Behind the Studio Door: The Pieces That Don't Sell
Not everything that comes off my wheel is meant to be listed. A good share of it never gets a product page at all — it is practice: a shape I'm testing, a proportion I'm not sure about yet, a glaze combination I want to see with my own eyes before I trust it with anyone else's kitchen.
Those pieces stack up on a shelf near the back of the studio, and most of them stay there. That used to feel like wasted clay. Now I think of it as the actual cost of getting anything right — you have to make the version that doesn't work in order to find the one that does.
The thing I would change, if I were starting again, is where I put them. For years the failures went into a cupboard, out of sight, and I learned almost nothing from them. Now the sample shelf sits at eye level, and the useful part is being able to stand the version that didn't work next to the one that did and see the difference in my hands rather than in my memory. A shelf of near-misses is a reference library. It only works if you can see it.
I don't think that's unique to pottery. Anything worth making well involves a pile of attempts nobody else ever sees. The visible, finished thing is just the top of a much taller stack.
The finished thing is just the top of a much taller stack.
Three things make a first version almost always wrong, and none of them are visible while you are making it. Clay shrinks by roughly a tenth on its way through drying and firing, so a proportion that was only just working on the wheel is a tenth off by the time it comes out of the kiln, and "only just working" becomes "not quite." A glaze on a flat test tile tells you the colour and nothing else — on a curved wall the same glaze runs thin at the top and gathers where the form turns, so it has to be tried on the actual shape. And a kiln is not one temperature: the same glaze on the same piece behaves differently on the top shelf than on the bottom, which is why one good result isn't a result. It has to happen twice, in two places, before I believe it.
I don't have a tidy conclusion for this one, other than: if you're in the middle of a version of something that isn't working yet, that isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It is the ordinary shape of making anything well. It might just be shelf three of an eventual shelf ten — and shelf three is not a lesser thing than shelf ten. It is the only route to it. (Every so often the sample shelf empties out into the annual sample sale instead of staying here forever.)
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A few things mentioned: the sample shelf, the glaze board I test everything against, and the marbled ring cones.
What's something in your own life that took a stack of unseen attempts before it worked? I'd love to hear it.