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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. On the show this week during the Membership Drive, we are ending every day by talking about a different hobby. We're going to end today-- You know what? I lost my hobby notes, so I'm just going to get them. [laughs] I apologize. Right here, I misplaced my hobby notes. Let's see. The guest is Ellen Day, and the hobby is ceramics or pottery.

Ellen, welcome to WNYC. I apologize for the confusion. Great to have you.

Ellen Day: Thank you so much. No problem.

Brian Lehrer: Do you say ceramics or pottery, or are they completely interchangeable?

Ellen Day: I find they're pretty much interchangeable. Pottery can be more functional work, but they're both ceramics. Ceramics encompasses everything that we do with clay.

Brian Lehrer: How'd you get into it?

Ellen Day: Actually, I started in high school. There was a pottery class, and I took a pottery class. I was throwing on the potter's wheel, and the first piece I made was finished and was entered into the Citywide Art show. It was accepted, and it was shown at Lever House. I guess I was hooked at that point, and I've been doing it ever since.

Brian Lehrer: Now I've got your title back in front of me. Sorry about that again. You're director of the BrickHouse Ceramic Art Center in Long Island City. What happens there?

Ellen Day: We teach pottery to beginners to advanced. We rent space to artists, and we have year-round programming. We have artist talks, and we have a big holiday sale the second weekend in December where people can come in and meet the artists. We give private lessons, one hour, two-hour private lessons so you don't have to commit to a semester class. We have book signings. Some of the artists have come in as brand-new beginners, and now they're selling their work and making a living at it.

Brian Lehrer: Do you focus more on what you might call sculpture, more abstract pieces or functional pieces like plates and bowls these days? Can people do both as beginners?

Ellen Day: Yes, people can do both as beginners, and our sculptural classes are more hand-building classes. You can explore sculpture if you'd like, but we also teach how you can make plates and bowls and cups. You pretty much start off making functional work, but if you come in and you say that you want to make a sculptural piece and you know what it is that you want to make, the instructor helps you do that too.

Brian Lehrer: When you say hand building, is that in contrast to working with a kiln or on a wheel, or what's the right way to describe that?

Ellen Day: Hand building is when you work with slabs and coils and you pinch the clay, and wheel throwing is when you're on the potter's wheel and it spins.

Brian Lehrer: That's quite an experience to be on the potter's wheel, isn't it?

Ellen Day: Yes, it is. It takes a lot of patience and a lot of practice. Some people come in, and that's all they want to learn, and they take to it, and they don't even try hand building. Then others come in and they don't want to do the wheel and they start with rolling out slabs and making things. You can do either, you can do both. Some people do, they combine the wheel-throwing pieces with hand built extensions or altering the pieces. You can do a little bit of everything.

Brian Lehrer: Besides wheel versus hand building, are there other schools of thought about the best way to do pottery like where you get your glazes or what kind of clay you use, anything like that?

Ellen Day: Well, we use different clay bodies in the studio. We have a stone wear clay that is available to everyone to use, but if you'd like to try porcelain or different colored clay, that's available also. We don't go to different temperatures in my studio, but some studios do work with terracotta, which is a low-fire clay, and they work with high-fire clay. They do different types of firings, a gas kiln versus an electric kiln. We do go out to Peters Valley and do a wood firing, which is firing a kiln, just stoking it with wood.

There are lots of options when it comes to working with clay. Depending on what you're interested in, you choose that type of studio to work in.

Brian Lehrer: In our last 30 seconds, is there any ceramics lore you can share with us? I saw there's something called a kiln god.

Ellen Day: Well, we create a kiln god when we do a wood firing so that it blesses the kiln because it's an atmospheric kiln and we're never quite sure how it's going to fire. We create a little kiln god of our-- Each person can create one or there's one for the kiln, and we sit it on the kiln and it takes care of the kiln when we're not standing there watching it for-- Another one is that clay has memory, and whatever you do to it, it remembers. If you twist it one way and then want to twist it back, it may in the firing twist back to the original shape because it has a memory in it. That's what it wants.

Brian Lehrer: So much fun. Clay with a memory. Ellen Day, the founder and director of the BrickHouse Ceramic Art Center in Long Island City. Thank you so much.

Ellen Day: You're welcome. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue our hobby series to close out our show on Monday with a teaching artist from GlassRoots in Newark.

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