POTTERY, COMMUNITY, AND THE ST CROIX TOUR DURING THE COVID CRISIS

I am taking some time during this pandemic moment to pause, try some new creative directions, finish installing my new (to me, anyway) gas kiln, and catch up on some of the ever-increasing deferred maintenance around this old place. Those of you who have visited Stonepool Pottery can imagine what an all-consuming project resurrecting this 200+ year-old property has been—and always will be. Since first building my wood kiln in 1988 with Sam Taylor, Aaron Weissblum, and Michael Kline, I have been making pots and teaching workshops, and doing historical research, and community projects non-stop. I have always been thinking about how not to be my own best collector, how to get the pots out there, hoping to make enough money to continue and develop the work a little further. I have been very lucky that it has worked out so far. My family and pottery community have been so supportive of this unlikely project of making pottery by hand, firing it all in a wood kiln, understanding ceramic history and building an apprenticeship program, all the while staying institutionally unaffiliated. In short, making the connected life that makes this precarious and improbable lifestyle not only possible but sustainable. There has been constant learning and unlearning, doing and undoing—so many processes and techniques to absorb, to create and sell the ware and resurrect this historic Hilltown property. Stonepool Pottery is a tinker’s paradise and purgatory, seemingly so marginal to the global corporatized technocracy that has crept over us during the last three decades.

            The St. Croix Pottery Tour has been a highlight of my career. Being welcomed by Will and Janel into the unique and vibrant community of Minnesotans and guest colleagues from around the country has been a thrill and honor. We have become a pottery family that provides support, refuge, and an important occasion to challenge the creative direction and quality of my own work—there are indeed high standards and a sweeping range of aesthetic choices on view at all the Tour’s studios. With Will and Janel’s generous hosting, our group has the great pleasure of achieving a big goal together, making something truly special come into being through hard work with like-minded collaborators.

 From the time I start making pots for the sale around the beginning of the New Year, to my April firing, to preparing, pricing, and packing the pots, and the long drive across country with Sam Taylor (with our annual overnight to visit Jenny Mendez and Mark in Ohio, also in high-hustle as they prepare to depart for the Tour), to our home stay with Sam’s Aunt, to transforming Will and Janel’s studio into a display that welcomes the public and makes the work sing out, to seeing and touching the pots that all the potters have worked so hard on, to our four-day working visit together and our family potluck meal, to getting a look at the pots of other tour hosts and guests (and the always painfully-too-short visits with them seemingly stolen amidst the frenzy of it all), to catching up with familiar returning customers: it’s a breathless, hell-or-high-water dash that affirms this particular odd and precious life.

 To return to the electronic technology that’s taken over so many aspects of our lives and the many skills that make a potter’s life come together, I will be taking some more time to learn how to show, catalog, sell, and ship my pots online. Please check back later this summer to see a selection of work from my latest firing.

SMITHSONIAN ARTIST RESIDENCY FELLOWSHIP 2018-2019

I’ve been lucky to receive an artist’s residency fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution over this winter and spring to look at pots in their collections. Mostly I’m studying early American stoneware in the amazing Remensnyder collection at the National Museum of American History, with some time at the Freer looking at their wonderful Asian holdings. My project started out looking at pots that document specific relationships between users and makers: presentation, commissioned, dedicated and end-of-day works in the American context, and inscribed accessories associated with Asian works in the Japanese context. I am interested in how these particular historical pots resonate with some of the ways we understand contemporary studio pottery.

Since I started this project (which was interrupted for a bit by the government shutdown) I have become interested as well in the story of how African Americans interacted with the potteries in New York and New Jersey in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I’ve been reading about the Crolius and Remmey families working adjacent to the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan (Willem Crolius manumitted an enslaved family in 1779), African-American freedman potter Thomas Commeraw and his relationship to the obscure David Morgan, and the Morgan slave trading scandal of 1818 (in which the scion of the holder of the largest stoneware clay bank in Perth Amboy ,NJ, was indicted for the kidnapping and transporting of enslaved New Jerseyans to Louisiana where he owned a plantation). Fascinating and disturbing history. I’ll be talking about some of this and demonstrating some historical techniques) at “Dish Camp” at Eastfield Village in June.

“Clamshell Swags and Tassels NJ?

