“It’s
really beautiful, isn’t it?” Mark Hewitt says, peering through
a port in the side of his kiln. Inside a meandering river of
white-orange flame caresses a glowing clay jug as the fire
glides through stacks of pottery.
Hewitt has
allowed himself a brief moment of reflection during the final,
tense hours of a marathon three-and-a-half-day firing.
Quickly, the North
Carolina potter gets back to work,
sliding a thin slat of pine through a fiery portal. The slat
sizzles, bursting into flame. Over days, the heat inside has
been building slowly. A digital pyrometer indicates that
temperature near the kiln’s front is 2,355 degrees Fahrenheit,
hotter than molten lava.
Carefully, Hewitt and his apprentices are feeding pine
slats into a succession of small stoke holes, fueling the
intense heat across the fire-breathing beast’s 40-foot length.
Inside, within sight of each stoke hole, he has placed
pyrometric cones that begin to melt at varying temperatures.
When the cones at the back of the kiln curl or bend, the
firing is finished. Hewitt and his assistants will stop
stoking, brick up the openings and wait six days until the
temperature drops below 100 degrees. Only then will they open
the kiln and discover what beauty- or ugliness- the river of
flame has created.
Last night, around 11, Hewitt had turned his tending
duties over to a friend and slipped into bed in his farmhouse
nearby. He didn’t sleep a wink. “I was lying there fretting,”
he said when he reappeared at 6 a.m. “I’d hear every noise and
think it was the pots breaking.”
Hewitt was
fretting because any number of calamities may befall the 1,700
pots -- four months work -- glowing inside the kiln. Fire too
hot and the clay gets brittle. Raise the temperature to high,
too fast, and pots may explode. Hewitt could use a modern gas
or electric kiln that would yield predictable results. But for
him the aesthetic rewards of taming the inferno outweigh the
financial gamble. “This is the hard way of doing it. It’s very
labor-intensive. It requires skills that you learn only by
doing,” he said the day before, during a break. “I feel like
the last of the dodoes.”
The pottery tradition
in North Carolina, as rich as
the local clay deposits, attracted the British-born Hewitt to
the eastern Piedmont in 1893.
When he arrived, there were only about nine or ten potteries
in the area. Most of the owners were from families like the
Owens, the Coles and the Teagues, who have created the area’s
utilitarian stoneware going back many
generations.
Now, more than 90 potters ply their craft in and around
Seagrove (pop. 244), about 35 miles southwest from Hewitt’s
farm in Pittsboro. Hundreds more are spread throughout the
state. Those numbers reflect the resurgent popularity of home
grown pottery in North Carolina. Customers
travel from afar to attend kiln openings, often arriving at
dawn to get a coveted spot at the front of the line. Many
shops, however, stay open year round. Museums throughout the
state have staged exhibitions featuring local potters. The
$2.1 million North Carolina Pottery Center in Seagrove
opened two years ago. Built with $1.3 million in private and
corporate donations, and $800,000 from the state, the center
features a museum and an education center and operates as a
starting point for tourists visiting area
potteries.
Wheel-turned pottery in North
Carolina dates to the arrival of the Moravians in
the Piedmont in the 1750’s.
Farmers needed wares to preserve and contain foods and
liquids. So potters produced churns for butter-making, jars
for pickling, jugs for vinegar and liquor, and mugs, pitchers
and bowls for the table.
While the craft died in most other states during the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, the
agrarian culture and the strong family tradition kept it alive
in North
Carolina until it found a new market
as art. “When the Industrial Revolution catches up to a craft,
it usually destroys it, because a factory product is cheaper
and probably works better- unless the tradition can adapt to
new conditions and changing tastes and find new audiences.
That’s what these people were lucky enough to do,” says
Charles G. Zug III, professor of folklore and English at the
University of
North Carolina and
author of Turners and Burners: The Folk Potters of
North
Carolina.
