Handbuilt objects can be produced by pinching balls of clay, joining slabs, or creating coils.
The relationship between hands and clay is the basis of the ceramic art form. When you put your hands to clay, the natural inclination to form, shape, and ultimately create something from the fine-grained soil is inescapable. Handbuilt objects can be produced by pinching balls of clay, joining slabs, or creating coils. “Handbuilding, a combination of coil, carving, pounding, and squishing, has taken center stage in the art world,” says Adam Welch, an art lecturer at Princeton University and director of Greenwich House Pottery, the oldest non-profit ceramics studio in the country (since 1909). “It seems most adequate to fight the slickness of conceptual art and most adaptable toward a return to an inner impulse.” And while certain vessels would be easier to achieve using one of these processes over another, Welch notes that “it all depends on style, taste, and one’s tolerance.”