Claymates
I think one of the most delightfully ridiculous things we do as humans is to collect things.
The form of collecting I am most afflicted with I learned from my parents and grandparents. They were artists and anthropologists, and this vocational mix yielded a certain type of collection of objects.
Ceremonial masks from my grandparents' field work in New Guinea hung on the walls of their Vermont farmhouse, inventions and art my mother and father created filled the converted Baptist church my parents raised us in. Solid things, made well and with care, that weathered and seasoned with the patina of a life's unfolding.
As a maker of things, it’s always my hope that the objects we make or source at East Fork join that pantheon—crossing over from “stuff” into the realm of meaning.
Like the Velveteen Rabbit, they become real not just through their design or materiality, but because they’ve been loved and used and carried through time, bearing witness to the full breadth of our unfolding lives.
This year’s fall collection is a little love letter to that impulse. To the thing that happens when we give or receive or find something that does manage to cross over to the land of the loved and looked after.
1. A small swirl-ware jar Alex made as an apprentice at Mark Hewitt’s Pottery
2. One of the first notebooks from East Fork, holding glaze recipes, early sketches of the kiln and pottery designs, recovered from the flood
3. Copper electric wire bent into the shape of a man, used in a scale model for an early collector who commissioned a lighting installation
4. The first monogram (AM) stamp Alex made during his first apprenticeship
5. An early edition of the Hobbit, read to Alex by his dad
6. A shard with John Vigeland's signature pulled out of the creek by Alex after John smashed the pot—for an unknown reason—by rolling it down the creek bank behind the original site of East Fork
7. A pot made by John, bearing a sketch of Alex on one side, and John on the other
8. A small ceramic beetle fired in the East Fork wood-kiln, modeled after a set of clay beetles Alex’s grandmother gave him, which were said to ward off evil or nuisance spirits