Potters, who once supported
themselves by working other jobs, can make a good living these
days doing what they love. Sid Luck, a fifth-generation
potter, chose to teach high school chemistry when he graduated
from college. “There was just no market for pottery,” he says.
In 1987, after 17 years of teaching, he quit and opened Luck’s
Ware, off winding Adams Road in Seagrove.
While most of his offsprings are inexpensive- a coffee mug
retails for $5- his volume is high enough that he earns as
much as he did in academia.
In the
Catawba Valley, on the state’s
western side, Burlon Craig’s career reflects how the craft has
come to be regarded as art. Craig 84, spent much of his life
farming, and working in a furniture factory to make ends meat.
He turned pots at night and on weekends. Now his jugs are in
such demand that customers take a number to prevent
free-for-alls at sales. When he began in the 1930’s, Craig
sold five-gallon jugs for 50 cents. In the 1970’s, when he had
a storage shed full of unsold pottery, he sold jugs for $6.
Today, collectors lucky enough to hear about his annual sale
fork over $500 for a five-gallon face jug. (Face jugs are an
African tradition brought to the South by
slaves.)
When
Hewitt first arrived in North
Carolina, he packed his mugs, pitchers and
planters and lugged them to fairs and a flea market in
Raleigh in a quest for
customers. These days, buyers flock to his spring, summer, and
winter weekend sales. At one sale last year, he sold his
entire stock in half a day. Some of his largest pots, 135
pounds of clay decorated with drips caused by melting glass,
ash and salt, are snapped up for as much as
$3,500.
“I think North
Carolina is probably the state that has the
longest continuing tradition of pottery as it came to us from
Europe,” says Jack Troy, a
potter and the author of Wood-fired Stoneware and
Porcelain. “If America has a pottery state, it
must be North
Carolina.”
Over two weeks of traveling North
Carolina’s back roads, I dropped in on
potters as they prepared for their spring openings. I learned
that the tradition continues to evolve. No longer are potters
constrained by the types of local clay and glazes. No longer
do they learn only regional shapes and forms. Many of the
newer potters are academically trained and well traveled, so a
range of global styles influences their
work.
But the connections to the past remain vital for many,
including Hewitt. His father and grandfather had been
directors at Spode Ltd., the fine china manufacturer in
Stoke-on-Trent, England. But he
fell in love with simple utilitarian pots after reading A
Potters Book by Bernard Leach, the eminent British potter
who helped rekindle interest in early ceramic traditions.
Apprenticeships with master potters Michael Cardew in
Britain and
Todd Piker in Connecticut preceded
Hewitt’s drive south to look for a place to set up shop. Near
Pittsboro, he and his wife, Carol, purchased a ramshackle
farm, transforming the chicken house into his studio and the
barn into a rustic showcase for his kiln
openings.
Six days after Hewitt and three apprentices closed his
fiery monster, I arrive for the unloading, scheduled to begin
at 8:30 a.m. The impatient potter, however, had broken into
the front of the kiln the afternoon before, taking out a few
dozen pitchers and jars. “It looks really spectacular to me,”
he says as he starts pulling bricks from the kiln’s side door.
Stacked behind the door are the large planters and jugs that
fetch the highest prices. They are also the most vulnerable,
the most likely to crack or shatter. Hewitt and an apprentice
strain to carry out a golden planter with dark-blue streaks
down the side. They return for another. “Shoot, that one
split,” Hewitt says, stooping inside the kiln. It’s the first
big casualty.
Hewitt expects a few disasters. Only about two dozen
North
Carolina potters fire wood kilns,
because it’s so risky. To Hewitt, though, the downside is
worth the unique qualities that come only from his
unpredictable beast. “There’s a depth to the colors and
complexity to the finish that you don’t get from a regular
kiln,” he says. As the unloading continues, Hewitt’s spirits
rise. A few mugs have fallen, a few small planters are
cracked, but the loss is minor.
