By Cynthia Robertson

Elly Dotseth, owner of Get Centered Clay in La Mesa, takes the mystery out of clay for her students while showing them the beauty of its resilience.

“Making pottery or ceramic art involves more than creativity and skill. It also involves science,” Dotseth said.

To become a truly accomplished ceramic artist, a person requires a basic understanding of chemistry, physics, heat theory, mathematics and geology.

Clay can either be dug straight from the ground, or manufactured following a recipe. The recipes for creating clay are developed by ceramic artists or ceramics engineers through experiments with various earth materials until they obtain the desired result. Getting the right qualities from clay requires a great deal of testing and detailed record keeping in order to create a reliable clay body.

Found naturally in many parts of the world, clay forms when rock decomposes over many thousands of years. The stuff is sticky because the particles are infinitesimal and flat. Water helps the particles slide past each other. That it is why it can be molded or shaped with a potter’s wheel.

“This property of clay is called plasticity. Because the clay sticks together so well, it is very difficult to dig through if you find it under the top soil of your garden,” Dotseth said. “Soil heavy with clay is not great for gardening because the water doesn’t drain through it. Plants don’t grow well in it.”

But that same clay is perfect for forming things with the hands. Making ceramics begins with the hands, kneading the air bubbles from the clay.

The next step in the process of creating ceramic is to heat the clay, which requires a kiln or some other method of getting the clay much hotter than what an ordinary oven can do. Some kilns reach temperatures of nearly 3,000 degrees. To create ceramic art or pottery, the artist must know how hot to fire the clay in the kiln to get it almost to the melting point. In this way, the clay will be very hard, and waterproof.

There are gas kilns, wood-fired kilns, oil kilns, electric kilns and even kilns dug into the ground, each of them having different effect on clays and glazes. Every firing can produce slightly different effects depending upon where the pottery is placed in the kiln and whether the kiln burns fuel or uses electricity to produce heat.

“Hand-made pottery and ceramic art can be affected by so many variables throughout the entire process that once a piece comes out the way the artist intended it to, it sometimes feels like a miracle,” Dotseth said.

After the firing process comes the glazing of the work. Created by ceramic artists and engineers, the glazes are made up of ingredients from the earth.

Glaze is glass that fuses to the clay during firing. Glass is composed of silica and various other elements and oxides combined to melt at specific temperatures and to get specific colors. “Glazes often do not look at all as they will after they have been fired,” Dotseth said.

The specific glaze recipe components must be carefully measured and detailed records of the process must be kept in order to get the same results repeatedly. Again, endless experimenting must be done.

All that experimenting and labor has made the artistic process of making pottery a true pleasure. Many artists make the Get Centered Clay studio their home away from home. Bruce Haggerty, a retired professor of art history, had dabbled in painting and drawing most of his life but decided to give ceramics a try.

“It’s totally Zen, just being in the moment, in the creating experience,” he said. “Every day you learn how to perfect your art.”

Dotseth opened Get Centered Clay in 2008. The name of the studio is a play on words. Throwing pottery on a potter’s wheel involves getting the mass of clay into the center of the wheel. And working with clay can be a very meditative process, which is also to be centered, she explained.

The studio offers membership for potters that includes around-the-clock access to the space and all of the equipment needed — kilns, potter’s wheels, clay extruders, slab rollers and other larger pieces.

Get Centered Clay is located at 8186 Center St. in La Mesa. For more information, go to getcenteredclay.com.

—Write to Cynthia Robertson at [email protected].