About the Studio
Since 1998, Green River Pottery has made useful & beautiful pots for the collector & for everyday use.
Moving from our quiet beginnings in Chimayo, New Mexico, down into Santa Fe, ten years ago the studio began offering one-time classes for travelers, then weekly classes, internships, and now we have two workspaces accommodating about fifty students & potters who work on their own, help load & fire kilns, take classes, and provide the energy & inspiration that keeps things evolving.
About the potter
Born in Upstate New York, I graduated from Oberlin College having studied philosophy & French. Before that, in high school, I spent a lot of time in a metal shop, learning to forge, weld, make tools. I loved the pursuit of the useful form, and the way this intertwined with the pursuit of beauty itself. My teacher, Murad Sayen, told me this was a basic idea - if you make a knife or a wrench and it works really well, is useful, chances are its form is good too. It is beautiful.
After college, working as a bike messenger, river guide, outdoor educator, and classroom English teacher, I started pursuing apprenticeships to working potters.
For the last twenty-five years I've been in the studio full-time. Since I learned clay by doing, through apprenticeship, I love being able to offer internships & work-trades to a few people at a time who are just starting, finding their way in clay, as I once was.
About the pots
The pots are stoneware - a rugged, durable, clay. They are fired to a high temperature (2350 Fahrenheit) in the kiln and during the long, intense, ‘reduction’ process the clay and glazes are transformed - darkened and given depth. I love how this process, especially since I start from a local clay I dig in nearby Abiquiu, New Mexico, is not quite predictable or controllable.
A lot of the ceramics that inspire me are old, and seem to form, as clay so easily does, a connection to the distant past. Many great pots were made by potters long ago who worked rapidly, skillfully, prolifically, meeting the needs of daily living. I also get a lot of inspiration from the vast empty northern New Mexico landscape - the quiet, the restrained warm color, the large scale & the sense of time — the presence of the distant past.
Clay is formless, abundant, and represents the final decomposition of the landscape. I'm fascinated by this paradox, the age and durability of clay together with its faithfulness to the fleeting, passing, present. Time is a basic element of my work - my goal is to evoke the feeling of time, and the sense of passage from one time to another.