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I’m 51. I realize I don’t have forever to live. I want my fifties to be a culmination of my work in the past. I started my ceramics career as a high school teacher at a private boarding school. That’s where I learned to teach a person and not a curriculum - a skill I’m grateful to have. After 6 years there, I decided to focus on my own work. I did shows and exhibits in galleries. I had a studio in Marvel where I had plenty of space, and I could work alone. I spent my late thirties and forties diving into meditation, teaching, and cultivating YUNOMI Pottery Studio.
I’m hoping to spend the next ten years of my life building on the foundations of my past work and pouring energy back into the visions of my art. I’m very excited.
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It takes a good healthy ego (not to be confused with a big ego) to be able to try something hard and fail. Healthy ego is a good thing in psychology because it can tolerate discomfort. In the beginning, throwing practice involves many failed attempts. That’s the only way we learn. We must learn how to fail without making it a statement of who we are. Everyone fails. Failure is not only OK, it's necessary. Children do this well. Adults, not so much. The potential for improvement remains locked up when we’re hanging on to pots for dear life and trying not to fail. Learning to master new skills, our heads and bodies slowly coordinate and come together. It’s like learning to play an instrument or swing a bat. It's not easy, and takes passion. People who get good at it are the ones who are willing to fail.
The Spring Classes are finishing up. I'm looking forward to having the time to make my own work and putting my online store together on this website in June. One of my Members, Sarah Roehlk, helped me to make a video on trimming yesterday. It's been a long time in coming! It's on my YouTube channel under Chyako Hashimoto along with other beginning throwing videos I posted earlier. I make these videos to help students integrate what they learn in class, so check them out!
It’s Friday, late afternoon: It’s quiet in the Smiley Building, and I love that feeling. A full year has passed since the beginning of the pandemic, and we’re coming back to some normalcy with the help of the vaccines. Classes started a couple of weeks ago. I’ve revised the website and will add an online shop. The last full year, we’ve managed just with the Members coming into the studio one at a time. I also had a serious knee injury last summer and was down for many months. It wasn’t a bad year to be injured since not much was happening anyway, but it still has been a long journey of recovery. I managed to keep the firings going with the help of the Members - looking back, it was a great excuse for seeing them.
Now it’s the blossom time again in Durango, and surprisingly, I feel a sense of renewal. I’m not going anywhere for a while: I’m not anxious to get out. There is so much to do here, and I’m excited to begin again. My first pottery teacher, David Hunt, used to come into his ceramics classes in college and give an inspirational talk that related to an assignment. We didn’t really know when it was coming, so we were always surprised and excited when he sat us down for his talks. After he finished, he would then simply go back to his office giving his students the space to work on their own. We were fired up, though we didn’t get much technical information. We learned to figure it out and think about how to execute our vision on our own. In workshops in this country are often taught in the opposite way. They are a chain of demonstrations of how to do things. Both are inspiring, but in different ways. Both are good and needed, but what David did was something rare and true to the spirit of an artist. David Hunt wasn’t a “how to” teacher, but he inspired his students deeply through stories and who he was. Those who sort to get techniques, went out their own to get what they needed, just like how they figured out how to do their assignments. Out of his classes, nationally known potters emerged, and numerous professional potters and teachers. He taught human beings and the heart and soul of pottery making. That lit in many, a fire that’s inextinguishable for the rest of their lives.
Yesterday, someone asked in class, “How can I bring up the wall (of a pot) without collapsing it?” I’d already explained. So how will we learn? We have to jump in and make an attempt. We have to be willing to make mistakes. Magically, we learn in time the mechanism of “how to bring up the wall”. She made an attempt. She jumped in. The pot collapsed. Now she has an experience to build on.
Sometimes I think being an artist is about having the time to dink around in a focused way without needing things to be in a certain way. Perfectionism kills this process. Goals, time limits, and high expectations do, too. One needs to be able to wander following the hunch that comes from deep within. Have you ever felt like time disappeared and you didn’t think about anything else but what you were doing? That is a sign of being in a creative space.
It might seem to others that potters are just making plates and bowls over and over, but that is not so. Every pot is different to us. It takes repetition to sort out a form. In wheel throwing, our bodies have to learn how to work with the force of the spinning wheel. For the same reason athletes practice the same movements over and over, and musicians the same notes, there is mastery that can only be acquired by repetition. It’s a beautiful practice and even a life time seems too short.
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AuthorChyako Hashimoto Archives
February 2022
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