“The space
in the kiln,” Hewitt explains, “is sort of my aesthetic
medium. Every single cubic inch can create a different
effect.” Pitchers and jars closer to the firebox show drips
resulting from ash falling on their shoulders and melting. Hot
embers create a mottled charring on vases that have been
placed on the floor near stoking holes. Other pots feature
gentle flowing streaks down their sides caused by runny glazes
and the salt that Hewitt blew into the kiln using a leaf
blower. At one point during the firing, he casually tossed
mugs of salt through stoke holes onto large pots. The salt
melted instantly, flowing down their
sides.
Hewitt’s
use of salt is an example of how the state’s pottery
traditions continue to evolve. Salt-glazed stoneware,
recognizable by its orange-peel texture, has been created in
the eastern Piedmont since
the late 18th century. But Hewitt tweaks the
tradition, mixing salt with other glazes for a variety of
colors and textures. For example, he applies an alkaline glaze
associated with potters in the Catawba
Valley
that yields a glossy olive green, but by combining salt with
it, Hewitt gets a golden yellow. On other pots, he diverts
sharply from tradition, using a white Shino-type glaze native
to Japan, or a crinkly
black manganese slip he created.
His shapes are inspired not only by he simple
utilitarian wares of North Carolina, but by the pots he’s seen
during travels in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Nigeria, the Ivory
Coast and Mali, as well as Great Britain and the United
States. “I beg and borrow in a postmodern way,” he
says.
Leaving Hewitt and
his apprentices to the task of sanding and preparing the pots
for sale, I drove to Seagrove. There, along winding Route 705,
one pottery sign after another beckons. Pottery Junction, Turn
and Burn Pottery, Old Hard Times Pottery, Dirt Works, Frog
Pond, Luck’s Ware, Rockhouse Pottery. I pull in at Ben Owen
Pottery just across from the Westmoore Family
Restaurant.
Ben III, as Owen is called in these parts, is in the
early hours of a two-day firing. It’s 3:40 p.m. on a Monday,
and the new digital pyrometer that arrived this morning reads
431 degrees. “We’re going up 100 degrees an hour for the first
20 hours or so,” he says. He was up late the night before,
putting glazes on the final 50 pots he’d turned over the
weekend. He is behind, unable to meet the demand. Special
orders jotted on post-it notes are scattered on a wall of his
office inside the store, a few feet away. Elton John and
Elizabeth Taylor are customers.
If there is a royal family of potters in North
Carolina, Ben Owen III is the crown
prince. Like many of the young potters in the area, he studied
ceramics in college, earning his degree from East
Carolina
University. But he also
learned from his grandfather, Ben Owen, perhaps the most
famous North
Carolina potter of his generation. Ben
III was eight when his grandfather started taking him out to
the shop to show him how to throw
pots.
Pots were
everywhere in the Owen Family’s home. Over time, little Ben
learned the history of each one. Many bore the stamp of
Jugtown, where his grandfather began working in 1923, when he
was 18. At the time, the old stoneware shops in the area were
closing. Cheap industrial wares had shrunk the market until
only a demand for whiskey jugs kept potters in business. With
prohibition in 1920, that outlet dried up as well. But Jacques
and Juliana Busbee, Raleigh
natives, figured they could sell North
Carolina pots in a shop they operated in
Greenwich
Village, New
York.
The Busbees opened Jugtown outside Seagrove and hired
young potters like Ben Owen, who were willing to try the new
shapes that the Busbees believed were key to building a new
clientele. They took Owen to museums in New York and Washington D.C., and gave him sketches,
pictures and pieces of Oriental pottery to imitate. They
introduced new glazes, including “Chinese blue,” which became
a favorite of collectors. Soon, Oriental shapes and glazes
became part of the local idiom. Jugtown remains a rustic mecca
today. Buses pull into the lot daily, unloading tourists who
browse a small museum and a shop. Vernon Owens, Ben III’s
distant cousin, owns the pottery with his wife, Pam. (One
branch of the family added an s to the surname.) True to the
tradition, they create a variety of utilitarian
stoneware.
