Subconscious Breadcrumbs: The Art You Make Before You Realize You’re Already Making It
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I started Clay Class in January because I noticed something important at the Desert Art Center: 3‑D artists were selling. Like, really selling. And I thought, “I want in on that action.”
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The first thing they teach you is how to make a coffee mug.
Honestly? Perfect.
A mug is deceptively simple — it’s basically a pu-pu platter of every clay technique you’ll ever need. But once I had a mug, the real question hit me:
What do I make next? And here’s where being an “established artist” becomes a curse. Suddenly I’m thinking about brand consistency. I’m gay, I photograph men, I basically live in the male form — so naturally my first idea was:
Charcuterie platters shaped like men’s chests.
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Yes.
Pectoral platters.
Nipple trays.
A belly‑button for olives.
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I even used my cut‑outs as templates — blew them up to platter size, printed them, traced them onto clay like some kind of queer forensic artist.
They were cute.
They were clever.
They were… maybe a little too niche.
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So I broadened the concept.
Palm Springs!
Pool culture!
Desert leisure!
Pool Bowls for chips.
Hot Tubs for dip.
And then — because the universe loves a plot twist — perfectionism rose from the depths like a vengeful pool float. Who did I think I was? Some YouTube‑trained ceramic savant? A couple of dried‑up, cracked, tragic messes later, I realized:
Clay does not care about your ideas. Clay cares about physics.
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Back to the drawing board I went. I’ve always hated perfectionism. I learned that early, the hard way, by sitting at a piano for hours, drilling scales and replaying Chopin until my fingers went numb and my soul left my body. Painting wasn’t much better. Abstract? Fine. Representational? Straight to stick‑figure hell.
Then photography came along like a gift from the universe. Click. Done.
No endless revisions, no “do it again,” no perfectionist prison. I avoided lighting setups, backdrops, and anything that required precision. Chance and chaos became my best friends. They still are.
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So naturally, I thought: How do I bring that energy into clay? Clay, as it turns out, is the opposite of photography.
It’s slow.
It’s needy.
It cracks if you look at it wrong.
It punishes confidence and mocks ambition. It’s basically a tiny, earthy Bette Davis.
And yet… here I am, trying to figure out how to make a medium built on control behave like a medium built on chaos. Because the truth is, I don’t want perfect bowls or symmetrical mugs or anything that looks like it came out of a pottery textbook. I want the wind‑blown, the warped, the slightly feral. I want the pieces that look like they crawled out of the desert with a story but are too dehydrated to remember that story.
Chance and chaos, my old friends, are harder to find in clay, but they are there.
You just have to stop fighting the material long enough to let them in.
I don’t want to build anything.
I don’t want corners.
I don’t want engineering challenges, structural integrity tests, or anything that requires a YouTube degree in architecture. What I want is simple:
Roll out some clay, throw a texture on it, drape it over something, and TADA! … art.
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So that’s exactly what I did.
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And somehow, miraculously, my clay became fabric. It started behaving like a blanket tossed over a chair and then frozen mid‑gesture. It wasn’t as easy as that sentence makes it sound… but then again, it kind of was.
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What followed was a series of experiments that felt more like conversations with gravity than anything else.
How thick could the clay be before it cracked
How thin before it collapsed
How far could I push it
And how often would it push back. I learned quickly that clay has opinions. Strong ones.
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But once I stopped trying to make it behave and started letting it drape, fold, slump, and settle the way it wanted to, something clicked. The clay stopped being a material and started being a collaborator.
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I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m an observer. My brain hoards details like a dragon hoards treasure, storing them until the exact moment they’re needed. It’s how I’ve made unique photographs, and it’s exactly how these strange, beautiful ceramics are emerging. Roll the clay, drape the clay, watch the clay… repeat. My classmates were mesmerized by the speed and focus, but honestly, when you only get three hours a week to build an empire, you move like a person possessed.
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Once I figured out how to drape clay like fabric, the next question was:
What will people buy? Damn Capitalism. Damn Bills!
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I live in a very small space, so there is not a lot of room for “inventory”, but I do have a lovely garden and a growing obsession with cactus and succulents. So naturally, the first idea was: Planters. Perfect. Useful. Small. And I could test glazes on them without feeling like I was wasting anything.
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Then came platters.
People love platters.
Platters are crowd‑pleasers.
And the textures I create absolutely thrive on a big, flat surface. Plus, I let them be whatever shape they want to be, no perfect circles, no perfect squares, nothing that looks like it came from a factory. Just organic, desert‑logic geometry.
Then I made a vase. Well… a “vase.” Let’s be honest: my vases are much closer to sculpture than anything your grandmother would put flowers in. They’re creatures. They’re landforms. They’re architectural moods.
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And suddenly, without meaning to, I had become a potter.
Cue the trombone. wah-wah.
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A capitalist sell‑out.
A production machine.
A man chained to the kiln, making yet another platter… again.
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I’m being slightly facetious. To know me is to love me. I have attained none of these attributes yet ,  but my brain is already projecting six years into the future, imagining myself buried under a mountain of planters and platters, wondering where it all went wrong.
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But then I went to a high‑brow art talk from a locally famous artist that shows in museums. Oooh Ahhh!
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And something churned inside me. A question I wasn’t ready for, but AI was:
How does my work become museum‑quality?
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Mind you, I made my first mug three months ago. It took four weeks to make.
I’m still basically a toddler with clay under my fingernails. But that’s where my brain went.
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So I talked with my AI (hi), and we came up with a plan: I’ll keep making the planters, platters, and vases, because someone has to pay the bills, but with every set, I’ll also make a relic. Something without function. Or something that used to have a function. Something that feels like it was dug up, not made.
Something that belongs to a mythology I didn’t realize I was building.
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And that’s where the story really starts to shift.
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The relic wasn’t even my idea. It was AI’s, along with thirty other suggestions. But that one word hit me like a tuning fork. I asked it if “relic” was the right term, and AI hesitated, saying it might be too religious for me.
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Too religious? Does it not know me? Please.
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A chance to treat religion like an ancient artifact from a long‑gone civilization?
A ceremonial object from a culture that may or may not have existed?
A sacred thing whose meaning has eroded into mystery?
I am absolutely IN.
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And then I realized something wild: I had already made one. A week earlier, I’d created this snakeskin‑textured object that was supposed to be a candle holder — something vaguely menorah‑adjacent but non‑committal enough to avoid theological debates. It had legs. It had purpose. It had a job.
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And then the legs fell off. Any sensible potter would have fixed it.
I didn’t.
I glazed it.
I finished it.
I left the broken spots exactly as they were.
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At the time, I thought I was being lazy, or rebellious, or maybe just amused by the absurdity of it. But now I see it clearly: I had already made the thing I was only just now deciding to make. My subconscious was way ahead of me, sending messages through cracked clay and broken legs. It knew where I was going long before I did. This has happened before. And I’ve written about it. Go figure.
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Dear Diary,
I didn’t set out to become a potter.
I didn’t set out to make relics.
I didn’t set out to follow the subconscious breadcrumbs scattered across my studio floor.
But here I am — following them anyway.
And honestly?
It feels like the beginning of something… or is that my stomach?
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Terry Hastings work can be seen at TheHastingsGallery.com/ceramics