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Double-Walled Pilsner Project

"The Last Drop: Intoxicating Pottery Past and Present" at the North Carolina Clay Center in collaboration with the Chipstone Foundation and Ceramics in American, curated by Rob Hunter

I first saw a Morley pierced double-walled stoneware mug in the Delhom Collection at the Mint Museum almost three decades ago. It struck me then and has stuck with me ever since. First, I love this basic cup form: a cylinder atop a globe, wedded with a handle. I’ve seen variations of this iconic form in pre-modern European, Native American, and Islamic ceramics. But there is an extravagance to the pierced double-walled version; the visual and technical complexity of this usually humble pot is undeniable. For a potter to throw two independent and joined walls is a lot of extra work—and yet offers less volume for the drinker. So why the double wall? The handle takes care of any concern that a hot beverage could transfer heat from the inner wall, making the pot uncomfortable and necessitating the second skin. But there is something immensely pleasing about the way the inner container hangs down from the rim of the outer form, suspended but not touching the foot ring. And the double wall makes possible the strangely stylized foliate piercings, a visual play on our expectation of a container’s integrity: this mug has holes and yet is not leaky. The iconography of the Delhom mug’s time-consuming piercings are quirky, somewhere between star and fossil, the curvilinear incised stems mannered.

Variation

With appetite whetted by my earlier encounter with one of its cousins, I embraced the chance to respond to the Chipstone Collection’s Morley mug. To my eye, this mug has an even more pleasing shape and proportion. The straighter neck makes the belly feel more globular, which in turn is echoed in the rounded arc of its handle. The piercings while still perhaps vegetal, are even stranger, reading as abstracted landmasses or maybe bats. Where the Delhom mug’s piercings repeat a couple of motifs, the Chipstone mug’s are free and wild, almost doodles, each pierced shape a mark of the potter’s bounding imagination. The incised straight stem lines are also more abstracted and unselfconscious. What a pot!
 
First, to get to know the historical object, I threw a facsimile of the Morley mug in dark stoneware. A neighbor was taken by it and carried it off to decorate with piercings of his own devising. Then I made a pilsner form in a porcelaneous white stoneware, which I felt had a relation to the fine fabric of the Nottingham mug, but with a brighter graphics quality that I thought would work well in my salt and wood kiln. The taller pilsner seemed more contemporary. I decorated the first one with piercings after the Chipstone mug’s, to get their feel. Then I made some taller double-walled pilsners, which stood on a ware shelf waiting to be pierced.

I had seen Nottingham pots with inscriptions, and in my studio practice, I sometimes write text on my pots that encapsulates cultural or historical moments. So I moved toward that idea for this piece, waiting for the right words to arrive and grab me, and thinking about how to render them.

Around that time, it was reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called President Trump a f—ing moron, after Trump reportedly had astonished his military brass by saying he wanted to retool the nation’s nuclear stockpile up to its peak level of half a century ago—a tenfold increase that would break the international agreements the U.S. has stuck to since the 1980s. In that situation room meeting, he also showed shockingly little understanding of Afghanistan and North Korea. That moment brought home just how weird things had become: the CEO of the biggest fossil fuel corporation in the world becomes secretary of state, with no previous diplomatic or political experience, and finds our nation’s president to be grossly uninformed and incompetent, and is incensed enough to let it slip. Wow.

H.L. Mencken’s quote from a 1920 Baltimore Evening Sun article had started circulating again after the 2016 election. It seemed uncannily prophetic then, but we didn’t know at that time that the muckraking newspaperman’s concluding word would be exactly the one Tillerson, in uncensored frustration, called his boss: "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

Moron Pilsner

Laying out the text and cutting the letters was laborious. I’ve never been much for penmanship, but I let that go and went at the clay with an X-Acto knife for the first letters of each word (along with a drill to get the round letters started), and scrawled in the rest of the text. Piercing just the first letters gave a random overall feeling.
            
Taking this cup out of the kiln, I was pleased by its amber interior against the salted orange-peel textured grey of its exterior. I hope my pilsner will be interesting to drink from. Texts that revolve around a pot invite the user to rotate it, contemplating, slowly rendering the words comprehensible. As Mencken’s prophesy moves around your field of vision, from the table to your hand, and up your mouth to take that first sip, I’d imagine you might well need that drink... and perhaps another.