When someone is thinking about making their own pottery, the first step to take is deciding on which process to try out. You can choose between wheel throwing and hand building as a means of creating with clay. These two techniques are centuries old, and can both be very creative, challenging, and versatile to practice. Knowing which approach is the most suitable for you can help you decide which is the best direction to take when you are starting to explore making.
The first thing I want to explain is about the two methods, and what each one entails.
Wheel throwing can be used to create a wide variety of vessel forms. This technique can be described as the most common form of wheel making, using a potter’s wheel to create a smooth shape with the movement and momentum of the wheel to create bowls, cups, dishes and vases. It takes skill to center your clay in the wheel to be able to pull out the walls of your piece. Wheel throwing allows a great degree of control for making pieces that have a uniform shape, such as round bowls or cylinder cups. This is a skill I believe every person interested in making vessels would benefit from learning, and it is often the first skill you would try to master.
Hand-building is often used to make decorative items such as boxes or vases, or it could be used for sculptural work. Rather than centering clay in the spinning wheel to pull up your walls, with this technique the artist would use methods such as pinching the clay, rolling slabs out, or coiling ropes of clay to build up their pieces. This type of pottery is often very creative, because there is a wider possibility of experimenting and creating shapes other than the classic cylindrical forms that can be made on a wheel. However, one surprising thing about hand-building is that it actually requires a good amount of precision and careful control to do successfully. Though there may be more room for flexibility when creating these pieces, it would still be necessary to carefully watch the walls of your work so that they dry out evenly and fire evenly. This would help to prevent your work from warping or breaking in the kiln.
These two techniques can also be used together to create a single piece. For example, a hand-built work could include wheel-thrown parts and/or a wheel-thrown piece could have hand-built elements. In that way, an artist could get the best of both worlds by choosing whichever process they want for any given part of their work. I believe that every artist should be encouraged to learn about both methods and explore the different possibilities that can come of it.
I hope you enjoyed learning about these two different techniques of pottery. Hopefully, you have gained a better understanding of what to expect if you decide to explore both of them. In that way, you can make a more informed decision about how you want to use clay to create your own work!