I learned to throw on a kickwheel. Not because I was learning before there was electricity – it feels that way sometimes, though. No, I was just always late to class, and the only potter’s wheel left was a dusty old kick wheel. Like most students, I preferred the electric wheels. They seemed familiar, like a power tool or something in my dad’s garage. The kick wheel felt like an artifact from another era; it was heavy, slow, and (at a glance) seemed archaic. In the fall semester of 1996, I was hooked on clay and exerted all my full-blown greenhorn enthusiasm on that kick wheel. I made genuinely awful crimes-against-humanity pots and loved every minute of it. The following semester, my schedule changed, and I started to arrive early to get an electric wheel. For the rest of my undergraduate education, I used electric wheels and didn’t look back to the trusty kick wheel from my freshman year. "Good riddance," I thought.
Years passed, I graduated, and I was working as a production potter when a friend from college asked if I wanted his old 1970s Randall wheel. I was wood-firing my work at the time and thought it would fit the whole vibe. I wasn’t wrong, but the only reason I fired with wood was because I hated glazing. (Sidenote: I disliked glazing so much, I would split many cords of wood and stoke a kiln for days just to avoid glazing my pots. I still don’t love glazing, but have found other less cruel and self-disparaging ways to get around that. That’s another story.) I traded him one of my pots for the kick wheel and set it up in my studio. It was a nostalgia-driven trade. I’m a romantic hoarder at heart, and I just wanted the old wheel I had occasionally used in college. At that point, it had been years since I threw on a kickwheel. The first time I kicked it into motion, it was like realizing it was Friday when you thought it was Thursday. Just awesome. Production is concerned with reaching the end in as few steps as possible. It is a noble tradition that I love for other reasons, but I was missing the whole point. The Randall opened my eyes and led me down a path of minimizing and slowing my process.
