(peaceful guitar music) - Clay, to me, when I'm working on it, I feel the full history of humanity when I'm working with it.

And pretty much from the first days that I started working with clay, there's something very seductive about it.

It's the smell of it, the feel of it, all of it fits together and it really does produce in you like a scope of historical, you know, drama.

(hands slapping) (peaceful guitar music) Generally what I do is I start with a ball, nice ball of clay.

So just like little Jack Horner, I'm going to stick my thumb in the middle, use my left hand as a wheel head, and I keep turning the ball and thinning the wall evenly.

Okay, at this point, I start sweeping from the bottom to the top.

And I'm still working on thinning the wall evenly.

(spatula slapping) Clay is really, really integrated into our lifestyle.

You can work it like wood, you can work it sculpturally, you can throw with it.

I mean, it's just so versatile.

You find it everywhere.

It's in food.

It's in, you know, the tiles on the space shuttle.

I like everything about it.

It's an entity unto itself.

It's pretty much a universe.

(peaceful guitar music) I'm going for a really organic, archeological look.

That's what I'm after.

I've always been interested in archeology.

I like the look of them because they look archeological.

They look like they could have been dug up.

But, I also like that the clay reads as a painting sometimes, because you can actually make it look like a painting just by how the glaze is applied and what your structure is when you're building the pot.

I'm after cracks.

I want the pot to crack.

I want the edge to be rough.

I want that because that's the style work that I produce.

(peaceful guitar music) The idea behind the wood kiln was to provide a community setting where people could come and wood-fire pieces.

There was no college in the area that had a wood-fired facility.

So, what we did, is we built this kiln and it was not just me, a whole group of potters worked on it.

And we got the kiln built and I had the shed built to house the kiln and the wood.

And in March of 2020, the kiln shed burned, through no fault of my own.

But, we're working on trying to get that set up again and trying to make it available to other local potters.