Two Apprenticeships

There is very little worth mentioning about my work before my apprenticeships. I was a part-time metalworker, a sometimes carpenter, and a self-taught potter from Birmingham, Alabama who spent my evenings and late nights making pots in a garage studio. I often thought about going to art school, but had an uneasy fear that art in academic programs had become so broad that it was functionally meaningless, more theoretical than technical. I felt that I needed something more direct: a formal apprenticeship under a craftsperson who could teach me how to begin a viable career in the arts as well as a chance to gain real-world fluency in craft and design. To those unfamiliar with ceramics the term “apprenticeship” may be vague and dated, but I wanted something dated. I wanted to take an approach to education and community that felt traditional and rooted in a craft movement. My opinions on the subject have shifted by now, but at the time, I had no interest in what I thought of as “academic ceramics,” but wanted to achieve the technical skill I read about in the writers and craftsmen of the folk-craft movement, namely Bernard Leach, Soetsu Yanagi, and Shoji Hamada. I researched vocational art schools that produced Lucie Rie and Anni Albers, but without a shred of inherent artistic talent, I knew I needed a more focused education under a mentor. After crisscrossing America and Europe unsuccessfully searching for a studio to take me in, I settled back in Alabama for a few months while sending what felt like thousands of emails to potters, residency programs, and ceramics factories. I got a response from one of those emails, when, in a moment of astonishingly good luck, Lisa Hammond, MBE, a potter whom I idolized, messaged me that she might have an opening in her studio, but I would have to start more or less immediately. I was on a flight to London before I fully processed the offer. 

I had met Lisa once before in her studio, Maze Hill Pottery, where she was kind enough to invite me for a chat over tea after I emailed her incessantly for several months. I remember having a hard time focusing on the conversation, distracted by the hundreds of pots that lined the walls, floor to ceiling. It was a better collection than most museums. Shelves were lined with Lisa's own work, her contemporaries in Japan, and ancient Korean pots next to freshly thrown jugs ready to be handled. I had pictures of her work taped above my wheel for years at that point, and to see the work in the flesh while maintaining a typical English conversation about the rainy weather was difficult. She may have seen something in that, whether an obsession with the work or just someone at the right place at the right time, ready to work at a moment’s notice.

I remember little of those first days in the city, only able to withstand the uneasy truce of consciousness that arises when one is heavily sleep-deprived and even more caffeinated. I missed the train on my first day, due either to jet lag or the uniquely American confusion when confronted with an operating public transportation service. We had our first conversation at about ten in the morning over my sixth cup of tea of the day, and after another conversation about the rain, Lisa began to speak about my experience thus far and what I could expect for the next six months. An immediate feeling that I was not qualified for this role washed over me. I had worked odd jobs at welding shops, an iron foundry, and community studios, but never in a production pottery studio with this sort of output. I didn’t yet have the capacity for what Lisa would come to refer to as “really seeing” a pot, nor the skills to throw with the repeatability or precision that I would be required to succeed here. I hid this fear behind a confidence that, if nothing else, I would be stubborn enough to learn, no matter how many pots I’d have to throw out to get there.

After a few days of throwing my first attempts at the standard tableware of the pottery, I threw some pots of my own for her, which turned out to be, to date, the most humbling experience of my life. It’s an old tale, I suppose; an ignorant young artist thinks they are a big fish in a small pond, so moves to the big city in search of a bigger pond, only to find themselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I threw her a teapot, a few vases, and some tableware. The teapot was the achilles heel of an already doomed endeavor, as not only had I never made a teapot before, but would come to learn that as an American, I didn’t know the first thing about tea. She took one look and told me quietly, but sternly, “Don’t run before you can walk.”

And so I walked. I threw dozens of attempts at the standard ware each afternoon after the chores were done, all to be recycled again and again until I began to see the subtlety of the form. A friend once told me that throwing was a sort of dance, but this resembled nothing so much as a military march: conformity, repetition, synchrony, a superior whom I didn’t want to disappoint. Lisa didn’t teach by example, but instead would glance over every hour or so and spot a problem, correcting it immediately from across the room. I’d watch her from my wheel, phone held between ear and shoulder, throwing the most dynamic pots I had ever seen. The critique was always exactly what I needed to hear. We became friends during that time, and I traveled all over England with her to pottery festivals or gallery installations. We would share lunch over the workbench, down a few cups of tea, then get back to work on either end of the studio, her half becoming increasingly covered in the bright red clay she’d use, mine with the soft grey of the standard ware clay as board after board began to pass her inspection.

