There’s one thing nobody really told me before I started pottery: that I was going to love it so much on a physical level.
I mean that in a very concrete way. The feeling of clay in my hands. Cool, moist, squishy but firm, malleable. The way it responds to pressure, holds the trace of your fingers, remembers every gesture. There’s something deeply satisfying in that — something that short-circuits the analytical side of my brain in a way that lets me lose track of time.
I work in tech. My days are made of screens, words, meetings, abstractions. AI wants my job and I’m low-key encouraging it. Pottery is the exact opposite of all that. It’s material, immediate, rooted in the present. When I’m in a studio with clay in front of me, hands in the material, there are no notifications. There’s no backlog. There’s just this piece of clay, and what I’m trying to make of it, and the gap — often considerable — between the two.
That gap, actually, is a big part of what I love.
The process, start to finish
There’s something people who’ve never done pottery have a hard time imagining: how long the process is, and how that length is precisely what gives it its value.
It starts with wedging — you take a block of clay and work it to drive out air bubbles. It’s physical, almost violent at times. You lift, you press, you turn. And there’s this moment, when you’re really in it, where you can slam the block down on the table — genuinely hard — and feel the clay flatten and redistribute under your palm. It’s a pleasure I can’t explain rationally. It relaxes you. It grounds you. It prepares the clay and somehow, in doing so, prepares the mind too.
Then comes the hand building — the actual forming. There are several techniques: pinching, where you hollow out a ball between thumb and fingers to create a wall; coiling, where you roll long ropes of clay and stack them to build up a piece; slab building, where you roll clay into flat sheets that you cut and assemble. Much of the time, you mix all three. You start a form one way and finish it another. You improvise, correct, start again.
Then the clay dries slowly. First it becomes leather-hard — firm to the touch, still slightly cool, easy to carve with tools. This is the stage I like best for working textures: incising lines, pressing in patterns, creating surfaces that glaze will later bring to life. Then it becomes bone dry — white, light, extremely fragile. The stage for sanding with a coarse sponge, smoothing edges, evening out uneven surfaces, preparing the piece for its first life in the kiln.
The bisque firing transforms raw clay into ceramic. Irreversible. The piece no longer quite resembles what it was — it’s become something else, something more permanent. And that’s where glazing begins.
Glazing, to be honest, is where I still have the most to learn. I have very specific ideas in my head — effects I want to create, colours I want to achieve, surface textures I admire in other ceramists’ work. And there’s often a real gap between what I imagine and what comes out of the kiln. Glaze is unpredictable. It runs, it crazes, it changes colour in the firing. It does things I didn’t plan — sometimes beautifully, sometimes not. Mastering that takes time, testing, patience, and a lot of pieces sacrificed to experimentation. I’m working on it.
What I’ve made — and why I’m not yet satisfied
I’ve made quite a few things since I started pottery. Bowls, cups, small sculptures, functional objects, more decorative things. Some pieces have made me genuinely proud. Others less so.
But here’s what I’ve come to realise: I’m not yet satisfied with my work. Not from lack of kindness towards myself, but because I have a fairly clear vision of what I want to make — of the direction I want to go — and I’m not there yet. Not technically, not in terms of glaze mastery, not in terms of consistency between what I imagine and what I produce.
And I find that dissatisfaction precious. It doesn’t discourage me — it makes me want to keep going. To try different types of clay. To explore sculpture, small figurines, forms that serve no purpose except to be beautiful. To better understand how oxides behave in the kiln. To learn about ceramics as art therapy. There are still so many things I don’t know how to do, so many directions to explore, and that’s precisely what makes this practice inexhaustible.
I call myself a ceramist. I say that with a certain pride, and also with a very clear awareness that I still have a long road ahead. Those two things don’t contradict each other — on the contrary, it’s exactly the tension between them that makes me want to keep going.
Why hand building, specifically
There’s a question people sometimes ask me: why not the wheel? The potter’s wheel is the iconic image of ceramics — Ghost, hands in the rising clay, the form emerging from centrifugal movement.
I’m not saying I’ll never throw on a wheel. I will someday. But for now, hand building is what suits me. Because it allows you to make things in an intuitive way — asymmetric forms, textures, sculptures, objects that visibly bear the trace of hands. Because it’s accessible without months of prior practice. And because there’s something in the direct contact with the material — without the intermediary of rotation — that feels fundamental to me.
When a piece is hand built, it keeps the memory of the gestures that created it. You can see the fingerprints, the tool marks, the slight irregularities that say: someone made this. Someone took this piece of clay and gave it this shape. That’s what I love in the objects I admire — and what I try, modestly, to do in mine.
What it’s taught me
Pottery has taught me to accept the unpredictable. You can carefully prepare a piece, work on it for hours, and watch it crack during drying or warp in the kiln. It happens. It stings, a little. And then you start again.
It’s taught me to slow down. In a world where everything moves fast, where value is often measured in speed of execution, there’s something almost subversive about an activity that takes weeks from start to finish and cannot be rushed.
And it’s taught me something about myself that I hadn’t quite been able to put into words before: I need to make things with my hands. Not as a hobby, not as stress relief — as a necessity. Something that completes the part of my life that happens in front of a screen. Something concrete, tangible, real.
That’s why I’m building Nice Pottery Club. Not to offer a service. Because I need it — and because I think others do too.