About the Exhibition

Linked to the preexisting North Carolina traditions of Moravian and St. Asaph’s earthenware, Eastern Piedmont salt glaze, and Catawba Valley alkaline wares, the potters in this show demonstrate the ways traditions mutate over time. While honoring their regional ancestors and aspects of traditional practice, they acknowledge outside aesthetic influences as well as ever-changing cultural and economic forces.

The show examines how six potters living and working in North Carolina responded to a traditional apprenticeship training with Master Potter, Mark Hewitt, and how their individual identities subsequently reasserted themselves.

From mugs to massive, life-size pieces, the exhibition illuminates how Hewitt and his North Carolina-based former apprentices continue to bend components of a vibrant Southern aesthetic. Within this fluid regional framework, his former apprentices Matt Jones, Daniel Johnston, Alex Matisse, Joseph Sand, Lara O’Keefe, and Stillman Browning-Howe honor the skills at the core of their training while bringing their separate aesthetic identities to the table. The similarities and ongoing variations within this pod of potters as they continue to interact with each other and the tradition, will be on display. 

While sharing a pottery family resemblance, each potter within this community has a unique voice. Discrete identity precedes an apprenticeship and reasserts itself once the training ends. Prior aesthetic influences and impulses gain traction as time and careers advance. 

Thrown Together examines a contemporary “Apprenticeline,” with a lineage going back to Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew, through Svend Bayer, Clive Bowen, and Todd Piker, to Hewitt and this former apprentices. Separate from Warren Mackenzie and “Mingei-sota,” these potters offer a different reading of the Mingei Movement, an interpretation based on a specific, extant, American pottery tradition, as well as the use of local clays and glaze materials, high production of functional wares - including very big pots, and large wood burning kilns. 

As an extension of the NCECA national conference, and given Richmond’s proximity to North Carolina, this show will give viewers from across the US and beyond the opportunity to see a contemporary expression of one of America’s great regional pottery traditions.

Participating Potters 

Mark Hewitt was born in Stoke-on-Trent, England where his father and grandfather were managers of Spode. He apprenticed with Michael Cardew in Cornwall and Todd Piker in CT before moving to NC in 1983, where he built a large wood-burning kiln. He’s trained 25 apprentices, six are still in NC. He makes functional work using local clays and glaze materials, specializing in big pots.

https://hewittpottery.com

https://www.instagram.com/markhewittpottery/

https://www.facebook.com/mark.hewitt.9469

Daniel Johnston’s work pushes vigorously against the boundaries of scale, while his installations of multiple big pots, including one permanently at the NCMA, ask questions about the relationship between art and craft. He was raised in rural NC, and after apprenticing with Hewitt worked in a traditional big pot making pottery village in Northeast Thailand. He lives and works near Seagrove and is represented nationally by the Gerald Peters Collection in Santa Fe, NM. https://gpgallery.com/exhibitions/daniel-johnston-2/ 

http://danieljohnstonpottery.com 

https://www.instagram.com/danieljohnstonpottery/ 

https://www.facebook.com/daniel.johnston.5811877 

Matt Jones lives in Western NC, outside of Asheville, where he’s been operating his pottery and raising a family for 26 years. In addition to a full line of domestic table and garden ware, he has a reverence for the great jugs and jars that were the backbone of the utilitarian Carolina potters in the 19th and early twentieth centuries. He is known primarily as a decorator, inspired by the natural world and Chinese brush painting and European and American reinterpretations of blue on white painting that became commonplace 400 years ago. His slip trailing technique under alkaline glaze is equally impressive, and he has occasionally turned his decorative sensibility to political satire and social criticism.

http://jonespottery.com/home/

https://www.instagram.com/mattjonespotter/

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000845156356 

Alex Matisse moved to the South to attend Guilford College but dropped out after a year to pursue an apprenticeship with Jones and then Hewitt. After three years of apprenticeship, he founded East Fork Pottery outside Asheville, NC, where he built a large wood kiln and workshop.  In 2013 he was joined by Johnston's apprentice, John Vigeland, and together with Matisse's wife, Connie, they launched a line of gas-fired dinnerware. The line caught on and the three eventually moved their growing business to Asheville and sold the original site of East Fork to finance the company's expansion into industrial manufacturing. Today East Fork employs 115 people and produces upwards of 500,000 pieces of pottery a year. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/style/east-fork-pottery.html 

https://www.eastfork.com

https://www.instagram.com/eastforkpottery/ 

https://www.facebook.com/EastForkPottery

Joseph Sand, originally from Austin, MN, lives and works near Randleman, NC, with his wife and children. He makes brightly colored functional wares as well as powerful, large, angular sculpture, using techniques acquired after his apprenticeship with Hewitt, attesting to his curiosity and prior training as a sculptor at UM, Duluth. 

https://www.josephsandpottery.com/ 

https://www.instagram.com/josephsandpottery/ 

https://www.facebook.com/JosephSandPottery 

Lara O’Keefe was born in Pittsboro, NC, where she now has her studio. She studied ceramics at Warren Wilson College and then worked at Mangum Pottery in Weaverville before a three-year apprenticeship at Jugtown Pottery in Seagrove. With her vibrant imagination she splices the decorative and ornamental onto strong functional forms at her pottery, while being a single mom of three girls - a teenager, and twin tweens. Lara also teaches at the local community college and a clay studio in Chatham County.

https://www.okeefepottery.com

https://www.instagram.com/okeefepottery/ 

https://www.facebook.com/lara.okeefe.14

Stillman Browning-Howe, the most recent graduate from the Hewitt Pottery, produces compelling work using the complexity of long wood-fired surfaces to highlight his simple, elegant forms. Stillman has been exploring these longer firings since 2021 when he used local clay to make the bricks to build his own wood-fired kiln. Alongside his partner and potter, Hannah Cupp, their energy and excitement is palpable as they build a pottery from scratch near Seagrove

https://stillmanbhpottery.com/ 

https://www.instagram.com/the_barefoot_potter/?hl=en

https://www.facebook.com/gerald.browninghowe