Iris Dorton doesn’t think of herself as a perfectionist, but just about anyone who knows her would say that’s exactly what she is.
A Guelph potter who has approached perfection in her work, Dorton is driven not so much by the act of perfecting, but simply by the act of making something well, and beautifully. If it can’t be beautiful, she says, it shouldn’t be made at all.
In another profession, in another city and another time, Dorton was a nutritionist, a well-paid professional in a hectic line of work. But when, in her early 40s, she started counting down the years until her retirement – and feared she might crash and burn out before that - she decided it was time to find another line of work.
“My dad turns 88 this week,” she said. “He’s an engineer, and he didn’t give up his engineering license until he was 80, and even now he still does engineering work pro bono. He was my inspiration. If I was counting my years to retirement, and my father was still working and loving it, I had to make a change.”
She first got her hands on clay in a community centre pottery class for beginners on the west coast. She had quit her job and was on an adventure. Her first efforts, she said, were lousy.
She sought perfection and struggled to find it. And when that didn’t work for her she found a way to give in to the clay, to listen to it and feel for it. She has earned her living from pottery ever since.
“What I would tell anyone starting out is, make friends with the clay,” she said this week, while seated at the glazing table in her 191 Woolwich Street Blue Iris Studios. The downstairs locale has a shop in the front section, a wheel and kiln in the back. “But also, tell the clay what you’d like it to do. It is open to direction. It wants to be whatever you want it to be, but you need to give it clear instruction, and relax with it.”
On a nearby slab-roller, she has begun to set out the finished works of pottery that will be in her upcoming Pottery Seconds Show. The annual spring sale happens on Saturday, starting at 10 a.m.
One would be hard pressed to find the imperfections in the work, those little things that makes them seconds, and sold at half the price of firsts. But Iris knows.
A slightly blurred line in the glaze, a spot where the clay bled a small drop of colour in the firing process, a few grains of sand under the surface. Even with these imperfections, the work is first and foremost beautiful.
She found from the start that turning clay into pottery is an addictive act. The degrees of touch and feeling involved are completely engrossing and highly meditative. And clay is full of potential - soft and malleable, and can be turned into anything you desire, she said.
“People say that with my background in advertising and marketing I should be a whiz at marketing my business,” she said. “I’m actually quite hopeless at marketing my business. Because what I love is the making.”
As a girl, Dorton gravitated more towards home economics than art classes. She has always loved cooking, sewing, and nutrition. She considers her pottery to be fine craft, but not fine art.
“But if you can’t make something beautiful, you have to ask yourself what you’re doing,” she said. “For me, the challenge is to always make with the same care and attention, whether I am making one of something or 20 of them. And the beauty is the meditation of being on the wheel.”
Come early to Blue Iris Studios. There is usually a line-up at the potter’s annual Pottery Second Show. Among the seconds in Saturday’s sale are a large number of pieces made during the perfection of her new line.
Dorton considered one of her earliest bowls to be breathtakingly beautiful and near perfection. While rotating it in her hands and admiring its beauty, it fell from her hands and shattered on the floor. She consoles herself knowing that she would have eventually found the imperfection in it.
I’m not trying to make the most pots or win any contests,” she added. “I’m trying to incrementally get better every year.”
