Jack Troy | Studio Potter

Author Profile

Jack Troy

Jack Troy is a potter, writer, and educator. Troy taught at Juniata College for thirty-nine years and has led hundreds of workshops across the country and around the world. He has published two books, Wood Fired Stoneware and Porcelain, Salt Glazed Ceramics, and two books that are a collection of poems, Calling the Planet Home and Giving It Up To the Wind. Jack has written many essays and articles for major publications in the field, including Inscapes, a privately printed tribute to David Shaner. He has been recognized by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

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Sources of Sodium as Vapor Glaze

Salt, by virtue of its wide distribution and relative cheapness, is the traditional source of sodium in vapor glazing. Until comparatively recently it was the only feasible material available for such purposes.

Object and Image

When I was a senior in high school, a photo of a young woman from a neighboring town appeared as the centerfold in a popular men's magazine, and a discussion took place among some of my schoolmates who had been friendly with her.

Delivering Color

Every potter's Christmas stocking should at some point contain a Coddington magnifier, for the same reason that bird-watchers use binoculars: until we see ceramic surfaces or migrating hawks through magnification, we can't imagine how much we're missing

The Secret Life of Pots

For the past twenty years I have sold work at a large arts festival near my home.

Woodfring: Learning From the Past

The first brick laid for any wood kiln signifies a particular conviction: a commitment to an ongoing labor-intensive process ultimately tied to a vision for personal work.

Bernard Leach: An Earnest Presence

When I made my first pot in 1962 I was 24 and a high school English teacher near Swarthmore, Pa. Bernard Leach was 75; /4 Potter's Book (APB) was in its ninth printing, and Leach was visiting New Zealand and Australia, where, in a radio broadcast, he said,

Fires of Innocence, Fires of Experience

Kindling our interest in woodfiring may begin incrementally, like striking a match, looking through a spyhole at heat-light as intense as a strobe that won't blink, and feeling the warmth in a cup that keeps being new, no matter how many times we pick it up.

Sharing the Fire: Woodfiring Among North American Studio Potters

I am pleased to be among all of you today; to be part of this grand celebration honoring an iconic elder of our clay clan. A program of this scale is unparalleled because Don Reitz is without parallel.

Containment

A short poem by Jack Troy.

The Sculpture of Life Forms at Juniata College

Several years ago, I became intrigued with Art Forms in Nature, a book of drawings by Ernst Haeckel (1834-^9) depicting microscopic creatures such as radiolarians (a type of marine Protozoa), foraminifera, and diatoms.

Pennsylvania Passages: Part One: Jack Troy

Between 1972 and 1975 I built this house. I didn't borrow any money to build the house, I did it all with money from pottery sales. I had taken a fifty-percent cut in my teaching salary at Juniata University, so I really worked hard.

The Most Valuable Clay in the World

No matter at what age we are introduced to ceramics, as long as we keep working with it, clay will be introducing itself to us, sometimes gloriously, exceeding our expectations; other times mocking us, as if to say, “Not that way, dummy!”

BOOK REVIEW

Jack Troy reviews Janet Koplos's new text, What Makes a Potter: Functional Pottery in America Today, featuring fifty interviews with contemporary potters.

Book Review: Commeraw’s Stoneware – The Life and Work of the First African-American Pottery Owner

This cinematic volume will be steep reading terrain for all but the most empathetic, relentlessly inquisitive seekers of pottery forensics. Lacking such scholarship, crocks and jugs sit mute – defying us to imagine their origins: that synapse between touch and its evidence. To date, we have no comparable documentation of a single potter’s life.

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