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Stories from the =a Pile By Melany Hallam

Potters are fearless. And by fearless
I don’t necessarily mean brave. The
definition here is something closer
to blissful ignorance. If you have any
desire to work as a potter, I invite
you to read on and then forget what
you've read as quickly as possible.

Some years ago my significant other
and I started taking beginner pottery
lessons at our local community centre
in Vancouver. Getting past the pinch
pot stage, we managed to centre and make a few pots.
Mugs that we could drink coffee out of (“the pinkie-sized
handle is fine, sweetie, Pl just hold it with two hands”)
and funky vases for those occasional bunches of flowers
purchased from the convenience store around the corner.
We dipped our pots in glazes that
someone else had kindly made for
us and were amazed at “our” results
as they were unloaded from the kiln
that someone else had carefully fired.

We congratulated ourselves on
our creativity.

Sometime later we realized that
we wanted more space than we could

“What
could

possibly

afford in the big city. We wanted ZO SO
a house and we wanted our own
studio. We were making too many wrong... Q”

pots to fit easily into our kitchen
cupboards our one-bedroom
apartment. I had finally been
admitted into the community centre pottery club—a
huge accomplishment that involved putting my name on
a list and waiting. A long time. But, man, we were potters!

Obviously, the next logical step was to organize our
own studio and build an enormous Minnesota Flat
Top kiln using a book and some mail order plans. We
had never mixed a glaze, fired a kiln or owned a piece
of equipment larger than a bamboo trimming tool. But
we told ourselves we were smart people, and resourceful.
What could possibly go so wrong that we couldn't fix it?
Look, we said, at the failed mugs that we'd turned into
cat food dishes and the bowls weighing as much as boat
anchors that we saved by copious trimming. Ah, yes,
definite cranial agility was at work here.

A few months after making the decision to leave the
city, a newspaper help-wanted ad took us to a small
town on the Sunshine Coast. A flurry of quitting jobs
and packing boxes of what helpful friends complained
were “every *!#@*!# empty yogurt container you've ever
owned” (we were convinced that we needed them for our

in

POTTERS B&W studio,) and we were moving to a town we knew

COLUMBIA

practically nothing about. In fact, I
had never set foot in the place before
jumping out of our U-Haul and
exclaiming blissfully, “I can’t believe
we live here!”

Well, I could go on and describe in
excruciating detail the painful process
of constructing an outbuilding and a
kiln with absolutely no experience—
really no clue whatsoever. But you
know what? I think many of you know
exactly what we went through. Because you're potters.

A couple of years later we had produced enough pots
to fill our roughly 25 cubic feet of kiln space and got it to
the point of being ready to fire, which we subsequently
went ahead and did—once. Results were mixed but not
entirely disastrous. We sold a few pieces at a local craft sale
and declared the income on our tax returns. I promised
a full set of temmoku dishes to a close friend living in
Japan—five of everything, since four is bad luck. We were
now professionals.

We immediately moved on to designing and building a
timber frame house on our five-acre property.

It’s now seven years later and we're living in the house
we built. The hardwood floor is sitting in a pile in our
library, we have no heat on the second floor and the
entrance to our house is a temporary ramp of questionable
integrity which has been there since 2005 when the frame
was raised. We are comfortable.

In the meantime, I’ve creatively managed to leave my
job for most of a year allowing me to get back to the
original plan of making pots.

Yes, Lam fearless still. My friend, you should be getting your
temmoku dishes any day now.

Melany Hallam és the new editor of
the Potters Guild of BC Newsletter. She
is a wannabe full-time potter with a
journalism degree, currently on sabbat-
ical from her “real” job as a continuing
education administrator. She resides
with her significant other, Derek, and
their two cats in Powell River, BC.

Stories from the Shard Pile és a new monthly column on
what it is to be a potter, random thoughts or philosophies,
comments on the ceramic artists process, or those “happy
accidents’ —basically, any ideas that every person who works
with clay might identify with. The hope is that it will be
written by a different person each month so if you have an
idea to submit please contact the Editor at:
editor@bcpotters.com mi 604.487.1597

C-53 Nassichuk Rd., RR#3, Powell River, BC V8A 5C1

Potters Guild of BC Newsletter -

March 2008 12