Reading Response1- The Ceramic Process

My experience with ceramics has been short, but I feel as though I have learned so much about it in this amount of time. I was able to take a ceramics class in high school my senior year with got me hooked on this amazing material-clay. This will be my second semester working with ceramics, and I still have a lot to learn! The reading gives a taste of the vastness of what clay has to offer including is extremely long and significant history, various uses, and observations about the processes of handling clay. The information from this reading provoked me to thing about the aspects of clay that intrigued me the most on my ceramic journey. These aspects are its flexibility, versatility, and the involved process of timing. What I mean by timing is this sort of choreography that happens when you make a ceramic piece. Depending of what you want to do with it, you might need to wait for a piece to dry out a little in order to attach it to another piece so it has stability, or waiting until the piece is the right hardness in order to carve a foot on the bottom of the piece. This choreography can be fluid but my experience with the ceramic process has seemed to be more incremental. From my past experience in this class, I have learned about this choreography, and it has not always been something very easy to pick up. This semester I hope to continue learning the nuances of timing within the ceramic process as well as investigating the versatility and flexibility (or lack of) embodied in clay.