Pennsylvania Passages: Part One: Willi Singleton

This is an interview that was part of Pennsylvania Passages 1 that was conducted during March, 2000 in eastern Pennsylvania, principally around Philadelphia and as far wast as Huntingdon. Interviews with potters and ceramic artists in western Pennsylvania from State College to Pittsburgh and Erie appeared in issue Volume 29 Number 1. The comments published are excerpted from extended archival interviews conducted in situ with each person, and constitute in their entirety part of the Studio Potter Archive of American Potters.

My father accepted a job in Kobe, Japan as director of a center for exchange students. I went to Japan to find work as an apprentice, and met Janet Leach when she had a show at a department store in Kobe. Janet had studied at a place in Tamba in the 1950s, and generously offered to intro­duce me to the lchinos as a possible apprentice for them. So I became an apprentice with Shigeyoshi lchino in 1982. Shigeyoshi had actu­ally been an apprentice with Bernard Leach for three years. Leach had met the lchinos through Hamada, and Hamada's group often stayed with the lchinos when in the Tamba region.

I started as Shigeyoshi's apprentice. It was hard for me, mostly I think because of my own incompetence. I couldn't speak Japanese and didn't understand a lot of what was going on around me. I didn't know what to expect. Lots of things happened, such as a faucet breaking off in my hands, and tools that seemed to disintegrate.

I just wasn't aware of how flimsy things were. They began treating me like I might break anything I touched. Boy, I was dan­gerous for a while, like a bull in a china shop. After a while I seemed to get the hang of things. I did general upkeep chores, like sweep­ing and splitting wood and pugging clay. There was an electric wheel I was assigned to, and I made smalI sake cups if there wasn't anything else to do. I was expected to practice, not contribute to the work­shop's production, as my cups were thrown back to be reconstituted.

After a year I decided the end of my time in this workshop had come. I went back to Kobe and studied Japanese language for eight months. I studied pottery in Mashiko with Tapo Narui in 1985, then met Shiro Otani and eventually became Otani's assistant when he traveled to the United States. I had learned that the spectrum of appren­ticeships in Japan can be from one extreme or the other, or anything in between.

I was married in 1987 and we came back here to Pennsylvania to set up a pottery at my grandparents' place in Kempton. We turned the chicken coop into a workshop, then built a climbing kiln. I had expected to use just store­bought clays and glazes the way all potters in the U.S. did, but my wife said, No, we will find our own clay and use 

ashes for glazes. Now we use wood ash, corn stalk ash, rice ash, clay out of the creek for slips, and the clay from Hawk Mountain for making pots. I use 2/3 Hawk Mt. clay, 1/3 mixture of stone­ware clays. The ash comes from the fireplace. It takes a lot of corn stalks to make an ash. I use 1/3 cornstalk ash, 1/3 wood ash, and 1/3 feldspar. I often put it on top of other glazes. The rice hull ash is more refractory with twice as much silica.

I have a Mashiko-style climbing kiln with four chambers, based on the design of the Tsuneo Narui family. I only use three or four cords of wood to fire, and usually fire only three chambers. The firing is 36 hours for four chambers, a little quicker for three chambers. I preheat for several days. Ifire three times a year. Lots of friends come to help me out. I've got a hearty crew to help.