Outside the clinic
Clay, patience, and a great deal of collapsed bowls.
Ben has been throwing pottery since 2019. He does it on Saturday mornings in his garage on a second-hand wheel that makes a sound his partner describes as "a lorry reversing, but quieter and more persistent." He has made several hundred pots. A small number of them are good.
How it started
It started, as most of Ben's hobbies do, without any clear intention. A client mentioned a weekend pottery class at a community studio in West End. Ben suggested they might find it grounding. His client signed up. So, on an impulse he has since described as "professionally embarrassing in retrospect," did Ben.
His client turned out to be good at pottery. Ben turned out to be terrible at it. His first pot collapsed three times before he conceded that the clay had won. His second pot survived the wheel but cracked in the kiln. His third pot is still technically a pot, if you're generous with the definition. He has it on the shelf next to Gerald and the rocks. It looks like something a child made on a dare.
He kept going. He borrowed a wheel — a second-hand Shimpo from a ceramics teacher who was downsizing — and set it up in the garage with a bag of stoneware clay and a book his partner described as "alarmingly technical for something you're clearly not good at yet." That was five years ago. He has thrown somewhere in the region of three hundred pots since. Perhaps forty of them are things he'd call finished. Perhaps twenty of those are things he'd be comfortable giving away.
"The reason I kept going," he says, "is that pottery is almost impossible to rush. The clay doesn't care how much you want to be finished. It doesn't care that you have a full schedule on Monday and would like to just get this bowl right. You have to slow down to the speed the material allows. For someone whose work is about being fully present, that's either very easy or very hard — and I found it very hard. Which meant it was worth doing."
He fires his work at a community kiln in Woolloongabba — the same suburb where he does interpretive dance on Tuesday nights, which he acknowledges is starting to sound like a fabricated personality. The kiln fees are modest. The community is warm. Nobody at the kiln knows he's a psychologist, and he finds the anonymity pleasant.
His first good bowl — the one he actually liked — took him fourteen months to make. He uses it for his morning porridge. He has never told anyone that, until now.
What comes out of the garage
The work. Some of it, anyway.
Five years of Saturday mornings distilled into a rough taxonomy of what Ben makes, what survives the kiln, and what ends up quietly disposed of before anyone can see it.
Bowls
The thing he makes most, and the thing that took longest to get right. A well-thrown bowl requires a centred base, consistent walls, and an even rim — three things that are individually manageable and collectively elusive. His early bowls leaned. His middle-period bowls didn't lean but were thick. His current bowls are, by his own assessment, "mostly correct, occasionally good."
Mugs
Mugs are harder than they look, because a mug needs a handle, and handles are attached separately and can crack away from the body during firing if the join isn't right. Ben has lost a significant number of mugs to handle failure. He now treats every surviving mug as a minor triumph. He has given several to his mother — his late mother, as it happens, though she received some of the better early ones before she died. He is glad about that.
Vases (aspirationally)
He has tried to make vases on several occasions. A vase requires height and a narrowing neck — both of which demand control he is still developing. His best vase is about 22cm tall, slightly off-centre, and holds a single stem perfectly if you lean the stem against the wall. It lives on the windowsill in the study next to the rocks. He does not call it a vase in front of people who know what a good vase looks like.
Things given away
A rotating cast of mugs and bowls have been given to friends, colleagues, and family members — with varying degrees of recipient enthusiasm. His partner uses a bowl he made in 2022 for her morning cereal, which he considers the highest possible endorsement. His son used a mug for about three weeks and then it disappeared. Ben has not asked. He suspects it broke and nobody wanted to say.
Things that didn't make it
A proportion of every batch doesn't survive — cracked in drying, warped in bisque firing, split during glaze firing, or simply not right in ways that are hard to articulate but easy to recognise. Ben puts these in a box in the garage. The box is quite full. He has considered displaying them as a kind of installation. He has not done this. He might.
The porridge bowl
The one that started it all making sense. Made in month fourteen, after a Saturday morning when something clicked — the centring, the pulling up, the feeling of the walls responding instead of fighting. The bowl is not technically perfect. It has a slight wobble on the rim and the glaze pooled in one corner. He uses it every morning for his porridge. It is his favourite thing he has ever made, and he is not apologising for that.
What it's taught him
The things pottery has shown him about the work.
Ben did not get into pottery to learn anything therapeutic. He got into it because a client mentioned it and he was impulsive on a Thursday afternoon. What it has taught him, largely against his will, is considerable.
The most immediate thing is the relationship between effort and outcome. In most of what Ben does professionally, the connection between effort and outcome is long, indirect, and hard to observe in real time. In pottery it is immediate, blunt, and sometimes spectacular in the wrong direction. Too much pressure on one side and the wall collapses. Too little water and the clay dries under your hands. You can feel when you're fighting the material and you can feel when you're not. The distinction is obvious once you can feel it. Getting to that point takes a while.
The second thing is that failure is the curriculum. Every collapsed pot is information. Every crack in the kiln tells you something about the drying process, the clay body, the rate of change in temperature, what you did with your hands that you shouldn't have. Ben's training — clinical, academic — had taught him to be comfortable with sitting in uncertainty. Pottery taught him to be comfortable with being plainly, materially wrong, repeatedly, and to find that more interesting than distressing. He has found this useful in the room.
"There's something I tell clients sometimes," he says, "about the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth one — the idea that effort isn't wasted just because it doesn't produce the result you intended. I believed it before pottery. I understand it now. There's a gap between believing something intellectually and having it in your hands. The porridge bowl is in my hands."
Book a session →On patience and practice
"The clay doesn't care how much you want to be finished. You have to slow down to the speed the material allows."
— Ben Stevens
I have sat with men who could not tolerate being a beginner. Who found it genuinely distressing to be incompetent at something. Who had not been bad at something in decades. Pottery fixed that for me. I was bad at it for a long time. I am less bad at it now. I cannot tell you how useful that has been.
Here for the therapy, not the pottery.
The pots are not for sale. The psychology practice very much is open for bookings.