Three pieces of clay that didn't get finished — and which I've stopped trying to decide about. An egg-shaped vessel that dried before I could close the top. A wavy form built during a moment of creative overexposure. An amphora that found its own form before I found mine.
I call them unfinished sentences because that's what they feel like. Not failed. Not abandoned. Just mid-thought. Fully dried, going nowhere. Occasionally I consider returning one to water. Mostly I just live alongside them.
An attempt to scale up an egg-shaped form I loved making years ago, back when I had a dedicated studio corner and a voracious hunger for clay. We moved. The corner didn't come with us. The piece dried out before I could finish the top half, and I haven't decided yet whether to fire it into permanence or return it to water.
Built in August 2025, when I made the mistake of trying two vulnerable things at once — touching clay again for the first time in years, and posting about it publicly. I was caught between what I felt and what I wanted to be seen feeling. Neither worked. I walked away discouraged. The piece stayed.
Half an hour to find the form, which became the final form. One arm missing. The mouth unresolved. Larger than I intended, smaller than the drawing I've been making of it for years. Incomplete and somehow complete — which might be the most honest thing I've made in a while.
I haven't touched clay since the amphora. But it's always in my mind. The distance between mind and hands has just been longer lately.
There's something about the unfinished pieces that I find I need. Not to finish them — just to have them there. Fully dried, going nowhere. They hold a kind of time that finished work doesn't. The decisions that haven't been made yet. The forms that are still in question.
Photography is a sight thing. Pottery is a hands thing. The two practices are teaching me different things about what it means to make something and leave it alone.
Clay records your state of mind in its form. Tense hands make tense walls. The pot knows when you're rushing.
The wavy piece from August has that quality — the unevenness isn't incompetence, it's documentation. You can see the moment I stopped caring what it looked like and started caring how it felt.
The amphora is different. Something was quieter that evening. The walls are still uneven. But the unevenness feels chosen rather than incidental. I'm not sure I could explain the difference. The piece could.