For anyone, their tools, and abilities – both mental and physical – can be seen as their lifelines to creating.
Like a painter needs a brush and a builder needs his strength, each tool or ability carries its own weight when creating something expressive and meaningful.
Take one away, and a creator may need to adapt and evolve their art or creative process to fill in that gap.
I sustained an injury to the chest, in part from overworking on the pottery wheel but also from not stretching enough. As many of us know, there can sometimes be a price to pay if you do not take care of your tools and yourself.
When I was confronted with the question of what I am going to do now if I cannot even wedge a piece of clay, lift a pot…let alone make one? My mind went into a dark space for quite a long time.
Countless days were spent in front of my computer trying to figure out a way to practice my craft without putting my body under even more stress. After weeks of pouring over articles, I was just about to give up when a link for 3D printing caught my eye – I clicked and I felt an inner smile start to form.
3D Clay Printing… it was right there in front of me all this time, and I had somehow overlooked it. When I first started working with clay, I was of the belief that handmade pottery works were something to cherish and that anything made by a machine was purely for mass production and required little skill by the maker and allowed little space for expression.
Over time my opinions changed, and I realised that technology is not your enemy, but rather just another tool in a creator’s toolbox. After all – a photographer uses Photoshop to enhance their photos, so why could I not use that same mindset for pottery?
Like many art forms pottery has also evolved. The mechanical pottery wheel was also met with scepticism in the beginning, but now it is a universal pottery tool used to create beautiful works of art in studios around the world. Why then can 3D clay printing not also be considered an art form?
The realisation soon dawned on me that to understand this new way of creating my art meant that I would have to dive deeper into unknown waters. I would have to start working with 3D software and understand how to design and sculpt a 3D model on a computer. This alone sent me into a flat spin panic.
I did not consider myself to be tech savvy at all, how on earth would I ever be able to do that? However, I had the time as I was unable to create pottery, so why not just give it a try?
As hesitant of my capabilities as I was, I worked my way through a few courses on 3D design and modelling, and I started to see the light at the end of a dark tunnel.
Starting out it was not altogether difficult, but rather it was confusing for me to learn how to use the 3D software as most of the tutorials were focused on mechanical and product design.
I pushed through and the self-doubt had started to trickle away as I started to find my stride with the 3D software. I knew that I had finally found my way out of that dark place.