We would fire her little soda kiln, “Wee Bear,” whenever we could, and the larger “Big Mother” trolley kiln only before the annual Christmas open house. There was nothing I loved more in my time in London than firing those kilns – the heat reminded me of the foundry, but happily without the coal dust in my lungs. We’d fire late into the night, mostly so that we could get a full day of work in, but also to keep the studio free of onlookers from the railway just a few meters away. The unload would invariably have pots that showed my many mistakes, but also work that was dynamic and alive, bright but reserved, capturing that elusive “energy” that Lisa would try to explain to me while analyzing pots around the studio. 

With the change of the seasons in December came the change in the legal status of my residence in England. I was there for six months to the hour, almost every waking moment spent in that small studio tucked under the railway tracks, absorbing every lesson I could. It ended as it began: sleepless, rushed, and missing trains. I packed the morning I left, my 21st birthday, and left nearly all of my clothes with a friend so I could bring back a backpack full of pots. Lisa walked me to the station and told me she was proud of what I had accomplished during my stay at Maze Hill. It was hard for me to leave someone I respected and admired so deeply, but the great joy in apprenticeship is that the connection formed toiling away in small studios has a way of bonding, and both the mentor and apprentice retain an interest in the other’s life long after the pots are sold. I boarded the train to Heathrow with the joint feeling of accomplishment and disappointment that I had to be leaving so soon. I still feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for Lisa’s patience in training me the way she did. I was making terrible pots when I arrived, and only in the last few months found a rhythm and produced work to the standard of Maze Hill. There has never been a time in my life so condensed with failure, and it took a lot from both of us to translate that into something positive amid the daily work of the studio. 

In terms of location, my next apprenticeship couldn’t have been more different. I traded the bustling streets of London for the country roads of Southern Appalachia; my commute on the train became a walk through poplars and pines in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. I helped Matt Jones’ wood-burning kiln the summer before I moved to England,  invited to help as crew during the long process of packing and firing. I had fired a few wood kilns before, but the kilns were always treated with the sort of reverence and fear you would expect from the front row of a televangelist’s sermon, as if the kiln had the same loose grip on reality and temperamental nature, ready to strike a nonbeliever down if superstitions were not rigorously followed. Matt’s firing was the opposite. He knew where each pot belonged in the stacks to achieve its best surface, an expertise that came from many years of trial and error, as well as his years of apprenticeships in Connecticut with Todd Piker and North Carolina with Mark Hewitt. He had felled the wood we burned from trees on his land, and each pot we loaded into the kiln was thrown from clay dug behind the studio. The glazes were made from that same clay pit, crushed glass bottles, and sand from the creek across the road. Matt seemed to me someone who had “figured it out,” not only in his work, which has the elegance of Chinese porcelain and strength of American folk pottery, but also in his private life among his family and a gorgeous valley of the Blue Ridge. 

I flew back to the US in late December and began my apprenticeship with Matt on a freezing cold morning in early January. We spent the first several weeks felling trees, dragging them out of the woods with the tractor, processing them on the sawmill, and stacking them around the kiln shed to ensure they would be dry for the next firing in May. Next, we harvested and processed about two thousand pounds of clay from behind the pottery, ensuring we wouldn’t run out of fresh clay before the end of the nearly six-month-long making cycle. I began throwing at Matt’s with a false sense of security, having been through rigorous production training already, but I was again humbled and mistaken. A lesson I learned repeatedly in apprenticeship is that I never knew quite as much as I thought I did.

Matt threw his pots in a completely different way than I had learned in London. He threw standing up, using a small wooden rib to push the clay up rather than pulling the wall directly with his hand, the way his mentors taught him, a lineage that reaches back to Leach (in chronological order: Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew, Svend Bayer, Todd Piker, Mark Hewitt, Matt Jones). It took me hundreds of pots to get the hang of the movement, and hundreds more before I could produce a board of pots with even, thin walls. All the basics were still the same as in London, but the process of throwing was fundamentally different and asked much more of the clay, stretched nearly as thin as it could be while maintaining strength. I threw mugs, bowls, planters, crocks, vases, birdhouses, coffeepots, jars, pitchers, and teapots, all highly decorated either with a painted cobalt blue pigment or white slip. I combined what I had learned in London with Matt’s techniques of folk pottery, and slowly became more comfortable with this new style of making. 

