It was a typical evening at Bklyn Clay, an airy, year-old, 24-hour pottery studio in Brooklyn. 

Urooj Khan, 29, a corporate lawyer, started making pottery after a breakup a few years ago.

“The studio was my sanctuary,” she said. “I would spend entire weekends at the wheel. Clay requires a lot of presence. There are so many subtle movements that require attention and precision, all the more so when you are a beginner. And that was a relief. My brain hurts after long days at the firm, poring over documents and law treatises, and being at the wheel releases that stress.” 

Strung out by work, politics, thorny relationships, an empty nest or just too much digital activity, many New Yorkers are showing up at studios like this one, using the wheel as a balm and a corrective. 

A single father whose son left for college this year, Jacob Dorland, 39, came to the studio because he was anticipating emotional fallout from his son’s departure.

“It’s really strange how much your legs get kicked out from under when you’ve been a single dad for 15 years,” he said. 

Also an extreme marathoner, Dorland likes the physicality of pottery and the concentration it requires.

“An errant pinkie or distracted moment can ruin a piece that you’ve spent a whole bunch of time on,” he said, “so all those anxious thoughts I might get about whatever problems I have in my life have to be shelved when I’m throwing.” 

Judi Roaman, a design consultant, hand-builds vessels she’ll glaze in black or white, because she finds colors are too complicated.

“How much MSNBC can you watch?” she asked. “I would bet every therapist would tell you their patients are beyond anxious. Everybody is looking for a place to put it. You can’t absorb anymore.”

Bklyn Clay co-founder Jennifer Wavereck, 52, said she often feels like a bartender in a very modern bar.

“You hear a lot of stories,” she said. “I hear more than I should about people’s therapy sessions. We had a woman who came in last year who was going through a divorce. She opted to do ceramics classes rather than traditional therapy. It was great. Cor likes to say that clay absorbs emotion.” 

Cor Garcia-Held, 38, Bklyn Clay’s co-founder, studio manager and educational director, trained as an art therapist.

“The grandmother of art therapy, Edith Kramer, borrowed heavily from Freud, and Freud believed that sublimation was a mature and healthy defense mechanism,” Garcia-Held said. “The basic idea is you take socially unacceptable behavior or ideations and channel them into something that is socially acceptable like art. In other words, you reach the studio fuming over the sexism that you had to put up with at work. Then you and your studio mates share pizza and beer and discuss how sexism affects you on an everyday basis. You take those emotions and make a mug that says, ‘male tears.’ You leave the studio not wanting to yell at the next innocent man you see on the street. Bam, Sublimation!”