This is something I finished after my former bandmate, S-kun, asked me to "make him an ashtray."
I’ve never had any formal training on a potter's wheel; I just made it by trial and error, relying on my intuition.
Watching professional artists and our own potters work, it looks like they’re truly having fun, as if the clay is transforming all on its own.
But when I actually tried it myself, the clay fought back and I had a miserable time of it.
I say "fought back," but in reality, I lost completely.
The lump of clay just spun around and around without ever rising upward.
Well, I managed to fire what I had eventually managed to throw, but just as I was thinking about handing it over to S-kun, I was stunned by a documentary I saw featuring a Matagi hunter.
"We must never let the life of a bear we have killed go to waste. It is a blessing from the mountain gods."
I felt so pathetic that I still haven't been able to hand over this "thing" I fired.
I keenly felt the message in the Matagi’s words: that countless lives are discarded and precious resources are destroyed in the corners of our consumer society.
I regret that I made and fired this without any real thought, not even knowing what I wanted to achieve with this clay, which is why I am writing about it on my blog today.
There is a line in a manga I love that says, "Conviction without righteousness is nothing," and I think that perhaps "pottery without heart is nothing."
Since it has already been fired, it can no longer return to clay, but I have realized that from now on, I must put my heart into creating things that bring people joy.
I ended up getting a bit melancholy, but I hope you all have a lot of fun when you create, and that you make things that become lasting memories.
Interacting with clay really makes you think about a lot of things.
Perhaps that is what I meant when I said at the beginning that it "looks truly fun."