- [Randy] Hi, I'm Randy, personally inviting you to put the Greater Eastside Remodel Team to work on your next remodel, renovation, or construction project.

Always above and beyond, it's our promise to you at greatereastsideremodel.com.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) (gentle music) - [Reid] I came to pottery very accidentally.

And changed my life.

It's just a physical reaction to the material.

It's just very captivating.

50 years later, here I am.

(bright music) - The city of Tacoma is named after an active volcano, one officially known as Mount Rainier.

But long before it was named for a British Rear Admiral, the mountain was called Tahoma by the Puyallup people who have lived in its proximity for thousands of years.

Settlers anglicized the indigenous name to Tacoma and built a busy port around Commencement Bay.

By the end of the 19th century, the city was booming with industry.

Tacoma felt more blooming than booming when I made a spring visit to Potter Reid Ozaki in his home studio.

Built in a sunny corner of his leafy backyard, the small windowed space holds all the ceramic essentials.

Okay, so here's where it all happens.

- Yeah.

Welcome to my studio.

- Thank you.

- I have two wheels here.

Typically, I use one for trimming and one for throwing.

Depends on which one's cleaner.

- Yeah, good.

- [Reid] Tools.

I use a table for hand building and glazing.

- [Brangien] Here's a few examples of completed work.

- Right.

You never know what you're gonna get out of the kiln, so sometimes it takes a while.

You have to live with the work a bit.

It's about expectations.

If you're expecting something and you get something else, you may not fully appreciate what the result is until you have a chance to look at it and live with it a bit.

- [Brangien] Each of his artworks begins with a lump of clay.

Today, Ozaki is working on the stonewire pieces he's known for, shaping raw material into vessels both beautiful and functional.

- So I want to get the clay centered on the wheel so that when I open it up, there'll be a equal amount of clay on any side of the center of the rotation.

When you're just beginning to learn to do pottery on the wheel, this is typically the part that most people struggle with.

If you don't know what you're going to make, you never know when you're done.

And clay has a sort of a finite working time.

So if you keep fiddling with it, it's going to fall down.

- Seeing Ozaki work with clay on the wheel feels like a direct illustration of his relationship with nature, his hands physically holding earth as its spins.

After a pot is thrown on the wheel, the excess clay is trimmed.

Remaining moisture is removed with a bisque firing before the glaze is applied.

And this is called shino?

- This is a shino, yeah.

- And what does that mean?

- Well, it's a glaze with a Japanese origin.

It's primarily feldspar, and I can edit these still, and if I don't like where that drip is going, I can just erase it later.

(gentle music) - You were originally from Hilo - Born in Hilo.

- And that's the rainy side, right?

Did you feel like that was drawing you towards our rainy climate?

- So this, you're gonna laugh.

What drew me to Washington were the Olympia Beer commercials.

- What?

- [Narrator] This is the Pacific Northwest, the water country.

- [Reid] It's the water.

- [Narrator] The natural artesian water of Tumwater, Washington.

- [Reid] These beautiful landscapes with the grasses blowing in the wind and thought, "Hey, that's a nice place."

- Oh my God.

Have you made any beer pitchers?

- I made tumblers, but yeah, no.

- So after you've got all this glazed, where are we going next?

- So this is ready to go in the kiln.

- The final step is glaze firing, which adheres the glaze to the ceramic and changes the color through chemical reactions and high heat.

After these forms spend 13 hours in the kiln at around 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit, the clay turns from brown to a textural black that looks like cooled lava from his Hilo childhood.

(gentle music) Ozaki holds the memory of his grandfather's bonsai practice in his Japanese garden in Hawaii.

With his wife, Emma, he has created his own backyard sanctuary.

Here he's planted Japanese maples, a ginkgo tree, and botanical specimens he's collected over the years that now fill the outdoor space with star-shaped flowers and heart-shaped leaves.

You obviously have a lot of Hawaii influence in your work.

What would you say are the Pacific Northwest influences on you?

- So the seasonality is one thing that is important in Japanese aesthetic, and so I love that about the northwest.

The spring, fall, even the gray.

Even the gray, even the gray.

- [Brangien] Nature appears in even his earliest work, black porcelain pieces with meticulously stenciled ginkgo leaves.

His stoneware vessels range from Japanese teapots to closed forms that look carved from tide pools themselves, some with removable pebbles to match.

His minimalist vases made for Ikebana, the Japanese flower arranging tradition, are glazed in a northwest palette.

Ozaki created his recent soda-fired works, Crackly and Red-Orange at a friend's kiln in Gig Harbor in view of the local volcano.

I know you're working to bring the pottery community together here.

- Yeah, so that's something I've been doing for the last two years.

I have a co-host, Christina Batiste, and we have been hosting gatherings of veteran potters like myself, introducing ourselves to some of the younger potters in the area, trying to create a connection between generations.

(gentle music) One of the things that's happened with ceramic education is it's become more retail, where people are opening up studios and teaching the necessary skills, but not necessarily the history.

There's so much to know, and it's a medium that's been around for thousands of years, but there's always new ways to mess things up.

I thought that was missing.

And so that's what we wanted to create with the salons, is to present some history, to have people talk about who their teachers were, who their teacher's teachers were, and you know how that all connects us together.

- [Announcer] "Art By Northwest" was made possible in part with the support of Greater Eastside Remodel.