A friendly rant on why symmetry isn't everything in art

I have spent the last several years wedging clay, trimming bowls, and arguing with my own work about whether it should be perfectly round. Most of the time it refuses, and honestly, that is fine by me. Across Sydney studios, Melbourne laneway galleries, and the quiet coastal sheds of Tasmania, artists keep arriving at the same conclusion: a perfectly mirrored piece often feels flatter than something slightly tilted, slightly off, slightly human.

There is a particular flavour of anxiety that runs through beginning ceramicists, and I think it deserves naming. We are taught from school geometry onwards that the right answer is balanced, central, and predictable. Bring that mindset to a wheel or a sculpting block and you end up with work that is competent and forgettable. The Australian design world has started pushing back, from the wonky pieces at the National Gallery of Victoria's design fairs to the deliberately irregular tableware served in new Sydney restaurants.

The quiet tyranny of the balanced

Ask a beginner what they want from a thrown pot and they will usually say "round". Round is achievable, round is measurable, and round is the answer the marking scheme rewards. None of that makes it interesting. A symmetrical bowl can still be dead in the middle, and dead is the quality most beginners are trying to avoid without quite knowing how.

The grip of perfect balance is not really about art at all. It is about the tidy scoring system we inherited from school, where marks go to the answer that matches the key. Pottery is judged by feel, by weight in the hand, by the way light falls across the rim at seven in the evening. Under that kind of judging, the slightly crooked piece often wins. If you want to see this for yourself, drop into a weekend workshop at your local TAFE, see a class spread across the tables in Sydney and Brisbane, and watch the strongest work at the end of the day. Almost none of it is symmetrical.

What our brains actually want

Neuroscience has been quietly confirming what potters have always suspected. The visual system does not light up for perfect order, it lights up for useful order, the kind that contains a small surprise. Faces we find beautiful are rarely mirror-symmetrical. Traditional Japanese ikebana arrangements are deliberately uneven. The wabi-sabi principle, older than most Western art theory, treats irregularity as a record of time and use rather than a flaw.

This is not a niche taste. Walk through the weekend ceramics markets in Fremantle or the Saturday stalls at the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, and the pieces that gather small crowds are almost always the ones with a visible hand. The perfectly turned, machine-precise vessel sells, but it does not linger in memory. The one with a thumbprint still visible on the foot, or a rim that dips slightly to the left, is the one a buyer takes home and thinks about for years.

A short history of the wobble

Western art spent a long time worshipping symmetry. Greek sculpture, Renaissance altarpieces, and a great deal of nineteenth-century portraiture traded emotional range for technical accuracy. The twentieth century changed that, and arguably the first big push came from the Abstract Expressionists, who treated the edge of the canvas as a horizon to be resisted rather than a frame to be filled.

Indigenous Australian art traditions had already been working this ground for tens of thousands of years. The painted dots, crosshatching, and asymmetric compositions in works held by the Art Gallery of South Australia carry a visual logic that does not depend on mirror balance, and that tradition has quietly educated a generation of makers. You can see its influence in the layered glazes and off-centre forms coming out of contemporary studios from Adelaide to Cairns.

The Australian landscape already gets it

You do not have to argue with the bush for very long to realise how strange our scenery is. Eucalyptus trunks twist, granite boulders perch improbably, and the light changes every nine minutes. Trying to make something symmetrical in response to that landscape feels like a polite lie. The coastline around Byron Bay or the red centre near Uluru is full of forms that work precisely because they lean, sag, and shift.

I think that is why so many of us here default to asymmetry without quite admitting it. Even the most disciplined wheel-throwers I know in Sydney's inner west will, when they are honest, confess to deliberately nudging a rim. There is a moment in the making where you feel the clay settle into its own balance rather than yours. You can fight it, or you can let it happen. Letting it happen is, more often than not, where the good work begins. You can see how that thinking plays out in the plates, sculpture, and abstract pieces on offer at ameliajcreations.com.

What this means for collectors and makers

If you are buying, the most useful shift is in how you evaluate. Rather than asking whether a piece is balanced, ask whether it feels alive in your hand. Look at it from three angles, not just the one the gallery has lit. Sit with it for the length of a flat white and slow a conversation before deciding.

If you are a beginner, your job is to let go of the calipers. Throw the wonky bowl, fire it, glaze it, and live with it for a week. The middle of the road is not where pottery gets interesting. Australian Consumer Law also gives you reasonable guarantees on authenticity and condition when you purchase through a registered gallery, so it is worth asking for the paperwork before you commit.

Recommendations for the lopsided-curious

• Look at bowls in three-quarter light, not full overhead gallery lighting, and notice which ones have a clear front.
• Try a one-day workshop before committing to a long course, so you can test whether the process suits you.
• Photograph your own work from the side as well as the front, because the eye reads asymmetry differently at table height than it does at eye level.
• Buy the piece you keep going back to, not the one that matches the couch, because the matching piece fades.
• Talk to the maker about the clay they used, and why, since the answer usually reveals whether the irregularity was accidental or deliberate.

The work I make now is messier than the work I made ten years ago, and I think it is better for it. If you are after clay, tools, and patient advice, the team at BHC Clay Smith's studio are worth a visit, especially if you are starting out. Browse the current collection, sign up for the next clay-and-tapas evening, and follow along on the Instagram feed to see what is coming out of the studio next.