In 1986, I moved from New York City to rural Western Massachusetts to make pots and build a wood kiln. I was able to buy a shipwreck of an old place that has an unusual feature from which I took the name for my pottery—a stone pool that Russell Conwell, turn-of-the-century preacher and educator and founder of Temple University in Philadelphia had built in 1893. The farmhouse, where Conwell was born, is rich in history—it had been a stop on the Underground Railroad during Conwell’s childhood, and he remembered John Brown and Frederick Douglass staying at the house.

While working on the place, I dug up a shard of a gray salt-glazed four-gallon crock that happened to have the makers’ stamp on it. “Hastings and Belding, Ashfield Mass.” It turned out to have been made only about 15 miles from my home and studio, at the middle of the last century. It got me thinking about pots that were made, bought, used, broken and disposed of within a specific region and the connection this implies between the community of users and makers. It led to my decision to move and restore the old shed (the one where fugitive slaves had slept) for use as a gallery to welcome local people at the pottery. It also prompted a deeper interest in early New England potters and their wares. In particular, the pots made from 1790–1830, wonderful swelling volumes of ovoid forms with their firing scars and flashing, spoke to me as powerful vernacular objects.

Before moving to Western Massachusetts, I had been living in New York and making sculpture while supporting myself as a carpenter. The turn to pottery answered the vexing problem that I had been unable to resolve with my sculpture: Where does the stuff go? On a pedestal in patron’s living room? In front of a building? In a museum storage vault? As a potter, on the other hand, my work would be held and used; it would stay in the main places of people’s lives. And, I could control most aspects of creative production—the concept, making, finishing, marketing and selling of the work, in a process and within a scale that preserves and enhances the humanity of the creative experience. As my work has evolved I continue to be compelled by the challenges of domestic pottery, but I have also recently become interested as in making larger scale work that is more appropriate to the scale and abstractness gallery space than the kitchen.

“Some Kind of Lark”: the Stonepool Community

Stonepool Pottery evolved as a group situation—other potters have always been around. I began working with and firing with Michael Kline and Sam Taylor in about 1988. Michael, Sam, and I came up as potters together. We began working together, building a kiln at my place in Worthington and setting up a cooperative studio with little training, knowledge or experience. Instead of much schooling (Michael has the only degree in ceramics—or in any visual art—among us) or apprentice experience, we constantly made pots and fired together, and over time, learned from each other’s successes and failures. Ideas bounced around. Picked up by one, left by another, we often can’t recall who started a particular motif or form. One time recently when the three of us were having dinner at Sam’s house because Michael was in New England teaching a workshop, Sam said of the oval bottles that he and I were both making at the time, and which Michael had made in the past, “It doesn’t matter who started it. The question is, who’s going to finish it?” There has always been that playful competitiveness, pushing each of us forward, and pulling us back, too, when necessary.

In 1989, we all took Michael Simon’s workshop at Penland School together. He played a pivotal role for all three of us in bringing coherence and the beginnings of an understanding of the great and expressive possibility of domestic pots. Michael Kline was already familiar with his work, as Ted Saupe, his undergraduate teacher, collected his work. When I arrived at the Penland workshop, Michael had 15 or so of his pots out on a table. I was overwhelmed by the sense of scale and power that they projected. In a gaze I took in how they were both completely compelling as objects in themselves, and absolutely certain about the context in which they belonged: the home. Most sculptural objects had for me failed to convey simultaneously both such formal aesthetic power and clarity of purpose. His pots projected an uncanny power and scale well beyond their hand-holdable size. This was a message I was ready to receive: it is possible to create objects with great complexity and meaning, with a clear and direct relationship to human activity. It has taken me quite a while to find my own way in the territory Michael Simon opened up for me during those weeks and since, and I am very grateful to him for it, and to Sam and Michael for companionship in exploring this difficult and exciting terrain. Michael shared my studio and kilns for a decade until he moved back to the Penland area in 1998. Sam fired here for a dozen years until he built his own kiln nearby in Westhampton.

Sam recalled in a piece he wrote for a show we all had together: “The three of us talked constantly about our pots. Sometimes it involved two of us, sometimes all three, and sometimes I held a silent monologue contemplating what the other two had just said. I remember on occasion showing up at Mark’s studio with pottery to glaze and then fire in his kiln. As the boxes got unloaded, Mark and Michael would descend on my pots with hungry, curious eyes. Between them, they questioned and commented; conversations to which I was more often a silent spectator… At moments when they would both throw up their hands in complete incomprehension, I would dig in my heels—“knowing” that someone else would better understand the pot or that I’d make one they would better understand next time. Now… proximity no longer allows for constant bantering about pots and process. Conversations have been distilled to minimalist speaking, where the articulate conversation seems to lie more in the pots than in our words. Our pots lined up next to each other inspire short terse phrases: “Nice,” “Yes,” “Hmmm,” “What?” Where our sentences are more like sound bites, our pots continue to contain an elegant conversation from which we draw sustenance.”

In an essay for the same show, Michael Kline recounted bumping into Michael Simon more than a decade after the workshop, at a utilitarian clay conference. He expressed surprise to see Michael there, to find he was really still at it, a professional potter, and asked him, “What is this—some kind of lark?”

Cast of Characters

In addition to Michael and Sam, many people have participated in the life of the studio and the firing of the kiln over the years. We have had many guests. Louise Harter, who now has her own studio and kiln in Connecticut, fired with us through much of the 1990s. Keith Kreeger from Cape Cod is a frequent visitor. Scott Norris, a weaver and writer, hasn’t missed a firing since the turn of the century. Ellen Huie and Chuck DeWolfe were my early studio assistants. Fergus Moore, Steve Theberge, Michael McCarthy and Maya Machin each worked at Stonepool as apprentices for three years. Daniel Garretson is the current apprentice.