My first thought when I read “Clay Sculpting at the Johnson Museum” was that it would probably be a very messy and hands-on kind of event. To be fair, I wasn’t wrong. Once our group all gathered in the workshop of the Johnson Museum, our instructor showed us the “slab building” technique that we would be using–it involved a lot of throwing the clay and molding it with our hands. Although this part of the event was just as messy and hands-on as I had predicted, it actually wasn’t so bad. Molding the clay into the correct shapes for a mug was fun, and I got really into trying to make my clay the perfect shape and length. The clay dried on our hands into a kind of gray powder that was easy to dust off.

It was interesting that despite trying to make one of the simplest things (a plain dish, no handle) I still found it very difficult to make it in a way that satisfied me. It was lopsided by the end and had crude, unfinished edges, and though I love having something useful that I made, I can still acknowledge that it’s pretty ugly. It got me thinking, though, about a study I once heard about. Apparently when one group is told they have one week to make 100 pots, and one group is told they have one week to make 10 pots (but as perfectly as possible), the group told to make 100 pots actually makes better, more perfect pots by the end of the week. It gets at that idea that through experience, you improve and get better, whereas just working for a long time at one thing to make it as perfect as possible will not get you very far. I definitely can see how this is true, since just working at one simple thing for a long time did not improve it much at all.