From Mastery to Aesthetic: What Does It Mean to Call Yourself a Potter?

Open Instagram or TikTok and it won’t take long before the algorithm serves you pottery. A mug pulled perfectly on the wheel in a few seconds. A vase glazed in cotton-candy pastels. A raw, greenware cup painted in cheerful acrylics and placed on a bookshelf as a total vibe. Pottery has become content — glossy, satisfying, bite-sized content — and influencers are absolutely killing it. They’re drawing new eyes to clay, creating trends, and making pottery feel exciting, modern, and accessible.

And yet… for those of us who have spent years in the studio, clay under our nails and glaze test tiles piling up in the corner, these videos spark complicated feelings.

Because pottery, at its core, is slow.

It’s rolling, compressing, drying, shaping, refining, firing, glazing, sanding, waiting — and waiting again. It’s failures that take weeks to discover. It’s cracked bases, warped rims, pinholes in glazes, hours spent testing colours only to land on “not quite right.” It’s invisible labour, the kind that doesn’t compress neatly into seven seconds of scrolling entertainment.

So here’s the tension:

• What happens when an art form defined by patience is consumed in clips shorter than the time it takes to wedge a ball of clay?

• If a mug is painted in acrylic and never touches the heat of a kiln, is it still pottery — or something else entirely?

• If someone attends a class or two, makes joyful, quirky work, and starts selling online, are they a potter? Or does the word carry with it a lineage — a quiet expectation of years spent in dialogue with clay?

• When influencers sell us pottery as a shorthand for “slow living,” but deliver it through sped-up Reels designed to hook our fractured attention, is that a contradiction? Or is it simply pottery adapting to the pace of our time?

• Is the influencer wave diluting the craft — or democratising it? Does it flatten pottery into an aesthetic, or expand it to new audiences who may never have touched clay otherwise?

None of these are easy questions.

And sometimes, the gloss hides the grit.

Take, for example, something I recently saw: a pottery influencer sharing a product called Bisque Fix — a cement-like paste designed to repair small cracks, chips, or imperfections in bisque-fired ceramics. She was demonstrating how it could patch over “s-cracks” at the base of her pots.

Her words stuck with me. She said: “It happens to everyone from time to time — it’s not a skill thing.”

And here’s the truth: she’s partly right. S-cracks do happen to almost everyone from time to time. But — they are also absolutely a skill thing. Any traditionally trained potter (whatever that means) knows that s-cracks often point to a lack of compression at the base, uneven drying or thickness, or water retention. Troubleshooting those cracks takes patience, resilience, time… and yes, skill.

So here’s the harder layer of questioning:

• When a product promises to fix a flaw instantly, does it empower makers — or erase the learning that comes from problem-solving?

• If an influencer frames cracks as “not a skill thing,” does that democratise the process, making beginners feel seen? Or does it quietly undermine the value of technique, as though persistence is optional?

• Do shortcuts strengthen pottery by making it more accessible, or weaken it by papering over the very lessons clay is trying to teach us?

• Because at its essence, clay teaches us through failure. Every crack is information. Every warp is a lesson. Every collapse is an invitation to look closer. When we shortcut that learning, what happens to the craft?

• What I keep circling back to is the invisible part of pottery — the part you don’t see in a Reel. The kiln mishaps. The glaze failures. The hours of practice before a rim sits just right. The slow apprenticeship to earth, water, air, and fire. This isn’t content. It’s process. And process doesn’t always trend.

But here’s the thing: I don’t think one cancels out the other. The influencer potter making rainbow mugs is as much a part of pottery’s story right now as the quiet craftsperson testing the same celadon glaze for the hundredth time. Both exist. Both matter. Both are shaping what the word potter means in 2025.

And maybe that’s the hardest question of all:

Is the definition of “potter” itself evolving — away from mastery, towards accessibility? Away from tradition, towards aesthetic? Or is it possible for the word to hold all of it at once?

I don’t have an answer. Maybe there isn’t one. But I do know that clay has survived thousands of years by being both practical and beautiful, ancient and adaptable. It has held water, carried food, and now — holds space on our shelves and in our feeds.

The question isn’t who’s right or wrong. The question is: what do we want the future of pottery to be?

So tell me — when you hear the word potter, what comes to mind? Mastery? Joy? Content? Shortcuts? All of the above?

Let’s talk about it.

Until next time,
Nawsheen, your friendly homebody artist from Murrumbateman.