My Thouhght on Ceramics
Patience and Unertainty
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As mentioned in the previous journal, “Change of Practice? Ever-flowing Practice”, with Porcelaina 3.0, my ceramics journey began in 2025.

Ground me, soil god! Ground this digital girl!
I must say, it was a whole different ball game when I first commenced Porcelaina 3.0. Every single thing went wrong at one point or another… I don't know how many times I spilled plaster all over the floor, got the consistency of casting slips wrong, or had a large firing batch come out burst and broken, despite being the result of three months of hard work.

After all, I found there were two things that were so different in ceramics compared to 3D printing: patience and uncertainty.

Slow-making in a fast-moving world: Patience
Patience… waiting and actively taking things slowly have never been my strong suits. One of the reasons why I loved digital work was that you don't really need to wait. When you have powerful enough hardware and software, you can go wild as fast as you want. It's always been a huge thing in the 3D-printing community to make the process faster and faster. Every little trick I learnt was about making things FASTER, never SLOWER. Also, with digital files, you can edit indefinitely.

Can you imagine how much of a shock it was to the system when I started working with ceramics? There is NO SHORTCUT when it comes to drying clay. You simply CANNOT rush the fettling process, or you'll definitely make a silly mistake, and it'll cost you much more than a Ctrl + Z. Most of the time, when something went wrong, I found myself arriving at the same answer: wait longer. Dry slower!!!

How unnatural is this in the age we're living in, where impatience is actively promoted: next-day delivery, "skip intro" at the beginning of shows, instant messaging with read receipts and typing indicators, binge-released TV seasons instead of weekly episodes… Things are delivered into our hands almost immediately whenever we demand them.

In a broader sense, I wonder if this is an attempt by human civilisation to techno-fix our mortality by saving time. But what we forget is that we ourselves aren't digital; we're organic, and therefore we're bound to the time and space of the Earth.

So when I realised that slowing things down was actually following the natural rhythm and tempo of organic materials, I felt like I'd revisited the river to which I belong instead of chasing the waterfall (quoting Waterfalls by TLC, obviously).

Full of surprises: Uncertainty
Another characteristic of ceramics that I found so different from digital processes was uncertainty.

If making something digitally is the modern craft, ceramics is an ancient craft. Humans began making ceramics during the Neolithic period, with the earliest known fired clay objects dating from roughly 24,000–20,000 BCE. Its fundamentals are still heavily tied to natural materials and traditional processes.

In ceramics, there are things we can only control to a certain extent, yet they fundamentally define the work, relying on physical senses and the maker's accumulated experience: the wetness and dryness of clay, the thickness of slip and glaze, the humidity in the room, and so on. What's organic always comes with uncertainty: things that are out of our control. Again, so different from the digital process, where you input something and expect a very precise output.

As an example of uncertainty, the firing process can be a particularly uncertain one. Take air bubbles, for instance: you won't be able to know if there's a hidden air bubble somewhere in your clay (you can't Ctrl + F: bubble). If it's there, it's there unfortunately, and it may eventually explode in the kiln due to the high heat. That means your piece, which you've worked on for however many months, is gone.

But on the other hand, there are "happy accidents" in glazing. Glaze is basically a liquid that turns into a thin, hard glass coating during firing. When it flows across the surface of the work at temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius, gorgeous patterns and spectacles can emerge by chance, through these very same "happy accidents".

Quite often, ceramicists place a wee miniature statue on top of the kiln or nearby, serving as a kiln god. Do your best and praise the kiln god. Believe me, as someone who worked so much in the digital realm, it was a bit of a crazy idea to me that you simply put your hard-worked art into a very hot box and then pray to the kiln god. Where I'm from, that's called a "glitch".

But I like it. In fact, I LOVE this uncertainty.
Isn't it a bit like life? You work so hard towards something, but you never actually know whether it'll work out. It's natural to have some failures here and there, and some great successes here and there. Life isn't Amazon; it doesn't deliver what I want to my door the next day.

Human inventions, such as computers and science in general, seem to act as armour against human anxiety. By taking control of a range of knowledge, we've created a sense of security that may not be entirely real.

I believe we're getting far too used to this little castle of certainty that we've built, while nature—the very environment surrounding us—is full of surprises. Perhaps that's one reason why anxiety is so common in 2026. We're organic, our minds are organic, yet we expect certainty. We're going against our own nature, cutting the tie to our mother (the Earth), ceasing to be her children and instead becoming the fathers of science, following in the footsteps of the Renaissance.

Hail the lord, human logic! How sweet it is to believe we know everything!

Ground me, Mother Earth! I'm home!
Accepting this uncertainty has brought me a sense of peace. Things can go off track, off script, but it is what it is. What matters is that it probably taught me something else to improve on or watch out for.

For me, working with clay, working with ceramics, there's something so right about it. It grounds me. It constantly reminds me that I'm only a part of an ever-changing environment and invisible moving forces over which I have no control.