Outsider Insider

Plate by Matt Jones

North Carolina is an incredibly exciting place to make pots. The longer I stay here the more this becomes evident and there is no better place to be reminded of this than at the Catawba Valley Pottery and Antique Festival. In the wind and rain both collectors, dealers, and potters all assembled in Hickory North Carolina to buy and sell some really fantastic pots.

It is events like this that slowly cement North Carolina into a more permanent place in my life. Over the past few months I have been going back and forth a lot about whether to return home to New England where I have the draw of family and childhood nostalgia, or remain here in North Carolina which now feels like more of a home and community than anywhere else.

What is so amazing about the Catawba show is the group of vendors. You can walk the isles and see work by Thomas Chandler, Collin Rhodes, Robert Mathis, and Daniel Seagle, and then turn the corner and see contemporary traditional wares that have been directly influenced by these old makers. Around the next corner there will pots that seem to have less in common with the old but instead push North Carolina along its evolutionary path as one of the most diverse and eclectic places to make pottery in America.

As I walked though the booths I started thinking about what the role of outsiders is an environment that is so steeped in these old multi generational potteries and makers. There are times when I envy that traditional past. My family has a tradition as well but I have followed it in a slightly different way. Instead of the galleries on 57th St I would much prefer wandering the booths at the Catawba show where I see work that excites and inspires me in a way that feels whole and good.

There were clay traditions in New England as well, but with the industrial revolution those have mostly died out and for reasons unknown to me, the old traditions where never transformed into a thriving contemporary movement of art pottery like that which Seagrove is so famous for. That is not to say that fine ceramics are not being produced in New England at all, only that the culture of pottery does not rival that of North Carolina.

But being an outsider is not bad. Henry Glassie said it best in an piece about Mark Hewitt, one of the most successful outsiders in North Carolina,

"Outsiders are necessary to the preservation of excellence in artistic tradition. They pull others into their tortured, exhilarating acts of adjustment, rearranging the lineaments of the little world, questioning the status quo, finding new directions, making the tradition healthier, fresher, better"

Excerpt from the essay "Mark Hewitt: Outside" by Henry Glassie