About the potter

Born in Upstate New York, I graduated from Oberlin College having studied philosophy & French. Before that, back in junior high, I’d started spending a lot of time in a metal shop, learning to forge, weld, make & use 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.

The work I was doing back then seemed archetypal, like something people had always done, though I never thought of it as ‘creative’ particularly. I put it aside & then after college, working as a bike messenger, river guide, outdoor educator (and yes also as the nightwatchperson for Haystack School of Crafts), then finally as a classroom English teacher, I started pursuing apprenticeships to working potters.

For the last twenty-five years I've been in the studio full-time. My workspace has evolved from a solitary place to go & get away from everything, just return to that formative pursuit of the useful & beautiful, to a workspace that is centrally located in Santa Fe, offering classes, pots for sale, and a place for a few potters to work independently.

I learned clay by doing, through apprenticeship. So I love being able to offer internships & work-trades to motivated people who are finding their way to clay, especially those who confess they’re not ‘creative’, just drawn to the work. The discipline. Speaking of which a dedicated group of these people do most of the daily chores to keep our studio going - cleaning, reclaiming clay (we produce our own claybody), loading & unloading kilns, mixing glazes, teaching classes.

Always a work in progress, the studio keeps changing, sometimes offering weekend workshops & lots of classes, and then some years, like this one, supposedly quieting down & allowing for more solo worktime, a return to the solitary place to get away from everything.

  • Theo Helmstadter

About the pots

“All that is visible must grow beyond itself, extend into the realm of the invisible.”

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 restrained warm colors of the Colorado Plateau, the monumental forms of its rocks, tumbling from the mesas, the generous deposits of sand and clay, the arroyos that change shape with each rainstorm, the visible presence of the distant past, the Jurassic era, when this whole place was sea, and seashore.

Clay is formless, abundant, and represents the final decomposition of the landscape, of the rocks that shape mountains. I'm fascinated by this paradox, the age and durability of clay, its permanence 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.

The pots are designed for use. They are food-safe, microwave, oven, & dishwasher-safe.