Mindful Pottery
Plus some creative homework!
Dear you,
This is my first blog post and I seem to find it a little easier writing it much like a letter to you all, plus I find it comes across a bit more personal than just generic blog content. Anyway, I hope you’re all well. I know the last few years have been rather stressful to say the least with the effect of the Pandemic and lockdowns but I hope things are starting to settle down for you now.
I’m super grateful you’re taking the time to read this by the way. It means a lot that you’re interested to know more than just the pottery I produce, because pottery for me is far more than just making pretty mugs or vases, it’s the entire process involved. I’m by no means a professional ceramicist, I’ve been doing this in what spare time I had as a hobby for a few years now, but the actual process of creating and making pottery has had such a positive impact on my mental health I thought I would look into this further.
I’ve struggled with my own mental health for a long time. Within the same 12 months of my mum being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s & Vascular dementia my daughter Daisy was born and it massively effected me. I had horrendous Post Natal Depression & Anxiety and really found it difficult to cope. I had hardly been in the studio during that year let alone made anything that I was proud of, mainly for fear of not being able to make anything at all as I felt like i’d lost my creative buzz.
Tools for mindfulness
This cropped up in conversation with my GP at one of my check up appointments and he highly recommended I went back in the studio. It didn’t matter if I produced a finished piece or not, but he’d read about how the Arts and being creative can help improve mental health and so that was it, it was like that was my ‘homework’, to make sure that I got back in the studio and just had some creative time.
From then on I made more time to visit the studio. I’d do a bit of painting, take my sketchbook for a walk, and began to work with clay again. But there is definitely something about working with your hands with clay that is extremely calming for the mind. The wheel turning would focus my mind on the clay forming and I would feel rooted and settled.
I’d heard a lot about Art Therapy, and just typing in ‘mental health and art’ into Google provides endless links to courses, medical research and interesting case studies, but I wanted to look further into the effects of pottery in particular and see if this healing power had similar effects with other people. I found I wasn’t alone.
One particular article that I found very interesting was on artsy.net, aptly named ‘Creating Ceramics Can Help Combat Depression’ where Hong Kong-based art psychotherapist Joshua K.M. Nan devised a study to measure the effects of clay art therapy or CAT. The article goes on to explain how through CAT, participants of his studies were able to “transform negative emotions (such as despair or despondency) into positive ones (like hope, surprise, satisfaction, and joy)” and believes what sets CAT apart from other art therapies is “clay’s distinctive malleability and the physical exertion it requires.”
Taking up pottery or even just a short course can have really positive effects both mentally and physically. Throughout the Covid pandemic we have been advised to prioritize our health, from being allowed to go for a walk or exercise to practicing mindfulness, in order to combat stress and the negative effects of lockdowns. Pottery isn’t usually the first thing that springs to mind when discussing mindfulness or stress reduction but the nature of working with clay and the calming, stress-relieving benefits that come from it is really beneficial.
Lastly there’s the glazing. There are moments, especially when loading the kiln for a glaze firing, that you do start to become anxious, but it’s diluted by the excitement and thrill of opening the kiln afterwards and seeing the end results. My glaze combinations are inspired by my mindfulness walks with my sketchbooks, playing with the colours and forms of the landscape around me, which in turn also helps improve my mental health.
I highly recommend getting creative as a means to improve your mental health, whether that’s trying a pottery workshop or exploring a new craft. In fact, i’m going to give you your own arty-mindfulness ‘homework’ to do!
Get outside, whether a walk to your local park or even just to the bottom of your garden, take something to draw on like a sketchbook, notepad or scrap of paper, and something to make a mark with like a pencil or charcoal. You can sit on a bench or stand, up to you, but close your eyes. As you listen to the world around you, make a mark on the paper for each sound. It could be a series of dots for a bird call, or a long swooping line for a car going by. Use all the space on the paper. Take as long as you like but I tend to do this for a minute or two. When you open your eyes take a look and examine how you’ve interpreted each sound. To anyone else it will look like a page of scribbles, but to you that’s your mind focusing on interpreting a sound into a mark, on emptying your mind of what’s burdening you even just for a couple of minutes. I’ve added a few of mine below.
I find this is a great quick exercise when i’m on a sketchbook walk to get me into the creative zone, and from then i’ll expand out to mixing different mediums and moving on to interpreting the landscape or a subject into shape and forms for pots, or colours and textures for glazes, but this technique is a brilliant starting point for many creative mediums.
So go and have fun and get creative! I’d love to see what soundscapes you’ve created too, so post them here or send me a photo on Instagram.
Until next time,
Loads of love,
Hannah
xxx
