A New Approach to Faceting Pottery | DICK LEHMAN

I think my interest in alteration and on-wheel alteration and faceting began more than 20 years ago when I was attending the Worcester Functional Ceramics Workshop and Mike Dodd from England was there and he did a kind of faceting that I hadn't seen before. Like you I'm sure we are all familiar with taking a wire and cutting things or taking an old rusty knife and cutting things after the form was in a leather hard state. But Mike did the faceting right on the wheel and I kind of determined at that point that I was going to try that to see if I could figure out a way to make it mine and not just make Mike's pots. So let me show you what Mike did as a way of beginning. So this is about a pound of clay give or take and I'm trying to maintain uniform wall thickness from bottom to top and create a fairly straight line. And I go back in and compress with this flexible metal rib and take some of those throwing rings away. And as I recall Mike gave himself a starting point down here and he used a wire. Now I've gone to using cheese cutters and one of the things I really like about cheese cutters is that you have a maximum depth. That's the distance between the wire and the wood that the handle. But if you bend this you can have ultimate control from nothing to everything and by holding the tool at the same angle to the pot you have a uniform cut. That eliminated my cutting through pots and I always did cut through pots when I used knives or or cut off wires freehand. So this is always leaning against the pot. So the facets go just straight up and right through into the rim. Straighten it up a little bit. Take my thumb and just remove some of the unevenness so that when I open this rim and make the lip that it doesn't tear. Make a little funnel add a little water and let's start as these nice sharp vertical facets begin twisting as the clay always does although I think we tend to forget about it as potters. We're looking down there's no reference point and everything looks like it's just kind of staying in place but it's actually twisting and that's real evident of course when you stop the wheel. This is the kind of kind of piece that that Michael made. He ended up trimming the foot but I will just kind of do a fast forward and tell you that I often give a little elevation to these things by pushing the clay around. Kind of do a test foot and instead of putting trimming lines in when I trim I just do that right now with the fingernail. A nice spiral that leads your eye up and around and also kind of mimics and matches the spiral in the piece itself. I was a production potter for more than 30 years and was training people to work with me and one of the habits I got into back in those days and it's kind of carried over now is to have the pot as close to being finished when it comes off the wheel as possible. So there are as few post throwing steps and so you'll notice that the trimming marks have been made. The undercut hopefully the only real trimming I need to do is a kind of a smoothing with my thumb. So this was the Mike Dodd pot that he made and I thought well that's kind of brilliant but I came back wondering you know how can I make that my own and so I decided to do what I called a double facet and that was to take the time I had just a plain wooden rib. Here's a pot that was thrown a bit earlier today. I usually do a wear board of these pieces probably you know 25 or 30 and by the time I'm finished throwing them I just go back and do the faceting right then. So the clay is quite wet at this stage and you know it kind of makes you cringe the first time you do it but here's a place where the memory that clay has that we often talk about kind of helps us out because while I'm putting this all whopper jawed and out of shape it kind of remembers that it was round and it doesn't take too much to coax it back into a sense of roundness. So this was my first attempt at trying to use Mike Dodd's idea and do some alteration on the wheel.