Jugtown survived because the Busbees fundamentally
changed the market. Their customers considered their purchase
art, not merely necessities of everyday life. Ben III’s shop
reflects that shift; vases, some glazed with his version of
Chinese blue, sit atop pedestals illuminated by track
lighting. It’s as modern an art gallery as in Soho.
Over two days, the firing behind the store becomes a
leisurely social event. Taylor Haynes, world traveler,
furniture designer and friend, takes some stoking shifts.
LoriAnn, Owen’s wife, keeps plenty of cold water on hand to
quench the stokers’ thirst. Owen’s father, Wade, who runs a
cattle farm, drops by to tell a few tales. His mother,
Shirley, brings dishes from a cookbook she’s writing.
Customers wander out to ask questions about the kiln and
recall watching Owen’s grandfather turn pottery on a wheel
decades ago.
By 2 p.m.
on the second day, the pyrometer reads 2,206 degrees. Owen
will hold the first chamber of the kiln between 2,300 and
2,500 degrees for the next six hours, a technique called
soaking. “You get a lot of colors and effects in the glaze by
soaking it,” he adds. If he soaks the pots for too long, the
glazes will run. If he doesn’t soak them long enough, they may
not develop the colors he wants. Nearly four hours later, Owen
peers through the firebox, checking the first row of pots.
Before pyrometers, his grandfather checked a kiln’s
temperature by monitoring the changing color of the flame at
high heat. He also watched the glazes on pots near the
firebox, something Owen still
does.
Two hours
later, he decides to raise the temperature to 2,400 degrees,
by feeding more wood to the fire. As the pyrometer clicks
higher and higher, friends and family count up-
2,397….2,398…2,399…At 8:01 p.m., the pyrometer reads 2,400
degrees. Owen and Haynes seal the first chamber, then move to
the rear of the kiln and begin stoking the back chamber. As
they do, flames shoot from ports in the roof and from the
chimney. The heat from the open firebox and the exertion are
such that Owen sweats despite the cool night air. “It’s kind
of like taming a dragon,” he says during a break. “The kiln
wants to shoot all this flame out, and you’ve got to control
it.” By 9:55 p.m. the dragon has been domesticated. Cones in
the kiln are bent to Owen’s satisfaction. He and Hynes close
the ports and contemplate on catching up on missed
sleep.
When Owen unloads the kiln three days later, the
results will be mixed. Several vases crack as he brings them
out. Overall, though, he figures the loss at less then 10
percent, considerably better than one earlier firing when he
lost about half his wares. “Every firing is a learning session
for the next one,” he says.
His pots pay homage to the Oriental shapes that his
grandfather made part of the North
Carolina tradition, but they also show influences
from Owen’s college studies and his travels in
Japan. He has made
his peace with modern amenities. He supplements wood firings
with a gas kiln. And he throws some pots using premixed
porcelain, a whiter clay, with glazes that yield vibrant
blues, coppers and greens. “There is change,” he observes,
“within a tradition.”
Rising early on a
gray morning, I drive two and a half hours into the foothills
of western North Carolina to
meet Burlon Craig at his home in Cat Square Road near
Hickory. When I pull up, the
door to his shop is open and I see Craig hunched over an
electric wheel. He is cranky this morning. His right leg-the
leg that held his weight while kicking a treadle wheel all
those years- is bothering him. He’s got pots to make and
little time for chat, but he agrees to talk while he
works.
Craig finishes a milk jug and sets it with others near
a rusted stove burning wood in the center of the shop. He
walks across the dirt floor to one corner, pulls a ball of
clay from a pile and sets it on an old-fashioned scale. Craig
and his son, Don, still dig their own clay from a site about
14 miles away, then grind it in a mill out back. That’s a
rarity; most potters today order their clay from supply
stores.