Those early days of winter were peaceful, with no cell service yet wired to the cabin I lived in on the back of the property. I would start each day by lighting a fire in the wood stove and getting through whatever chores needed doing before watching Matt throw an example pot on my wheel, which I would try to replicate until it got dark out. Some days I figured out the form in a few tries, but some days I would be lucky to have a single good pot at the end of the day. I would not like to count the evenings I walked back to my cabin in the dark, trying to force myself to stop thinking about why I could not make the form I was given correctly, nor the mornings I would spend evaluating the work from the previous day before destroying the pots, recycling the clay, and starting again. There was something obsessive and restless about this sort of education, something that never quite allowed me to slow down as I should have, a mistake that forced me to end my apprenticeship with Matt after a year. After ignoring a sharp pain in my hands for months, I woke up one night with a wrist double its usual size, inflamed by bone spurs, tendonitis, and a cyst on my tendon that would eventually need surgery. The pain kept me from throwing, and so for three months I took anti-inflammatories to blunt the pain and made as many pots as I could, but eventually I had to leave to heal properly. I’m writing this now, one-handed, a few days after the operation, hoping for a quick recovery. 

In the months since my apprenticeship with Matt ended, I have realized just how much I learned in the year I spent with him. Not only did he teach me to make pots with a speed and fluency that I had never before seen, but he also taught me about forestry and land, about driving the tractor and using the chainsaw and sawmill operation, and how to build anything using only scrap wood and confidence. I learned how to process clay from the ground behind his studio and how to mix glazes with materials found on the property. I learned how to fire a wood kiln through the night alone and how to herd three escaped sheep in the middle of that night shift. Matt taught me what it meant to be a self-reliant craftsman who does not make excuses for the difficulty of living a life of craft. It takes grit just as much as it does passion when you are three weeks into splitting wood and still have trees to fell, when your hands aren’t making the pots correctly, when the well runs dry and you have to descend into the dark to fix the pipes on a freezing February day. This life of scratching out a living for yourself out of the work of your hands can be a hard one; it can be discouraging, anxiety-inducing, and troublesome. For all the hardship inherent in this craft, there is the feeling of walking into the studio on a cold morning and lighting the wood stove. There’s the feeling of throwing the first pot of the day with clay that is just right and watching boards of pots begin to fill the shelves. There's a community here too, one that is more accepting and tight-knit by nature of the difficulty of the work. The most important thing that Matt taught me is that all the effort is worth it. 

Both apprenticeships changed my life in profound ways, but the past years have been the hardest I’ve known. Embarking on a traditional apprenticeship is something like walking a tightrope between education and employment, and for the sake of sanity, you can’t look down. Whether you realize it or not, those long hours teach more than any direct lesson ever could. Not all the lessons learned in an apprenticeship will be applicable directly to your own work, but the ability to work closely with a craftsperson who knows the trade inside and out changed how I thought about not only the craft itself, but the life that surrounds it. Like any vocation, living a life of craft requires sacrifices and pain and uncertainty in times so hostile to the arts. It is worth it to seek that depth, that connection to something material, and apprenticeship was the way I found that depth. Apprenticeship is not a way to make money, even if you are doing weeks of manual labor that feel oblique to the main goal of making pots. Every day is spent in education of one sort or another, and that education is more often than not equally supportive to both mentor and apprentice. The days were long and hard, and many weeks passed where I did not make a single thing I was proud of, but even in the hardest days, I saw the work with the eyes of two potters who have devoted their lives to the craft, and so saw the life that I could live where my life and community were full of passion. 

I could not have worked for Matt Jones without the support of Studio Potter's Grants for Apprenticeship Program, which allowed me to immerse myself fully in the apprenticeship. The work Studio Potter is doing to support formal apprenticeships financially is vital to the health of the craft and tradition of education. Without the generational passing down of knowledge, the culture begins to lose the connection to the past that previous generations have enjoyed as a matter of course. There are indeed many ways to go about an education in the arts, and this was mine, for which I am forever grateful to my mentors and to Studio Potter for their support.