Pottery

With pottery you can indeed approach it from a project based approach, which a lot of us (including myself) do in most cases. However, a clay artist may find that they aren’t improving very quickly or becoming as fluent as they would like to be. With throwing pottery, developing the muscle memory is important and this can only come by doing LOTS of throwing.

This is where such a challenge shines.

Another blocker for myself and I assume many other potters is the tendency to be perfectionist and trying to complete every pot you throw. This will just slow you down and often can become a mental blocker to getting started if you are finding yourself discouraged because your pieces aren’t turning out how you want them to turn out.

It can feel like you aren’t improving anymore and you’ve hit a wall. I think this comes from trying to "play it safe" due to trying to always create finished products so you leave things thicker and chunkier than you could make them because if you push the boundaries you risk the pot collapsing.

By making a determination that all the pots you make for this challenge WILL be destroyed, you free yourself from that mental block. It’s the “get the failures out early” approach and reduces the fear of failure since you know it’s destined for reclaim anyway. You can begin to experiment with trying to take your pieces higher or thinner without caring too much if the piece gets destroyed in the process.

Doing this exercise is about doing a targeted level up of your throwing skill. Cutting them in half and analyzing your weak points to do better on in the next cylinder is the most efficient way to improve.

It also doesn’t prevent you from doing your other pottery projects should you decide to do them. This particular challenge has no rules on pacing. Take a month, or a year if you want. Do things in between. Just complete it.

I would recommend against making 200 pots with the determination to offload them on some community or other. After being fired, the pots you make can never become throwable clay again. And you’d be essentially trying to offload your poorly made practice pots on someone else who generally doesn’t need them. Not to mention that would require 400-500lbs of clay and firing fees which would get prohibitively expensive.

The goal of this is to never have to “think" about making a cylinder again. Your body will just know how to do it, quickly, fluently, and to a high degree of quality.