The Great Pottery Throwdown Rides Again !

What fun. It's a BBC program from 2015 and 2017, available now in bits and pieces as people put it up in various places on the web. Just Google The Great Pottery Throwdown. I've recently discovered several more episodes listed as series three, which they are not.

It's a competition, exactly on the model of The Great British Baking Show, for making pots. They find competent amateur potters who are also expressive and articulate, fun to follow. They require an astonishing variety of products and techniques, far wider than I've ever considered making (a handbuilt toilet?). The video is well done, so I/you can learn from watching the work. The judges are serious and demanding.

I do object to the constant time limits. Necessary for a TV show, perhaps, and part of making pottery. But almost all the pots would be better with more time for work. There's no attention to production skills (speed for a purpose, efficiency, saving materials), so why the scramble, the panic, the unfinished work? It does make the whole thing seem very artificial.

Also I find I am constantly resisting the whole idea of competition in making what might be art. Each assignment is not only judged for quality, but also rated, so someone wins. And in each episode, one potter is eliminated, as worst in the week's assignments.

But fun. And broadening, and sometimes inspiring. I've loved trying the assignment to make a cylinder and a bowl blindfolded. I find I do work on the wheel largely by feel.

Have a look.

"You're Creative. Figure it Out."

"Reach inside of yourself for guidance. Don't ask the larger culture if it's okay. They can't answer that question. Only you can. "

That's Lisa Naples, in a short interview in the May Ceramics Monthly. I love her attitude. Here's some more, from that interview, from her website, lisanaples.com , and from an interview with her in the podcast, The Potters Cast. thepotterscast.com.

"If you need a part-time job to makes the ends meet, brilliant. If you don't, brilliant. Neither is better. Just deal with reality. Believing that things are "supposed to be" a certain way is an argument with reality." "I worked in a closet in an apartment for one year."

Absolutely. How we tie ourselves up in unnecessary knots.

She says "figure it out", but I think her working process is much more open, less figuring than attending.

"There has always been a persistent honoring of the flow of creativity; a deep knowing within that I'm facilitating that flow, that I'm in service to it. "

Yeah. People who play music know we play in service to the music. If I play Beethoven's music, I'm in service to him; how marvelous. In creative arts, we don't have a personal name for the source we follow, but it's there.

""I don't make art by entering my studio "knowing", rather with a disciplined commitment to "not knowing." "And creativity, in my experience is as tangible as gravity: always there, present, available for engagement. The gatekeeper for communion with it is stillness and then a willingness to play, process, and practice. Invite yourself to stillness as part of your studio life and wait for what arises. " And then do: "show up...a daily practice".

She says the newest pieces of a 3-month making cycle tend to sell first. She thinks they are the most live. They are made when there is enough to sell, so no pressure, when she is well warmed up in the making, and they come as something that's been incubating for awhile.

Here is a potter who has been working for 40 years, so aware of her process of work, and so articulate about it. Inspiring.

And I find what she says here articulates my next challenge. Over the past several years I have been trying to live more intuitively, following the example of several friends with powerful intuition and amazing experiences. I think I am doing so generally. But am I attending to what arises in making pots? Back to the wheel to try.