Ten Mugs

The last few months of 2025 took a lot out of me. A large restaurant commission, a demanding full-time job, and other personal pressures left little room for anything else. After the commission, I needed a break. I stopped creating. January passed mostly between work and seeing friends. I traveled to India in February. In March, I walked into the studio but had no enthusiasm for it and left the studio untouched. I had completely stepped away from ceramics.

One gloomy Sunday in April, I wanted to see what it felt like, if I still remembered how. I had some clay left over from the restaurant order. I wedged ten lumps, 300 grams each, dusted off my wheel, filled the water bowl, and laid out the tools I normally use: a wire cutter, a silicone rib, a sponge, a needle tool.

I placed the first ball on the wheel and started to center. My hands took over without much thought. They pulled the clay up and down until I felt the body center. I still didn't know what I was going to make. When I opened the walls and started pulling, something familiar came back to me and I knew I wanted mugs, the first forms I made when I started. I lost track of time. Two hours later, I had ten mugs, all different shapes and sizes.

A day later, once they had dried to leather-hard, I trimmed the bottoms and attached handles. I wanted something to tie them together despite their differences, so I used a trimming tool to carve a band of detail around each one. They looked like they belonged together. As the pieces progressed, my enthusiasm started building and more ideas followed.

They went into a glaze firing before being bisque fired, with no glaze on them. I was disheartened. I hadn't taken enough care. I detached again. The mugs sat on my shelf untouched for another two months.

Later in June, I found myself with more time than usual. The mugs stared at me every day, and I finally decided to try and fix them. I glazed them, following an unusual process recommended for such pieces, and put them back in the kiln. The outcome was more than what I had hoped but not what I had desired. The glaze looked a little darker than it should have been. All I could see were the flaws.

I sat with that for a while. Instead of going back to the wheel, I decided to build a website — a small way to start again. But as I worked on it and photographed these mugs, I started to see the perceived imperfections differently. The glaze had settled. The forms were solid. They were fully functional. That was enough.