One Ball of Clay. Every Form You'll Ever Make.

Most potters think of throwing as a collection of separate skills — bowls over here, cups over there, cylinders somewhere in the middle as a kind of warm-up exercise nobody particularly enjoys. They have it backwards. The cylinder is not the warm-up. It is the whole game. Master the cylinder and you have the skeleton of almost every form that exists on the wheel. What comes after — the pushing out, the pulling in, the shaping — is just a conversation you're having with that foundation. In this video, filmed during a Throwing Essentials Intensive at Il Baciarino in Tuscany, I throw two balls of clay from scratch. The first becomes a textured cup - the texture applied while the clay is still moving on the wheel, still alive. The second, a much larger ball, becomes a wide open bowl. Two very different forms, one underlying logic. Along the way I cover the same fundamentals from the first video in this series (centring with body weight rather than muscle, keeping your back and wrists out of the equation) but more briefly, so you can see how the principles settle into the body when they stop being new. Watch the hands. Watch the whole body. And notice how much of what you see is the same, regardless of what form is taking shape. Part of the What the Clay Teaches playlist — throwing instruction filmed live at Il Baciarino, a ceramics studio and agriturismo in the hills of Tuscany, Italy. New to centring? Start with the first video in this series. 🌐 www.chandrarice.ca 📷 @chandra.rice