From the owner’s camera roll

Pottery Photos

The owner has been photographing the strange, satisfying corners of pottery since 2023. Some of these are from The Clay Hole. The older ones go back to his first little studio. Kiln disasters, glaze tests, trimming spirals, a dining table that stopped being a dining table. His notes sit under each one.

New photos land here as they happen. The collection only grows.

Some people have a dining room table. This is what mine was doing that week.
A big platter that dried faster than it should have. Every one of those cracks showed up overnight. Hours of work. Pottery keeps you humble.
Glazing day at The Clay Hole. The hands matched the mural without even trying.
Glaze testing night. It started as a few jars and ended as the whole island. My family was thrilled.
The same vase, thrown over and over, each one a little bigger than the last. The little one at the end is the size of a grape.
The day an outlet decided it was done. Nobody got hurt. The wall needed help. I have checked every plug in the building about a thousand times since.
A bowl woven from clay strips, sunning itself next to the test tiles. Weaving clay is slower than it looks, and it looks slow.
Six glazes auditioning on spoons. The drips are the interview.
Thousands of little pinches, one at a time, in four colors. The clock in the corner says 1:44. I choose not to say which 1:44.
From my first little studio. Slab work, technically. No, that clay did not go back in the bag.
Rows and rows of finished vases. Every glaze in this picture behaved differently in the same kiln. That is glaze for you.
Trimming shavings around a fresh foot ring. This is the most satisfying mess in all of pottery and I will not be argued with.
A piece probably went into this firing with a little moisture still hiding in it. The kiln has exactly one rule about that. My kiln, my load, my lesson to teach better.
A loaf of marbled clay, mid twist. Cut it open and every slice is a different painting. That is the entire magic trick of agateware.
A whole table of bud vases waiting their turn. Every shape in this picture started as the same boring lump.
A fired drop of glaze, up close. Trapped bubbles, frozen mid rise. Chemistry made this. I just held it up to the light.
Same lineup, straight down the barrel. This angle is the reason the whole row of tables got cleared.
Dried blue glaze, flaking off a plate on its way back into the bottle. Good glaze does not get thrown away. It gets recycled.
Barrel cleaning day. I would like to say I drew the short straw. I took the picture instead.
Coils, laid one at a time, in three colors. Somewhere around the fortieth coil you stop counting and start listening to podcasts.
A big one, minutes off the wheel, still soft enough to ruin with one wrong look. The tool stuck in its side is holding a spot, not fixing anything.
Unfired pottery meets concrete floor. There is a sound this makes that every potter knows. It is followed by a very long silence.
The same crowd from above, mushroom included. Looking down at a table like this is the whole reason to keep going.
Clay ropes woven over a form. It looks like a noodle disaster at this stage. That is normal. It gets a haircut later.
Every potter on earth has this exact cup. Nobody remembers filling it. Nobody will empty it.
Plates drying in a spiral on the driveway because the sun was free and the shelves were full.
A puzzle of pottery, because apparently making it all day was not enough.
A hand at the end of a hand building session. It washes off. The habit does not.
Colored clay, stacked layer on layer like a sandwich nobody gets to eat. This block became a lot of striped pots.
What the wheel does to slip when you let it spin a little too fast. I could not make this pattern on purpose if I tried.
Underglaze day at my first studio. Morning light through the garage door made every one of these look better than it had any right to.
Loading day. The big vase barely cleared the lid. Everything you see here goes in on faith and comes out however the kiln was feeling.
I looked down into the tool jar and it had accidentally become a sculpture. So I shot it like one.
The same blue, closer. Dried glaze cracks into little islands like a riverbed. Prettier than some finished pots. I do not make the rules.
The splash pan at the end of a long throwing day. Beautiful work happens directly above this. This is the receipt.
Hundreds of little vases, each one with a rolled up note inside. It looked like a tiny paper city by the time it was done.
Old scraps drowning on their way to becoming new clay. Reclaim is the closest thing this craft has to a second chance.
Hands after a wheel session, mid dry. There is a stage where your own hands become a texture study. This is that stage.
Marbled blocks, freshly cut. You never fully know what the stripes did inside until the wire comes through.
Glaze pooled into circles during a firing. No brush did this. Heat did.
An agateware bowl that exploded in the kiln and took its own shrapnel with it. All that marbling, gone in one loud moment.