I've been sitting on the floor of the studio with the clay between my feet and honestly? better. I feel the whole piece through my legs now, I catch a wobble in the wall before it becomes a problem. my back hates me by hour three but the vessels are coming out straighter in the foot and weirder in the belly, which is exactly the trade I wanted. everyone who comes in tells me to go buy a new table. my madre has offered me money for one twice. I keep saying vale, vale. tell me I'm not the only one who's given up furniture for a reason this dumb.

I sent one last month and I'm still recovering. Subject line: "ceramics, Valencia, please look." That's it. I wrote it at 1am with clay still under my nails and hit send before I could think. No answer, obviously. so I'm asking the people who've actually had a yes: what goes in the subject line? do you name the work, put your name, write something that sounds like a person and not a catalogue? I keep swinging between boring and too cute and both feel wrong. and did anyone ever get a reply from a terrible email? tell me there's hope for the 1am ones

Sat at the market in Ruzafa on Sunday with about thirty pieces and the small bowls were 45. Sold eleven of them. Felt like a great day until I did the actual math in the van. Clay, glaze, two firings, my table fee, the hours. Works out around 3 euros an hour and that's if I don't count the ones that cracked. Which I always don't count. Funny how the cracked ones disappear from the spreadsheet. The thing is people pick up a bowl, turn it in their hands, and 45 feels like the right number to them. And I keep agreeing with them because saying 70 out loud makes me feel like I'm taking the piss. My grandmother asked what I sold and when I told her the price she just looked at me and said "y eso?" and went back to her coffee. She's not wrong. I know the answer is raise the price. I've known it for a year. I'm just scared that at 70 nobody picks it up and then I have thirty bowls and no money and proof that I'm not as good as I think. Which is a stupid reason, I know. But there it is. Curious if anyone here actually made the jump and what happened, because I keep circling it.

sold a little lidded pot at the market last Sunday for €60. handbuilt, caña color glaze that came out almost exactly how i wanted which basically never happens. woman who bought it posted a photo on instagram, three people messaged me that night asking for "something similar." i quoted them all €75 and they all said yes. which is great obviously. but i keep doing the math and after clay, glaze, two firings, the hours of throwing and trimming and the one lid that warped and had to redo... that €60 piece was maybe €9 an hour. and the €75 ones are gonna be worse because now i'm self-conscious about repeating myself and I'll probably take longer. the thing is the €60 piece got me three sales. if i'd priced it €90 would it have done the same? i genuinely don't know and that's the part that keeps me up. cheap prices get you seen, but you can't live on exposure unless someone else pays your rent. my grandmother keeps telling me to charge more and she's 84 and has never sold a thing in her life, yet somehow she's right. anyone else ever had a "cheap" piece accidentally do more work for you than your best priced one? or am i just bad at this.

My abuela came over yesterday and was looking at the pieces drying on the shelf. She said, "Mateo, why do they all look so sad?" and pointed at this little vessel I made that has a face melted into the side of it, half-tilted, like it's thinking about a nap. And I said "they're not sad, they're... contemplative." She just laughed at me. "Contemplative. My foot." She's not wrong though. Everything I make leans. Nothing sits straight. Is that melancholy or is it just what clay does when you don't fight it? Kind of a lazy question but I've been turning it over since. I don't think they're sad. I think they're tired. There's a difference. Maybe I'm the one who's tired. Anyway she left with one of them. The saddest one. Said it reminded her of my uncle. Abuelas always keep things weird.