The kiln took fourteen hours to come up to temperature, which is an act of patience I had to re-learn after a decade on film sets. On a film set, things wait for you. At the kiln, you wait for the clay.
There is a particular quality to the silence inside a Jaipur courtyard at four in the morning, when the kiln is roaring and the rest of the house is asleep. The fire makes a sound like a soft river. The air smells of warm brick and a little of gas. You sit on the step and you wait, and what you are really doing is forgetting that you have anything else to do.
"Acting taught me to wait for someone else to be ready. Clay taught me to wait for nobody at all."
I started throwing seven years ago, in a small studio in Echo Park, with a teacher who told me that the wheel would tell me when I was anxious. He was right. The first month, every pot collapsed. The second month, most of them collapsed. By the sixth month I was making things that were ugly but stood up.
The piece I am working on this week is a tall vase — eighteen inches, narrow neck, slight asymmetry at the shoulder. I have thrown it three times and it has collapsed three times. Tomorrow I will throw it again.
There is a thing I have started saying to myself, on the courtyard step, while the kiln roars: this also is the work. The waiting is the work. The collapsing is the work. The being-here-at-four-in-the-morning, with no audience and no script, is the work.
I think I will keep saying it.
— A.K., Jaipur, April 2026