But first, in Boyle County, a group of dedicated potters have embarked on a project to breathe new life into a kiln that had been dormant for decades.

In partnership with the Art Center of the Bluegrass, a new generation of artists is reigniting a traditional firing process and helping ensure this enduring craft continues to thrive.

[music playing] An anagama kiln is one of the oldest methods used to fire pottery, dating back to the 5th century in East Asia.

Anagama is the Japanese word for cave kiln, a long, tunnel-shaped chamber carved into the side of a hill.

Fed continuously with wood, the fire burns for five to seven days without rest, with potters tending to it around the clock to reach its optimal temperature of 2,200 degrees.

And in Danville, that same fire brings this artist community together.

The whole reason a sane person would go to all this trouble to make pots is the mark of the fire on the clay.

You can almost visualize the path of the fire through the kiln.

The wood ash collects on the clay over the course of the firing, and then it melts as it gets to the temperature, and it forms these beautiful ash glazes.

and it forms these beautiful ash glazes.

This kiln was built by Steve Powell and his ceramic students at Centre in 1993.

I discovered it about 10 years ago.

It was kind of a collision of good timing, good luck, and goodwill that the project took off and happened so quickly this time around.

It's just super exciting to see something that was started 30 years ago come back to life through the work of Jonas Hurley and so many others.

We started work on it August 2025, reconstructing the kiln, insulating it, rebuilding the chimney, rebuilding the firebox.

I was thinking, “What have we gotten ourselves into?” We put the Kaowool around it with the chicken wire, then the high refractory, and then on top of that the cement to help seal in the kiln, to get it nice and insulated, to help hold all that heat so the pots can do what they need to inside the kiln.

The kiln had two long spines of bricks running along either side with a long tail that made it resemble a dragon.

It seemed an appropriate name for something that you used to get to 2,200 degrees.

Since it's not been fired for 20 years, it's almost a rebirth or development of a new community.

We have people that are gone now that played a huge part, and it's almost like part of their soul lives on through this kiln each time you fire it.

That legacy lives on to the next group that comes in.

That teapot, I can get in here.

We have a wide variety of potter that is participating in this firing, so we've got the full range of small and really large stuff.

I mean, it's a giant game of Tetris where you're trying to fit pieces and get levels to line up.

One bad stack, and all of a sudden you have 100 pots laying in rubble.

We're actually getting into the zone that's going to have a whole lot of heat coming to it.

And you really want to make it so that the flame kind of has to work to get through the kiln.

It kind of snakes through, and that also helps distribute the ash through the pottery.

Most of us that are here today are just starting to get a glimpse of the potential of what this process can do.

It's going to be a learning tool for all of us.

[clapping] I'm relieved that we are here, and nervous and excited and curious to see what pots are going to come out.

Curious to see if we get it up to temp that we want to get it up to.

[music playing] This is day five, and today we are trying to climb.

It's really fired well.

Now, anagamas are good designs.

That's why we're still using them after 1,500 years.

Watching the fire as we get further along in the stoking process, we'll rely less on the temperatures and more on what the kiln's doing.

The flame in the chimney tells you that the entire chamber is pressurized with fuel, with hydrocarbons in the wood.

When it dies out, that means it's time to stoke.

We had 600, 700-degree difference between the front of the kiln and back of the kiln.

Well, as we started to stoke it down the side port, as you load it, we started to make the temps be more congruent all through the kiln, and we've actually done that to where it's only 20-degree difference.

You can't fire an anagama kiln by yourself.

There's six-hour shifts that we're doing with three to four people per shift.

You initially want fairly dense, mixed hardwoods up to 2,200 degrees.

After that, you'll move primarily to pine, which burns very hot and very fast.

It takes a lot of fuel and a lot of people to keep the kiln that hot.

[music playing] There's nothing like opening day.

A lot of potters refer to opening a kiln as either Christmas or sometimes it's Halloween, sometimes it's April Fool's.

You're never going to open this kiln and see the same results.

Seeing the first section, I was like, “We're headed towards some really awesome pots.” I am surprised and delighted that this kiln fired so well, so efficiently, so fast.

For a kiln this size, we can do this in a five-day firing.

That's pretty fast.

[scraping] Oh, yeah.

This next guy got hot.

[laughs] You can see this is a gorgeous example of where the fire hits the pot and melts and creates this surface.

But then, as you rotate the pot, you can see where this area of the pot is dealing more with the flashing of the fire.

So, if this was fired in a different style of kiln, the colors would be more consistent, but that's the beauty of wood firing.

Just a lot of Bob Ross happy accidents that happen.

[music playing] [scraping] Oh, what do we got here?

We got an assemblage there.

Be careful.

As it fires, it fuses, so now the artist has a decision.

Do I break it and create two pots, or do we save it like this, and maybe it's a symbol of the firing and what happens?

You can see the ash collection just naturally from the kiln.

I have some Shino glaze on it as well.

And, yeah, I think the kiln did its thing and deposited a lot of ash on that.

That was towards the back of the kiln.

In my opinion, if this came out of an electric kiln, I'd be like, “Oh, okay, there's a little cut.” And now, instead, with the wood firing, it just has beautiful kisses of fire on it that excite me 50 times more.

There's different aesthetics in wood firing that different people prefer different things.

The wood firing process has so much to offer artists and potters that you can hope for certain things, but the kiln's going to give you what it wants to give you, and it's just nice to see such a variety.

I'm just super happy with the whole kiln.

Kind of amazed at the quality of results we got.

[music playing] Couldn't have expected such a community of folks to gather around and spend awful hours doing hot, awful labor.

But for the end result, I think it's worthwhile.

A lot of times, as a potter, you find yourself very isolated.

To finally be able to come together with a large group of people that share a similar interest and passion, that's by far one of the treats of firing an anagama kiln.

[music playing]