UW-Milwaukee Students, Community Members Explore Pottery and the Power of Failure Posted on March 24, 2025March 24, 2025 by William Stauber Soik Tucked away on the ground floor, the Studio Arts & Craft Centre is a corner of the UW-Milwaukee Student Union brimming with creativity. From Monday until Saturday, students and community members come to create, experiment and learn. A “Project of the Week” table welcomes everyone through its doors as people work well into the evening on their artistic vision. From metalworking to printmaking to photography, the Craft Centre supports a broad array of physical art forms. Yet pottery, which has been practiced by humans for thousands of years, continues to thrive. In a series of workshop sessions throughout the spring semester, Ang Van Den Eeden, a senior at UWM and Craft Centre staff member, teaches a small group how to work clay on the pottery wheel. She has been practicing pottery since 2013 and attributes her passion for the craft to her old instructors at the City College of San Francisco. “Pottery is such a great material to work with,” Van Den Eeden said. “It really teaches you about patience and that it’s okay to fail. All these really great life lessons can come from the material.” Van Den Eeden touches up a piece on the wheel. Photo: William Stauber Soik During the two-hour evening sessions, Van Den Eeden shows participants how to form the clay into different shapes. At the second session in early March, for example, she walked them through the process of forming handles for cups and mugs as well as a juicer. The rest of the session was the group’s to work at the wheel. “I feel like I’ve always watched it and thought it looked cool,” said Danielle Callahan, a recent UWM graduate and workshop participant, “but I didn’t know I could do it.” Callahan does not consider herself an artistic person but finds working with clay in particular to be a calming activity that teaches the bigger lessons about life. “It’s the exercise in patience and letting go,” Callahan said, “I feel like patience is tough. I see something in my mind, and I can’t make that, but I can try and figure something else out.” Learning how to be patient can indeed be difficult – especially when dealing with clay. Adding too little water makes the piece rigid and difficult to shape. Adding too much turns it into a thick sludge known as “slip” that hardly keeps a shape. Instructors like Van Den Eeden are essential for aspiring potters to learn patience, both while working the clay and learning the craft from one piece to the next. “I feel like it’s really normal for a lot of people where they just end up hating their pieces,” said Angel Churney, a social work major at UWM who also participated in the workshop. Churney followed along with Van Den Eeden’s juicer demonstration and continued working to get the right shape for the workshop session. After a bit of guidance, she had something that she was satisfied with. The final shape of Chureny’s juicer off the wheel. Photo: William Stauber Soik “The perfectionist in me isn’t super happy about it, but I’m also content that we made it,” Churney said. “I’m just learning to kind of, I don’t want to say love the imperfections, but be more accepting of them.” The participants work their way through the process step-by-step. It all begins on the pottery wheel, where they learn to shape the clay how they would like. The pieces are then left to dry out completely, at which point they are fired in a kiln to harden. After this step, they apply glazes to their piece, giving it life and color. The final step is to then fire the piece once more to seal the glaze and make it more durable. Whether it is on the wheel or after the piece has been glazed and fired, it is always possible for something to go wrong at any stage. The clay could lose its shape on the wheel, for example. The glaze could also flow down the piece, leaving it stuck inside the kiln. Van Den Eeden said that failure is not uncommon in pottery. “The more you learn, the more you learn about what you don’t know,” Van Den Eeden said. Clay, she explained, is a cyclical material. Even a failed project is never truly abandoned. The clay is recycled. It is dried out completely, renewed with moisture, sapped of its air bubbles, and reformed to be used again in another piece. The Craft Centre sells the recycled clay in 12 lb bags for just $5. The aspiring potters of today are learning many of the same lessons that potters have been learning for thousands of years since they used their hands to shape clay. The pottery wheel itself is an invention thousands of years old. The earliest pieces made by hand without a wheel, however, are even older. “You can find pieces of pottery that are like tens of thousands of years old,” Van Den Eeden said, “and I think that’s so crazy. It’s something that was just a piece of mud.” Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)