Ayumi Horie Workshop Weekend

I went to Peters Valley Craft Center for a 2-day workshop with Ayumi Horie, who is a ceramic artist whose work I like very much. She makes functional stuff, cups, bowls, plates, out of red clay that she covers in white slip (sometimes other colors too) and scratches through to make drawings of animals. The bunnies, monkeys, whales, and birds are charming. Often small spots of bright colored glaze are added.

I've always been drawn to how loose, soft, and unworried her work is, there's sort of a bold imperfection to it. Her pot construction looks a little sloppy, like for example she doesn't erase burrs and crumbs from the surface of the clay, but maybe just pushes them down a little so they won't be sharp, or like how the place where the handle meets a cup has a seam, not trying too hard to smooth it to perfection. When she dips her pots in slip you can tell she didn't fuss with tongs, there are finger marks that show she just held it with her own hand and dunked.

At the same time, I once helped unpack a shipment of her work at The Clay Studio, and it was PERFECTLY well packed, the boxes were filled really nice and tight, careful attention to teapot spouts and handles, and this was the first time I witnessed the brilliant use of narrow film wrap to secure the bubble wrap.

So I really wanted to meet this artist who seems to run a very professional studio and effective website (where she sells most of her work- and it sells out, people), but at the same time, makes work that is playful, loose, and fun. It seems like a great combination to have.

Because clay is fun, and while I know there is a part of me that is very serious, and perfectionist, and gets stressed out, I seem to remember that there was a time when I was a more whimsical and joyful person, and I think part of what I am trying to do with clay is reconnect to that old part of me, before she got beaten down by school, and office jobs, and loss of love, and credit card debt, and lack of health insurance. The good news is these things are no longer active parts of my life right now, but the bad news is I got kind of dried out in the meantime.

Clay is moist. There was a studio tech at Peters Valley, who, every time he opened a new bag of clay for us would breathe it in deeply and say, "Aahhh". The smell is like being on a dewy mountain at dawn.

Ayumi demoed her "dry throwing" technique, where in fact the clay is moist, fresh, and soft, but the idea is to make pots on a wheel without adding water. It's like trimming away and scooping out everything that is not part of the pot, and also some stretching and pushing it out with ribs. She said she originally started doing it in order to deal with tendonitis in her wrists, but also likes it because there are marks you can make this way that you'd be unlikely to achieve through wet throwing. For example, she'll use the edge of a credit card to press a line into the outside of the her clay cylinder; then later when pushing the wall out, that hard line will soften, warp, and open up.


I played around with this technique the first night, it sort of lends itself to making chunky pots, which is fun. (chunky is fun!) But it's a little distressing to have so much "wasted" clay. In her studio Ayumi has an assistant who immediately takes her trims and scoops and wedges it up to use again.

The other parts of the workshop included some exercises and slide/video/lecture. Maybe I would have liked a little more time for exercises. There were these slab tiles that were AROUND the studio all weekend, being moved from shelf to table to shelf again, and dipped in slip, and the techs were HANDLING them and preparing them ALL weekend, and I kept anticipating this exercise we were going to do with all these tiles, and we didn't get to it till the very end of the 2nd day (it was a mark-making exercise). I could have used one less slide show in order to have more hands-on time. I did skip the Peters Valley slide show the first night in order to spend a few hours in the studio to play around and try stuff out. That was good. I don't usually let myself play. Playing around is something I ought to do more if I want to loosen up, soften up, and if am concerned about seeking my own style, or distinct vocabulary, for my work.

The slide lectures were a good way to see a lot of pots made by lots of different potters. It made me consider many adjectives and words I would or wouldn't want people to associate with my work. Or me, for that matter. That's something about making stuff that falls under the category of "art", it ends up being an extension of you, or at least an expression of you. I hear potters say to make "honest pots", I guess because it's going to be the most convincing way.

She also showed us a fascinating movie, Isaac Button, Country Potter, a B&W silent film document of the last potter at one of the last England countryside potteries. He did everything from digging the clay out of the ground, to throwing and glazing all the pots, to shoveling coal (coal!?) into the kiln. I found an excerpt from it on You Tube.



His pot-making responded to the needs of a different lifestyle; the pottery had been there for centuries making ware for the villagers' every day use. It forces you to think about your own work in this context. No one who buys a mug from me "needs" it in the sense that he'd be out of luck for drinking, otherwise. So why do I make, and what other needs shall I fulfill? The industrial design student in me hopes my pots would provide interesting solutions. Must think about this more. More later.