After reducing the weight, Craig takes the ball from
the scale and splits it with a wire attached to his workbench.
Then he slams the chunks of clay on the bench, kneading them
with thick, strong hands. He repeats the act again until he is
happy with the consistency. Returning to the wheel, he wets
his hands in a nearby bowl of water and centers the ball with
remarkable ease. If the clay is not centered the pot will be
lopsided when he pulls it up. He slaps it into place on the
first try.
He flattens the ball a little, then lowers a knob
attached to a long wooden arm into the center, creating an
indentation, and quickly pulls the sides up with his hands. In
a minute, Craig has almost magically produced a cylinder about
14 inches high. He thins the walls, slows the wheel and
pauses. “I don’t like that much,” he says. “I believe I’ll
widen that out.” A few more turns and the shape slowly
changes. Suddenly, he’s finished. He uses a piece of wire
attached to two pegs to cut the jug from the
wheel.
We walk outside to inspect his kiln, which looks like
Civil War ruin, though it actually dates to the 1930’s. Craig
got his start making pots by helping a neighbor grind clay and
collect wood when he was about 14 years old. “Every chance I
had, I’d get on the lathe and turn,” he says. After his
discharge from the Navy in 1945, he purchased the shop, house
and kiln for $3,500.
He’s been turning pottery ever since, though some
years, he concedes, he didn’t make much money because he had
few customers. In recent years, collectors have come to prize
his alkaline-glaze face jugs. Craig made his first face jug in
the early 1950’s. These days, he fires his kiln just once or
twice a year. Though slowed by age, he still turns every day.
“I get tired of sittin’ in the house,” he says. For years,
that restlessness was all that kept the alkaline-glaze
tradition alive.
The Saturday morning
of Hewitt’s spring sale breaks unseasonably cold and drizzly.
No matter. Nearly 150 people have lined the dirt road that
leads to his farm. Immense, handsome jugs and planters border
a path by the kiln. Hewitt has cheekily named one large
planter “Monsta V: The Resurrection.” It sells for $2,500. The
path leads to the barn, where pitchers, vases, plates, bowls,
umbrella stands and mugs are displayed.
Rob Hazelgrove from Raleigh is second in line and
not happy about it. “I hit the snooze button one too many
times,” he says. Hazelgrove had been first for the last
several sales, but Tom Rose of Raleigh arrived at 6 o’ clock
to beat him this morning.
A few
minutes before 9, Hewitt announces that customers will be led
single file down the path to the promised land of pots. “Don’t
pass the person in front of you,” Carol adds in a schoolmarm
admonition. “And don’t run or you will be sent back.” With
that, the sale begins. Customers do their best Olympic
racewalk down the path and fan out to claim their prizes.
Inside the barn, a long table of plates selling for $40 each
is emptied within five minutes. Gone, too, are most of the
vases, including some tall, elegant cylinders Hewitt has made
for the first time. Veteran shoppers grab first, filling sacks
or baskets, then retreat behind the barn to sort through their
hoard and do a little trading.
The sale is a sort of reunion among pottery collectors,
who eagerly compliment each other on their choices. Cashiers,
set up behind tables in an old pasture, ring up the sales.
Hewitt works the crowd, chatting with customers who have
become friends over the years. He calls his work “high-status
functional entertainment,” an acknowledgment that his rural
utilitarian pots command urban gallery prices-prices that mean
his planters may never hold soil or his mugs an ounce of iced
tea. “Potters have an elevated status here,” he says. “I’m
preaching to the converted.”
Preaching, that is, to converts like Tom Rose, who
grabbed a $650 platter for his wife. And Rob Hazelgrove, who
drove back to Raleigh with more than $1000
worth of pottery, including mugs, plates, a vase and a
planter. Before he leaves, he tries to explain the appeal of a
simple pot.
“There’s
something about Mark’s work,” he says. “It just speaks to you.
If you buy one piece your
hooked.”
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