Feel free to slurp, I’m a big fan of slurping,” said Alp Ilsin of Budala Pottery in Belmont. So I slurp. Loudly.

We drink a lot of tea out of exquisitely crafted pottery—tea cups or mugs, some with handles, some without. We drink so much tea I have to sheepishly excuse myself a few times during the interview before my bladder explodes.

Ilsin pours more tea from his one-of-a-kind teapot into one of his signature teacups, and it occurs to me that he gets to eat and drink out of beautiful, hand-crafted pottery on a daily basis.

“There’s no way I can drink out of a regular mug now, right? It’s such a repulsive experience for me, I would rather just not have anything,” he said, laughing. “I don’t know how people necessarily do it. But at the same time, I didn’t think about it until I got into it.”

Ilsin is part of a new generation of local ceramic artists drawn to a scene that began in the mid-’70s. After decades of being consigned to craft markets, pottery is catching on again, in part because it’s an age-old practice that intersects with our everyday lives. You can call it a craft or an art, a skill or a medium. The potters I interviewed for this story learn from and teach one another. Their work is turned into vessels their friends eat and drink from. They compose forms from spit, clay, water, and fire.

“Pottery is a lifestyle as much as it is anything else. You’re not going to get rich doing that but it can be very satisfying,” Tom Clarkson said. “And I like the tradition of the village potter, you know, making pots for people as favors, for friends to use.”

Clarkson, who is well-known as a kind of father-of-pottery in town, opened his studio in 1978 and then began teaching ceramics at Piedmont Virginia Community College. His pottery proteges include Ilsin and Suzanne Crane of Mud Dauber Pottery in Earlysville, among others.

Along with Nelson County pottery guru Kevin Crowe of Tye River Pottery and potter Nan Rothwell of Nan Rothwell Pottery in Faber, Clarkson has been here since the inception of the present day potter community in Charlottesville and the surrounding areas, back when such a community was non-existent. As I dug for the roots of the pottery scene, nearly everyone I spoke to asked me if I had spoken to Crowe yet. If Clarkson is the teaching father of the community and Rothwell its mother, then Crowe is the high priest. He arrived in Nelson County in 1976 at a time when people wanted to get back to the earth, back to living off the land and self-sustaining.

“I wasn’t very interested in being self-sufficient,” Crowe said. “I was interested in making pots, and the only way I could afford to do that was to buy a piece of land really cheap and build my own house and studio, and I didn’t know how to do either one of those, but when you’re young, you have got this beautiful nexus of complete ignorance and overconfidence.”

So he built a house. And a studio. It took four years, during two of which he lived in a tent on the property and went three-and-a-half without electricity. And this was the guy who was not very interested in communing with the earth.

“I think that regardless of who we are, where we are, every artist is looking for their voice, and you already have it,” Crowe said. “You need a certain amount of time in solitude to hear that voice and work with it, and that’s another challenge in the digital age, because we’re so available that it’s difficult to create a space in which you’re uninterrupted and can actually be comfortable being alone with yourself.”

Back to the land

When I went to visit him at his home, Crowe’s beautiful earthy mugs, plates, and bowls lined his kitchen shelves.

“I like the idea of making objects that will support the ritual of sharing a meal together,” said Crowe. “And in that conversation about the relationship we have with each other, about what’s on the plate, all those things are a byproduct of actually slowing down to be attentive to the experiences that we’re having at the moment, almost like civil disobedience in this vast age.”

The potters’ everyday use of their own work makes it clear that pottery is different from many other art forms. Over the past four decades, Crowe’s property in Nelson County has certainly given him solitude and the space to create, but it has also given him a site for his kiln.

Firing the kiln only happens twice a year, but when it does, it is a momentous occasion. Most potters fire a few hundred pieces at a time, but Crowe’s wood-fired kiln holds a couple thousand pieces of pottery which take 10 days to load. The firing itself can last eight days, but the real fun begins when the crew shows up around the fourth day.

“For us, stacking the kiln is just as important as throwing the pots,” Crowe said. “When we throw them and they’re ready to go in the kiln, they’re only barely half done. Everything is contingent on the stacking and the firing. And in my case, it’s really contingent on having a really good crew.”

Crowe’s crew ranges in age from 18 to 73, and now after his 25th firing, about 60 percent of the crew come from the Charlottesville area. The process requires eight people, two at a time working six-hour shifts. The firing is meticulously planned so that each pot interacts with the flame, but at the same time, because each piece of burning wood is different, so will each pot be unique and impossible to duplicate.

“You have to surrender to something larger than yourself when you’re firing a wood kiln,” Crowe said. “You’re firing everybody else’s pots and not just yours. There’s an element of surrender, there’s an element of magic and surprise, but all that is also based on careful planning, careful stacking, and understanding what a combustion cycle is.”

Here the world slows down to tending to the kiln and spending six hours with one other person while the rest of the world sleeps. The world created by Kevin Crowe and his crew during that week of firing is about delicious vegetarian food, laughter, renewing relationships, and making pots.

“What unites everybody is the pots, the firing. So you have younger potters starting out on their aesthetic journeys talking to people who have been down that road a long time, and I think it’s really great for the younger potters to see we older potters still as excited as they are about the possibilities,” Crowe said. “That that creative process matures and it gets richer but it doesn’t really wane much. That desire to go back and get it right will keep you coming back to the kiln time after time.”

Potters value this ethos of sharing between generations in a way that perhaps other types of visual artists do not.

“I have friends who are painters who say, ‘Painters don’t get together and share recipes or talk about places to sell,’ and I think the overwhelming ethic among potters is ‘get it right and pass it on,’” said Crowe. “Because everything that I do is the result of having received information and techniques from the old ones that are long gone, and passing that on to the next generation is my responsibility.”

Rather than hoard their personal recipes for success, potters of that founding generation in Charlottesville truly want to spread their knowledge around.

Ken Nagakui of Karematsu Pottery learned from Crowe and he shares his teacher’s connection to the land. As a child Nagakui climbed a small hillside near his family’s home in Japan nicknamed Karematsu, after which he named his studio. On the hill, he occasionally found pieces of ancient earthenware pots dating back to the Jomon era, which spanned roughly from 10,000 to 3,000 BC. Jomon pottery was so named for the cord-pressed patterns on the surface of the clay.

Although Nagakui is influenced by this formative experience and Japan’s rich history of earthenware, one of the oldest in the world, he is more captivated by the creativity that emerged from this ancient period than by the pots themselves. He didn’t start his own career with clay until he moved to Charlottesville in 2010.

Ken Nagakui of Karematsu Pottery. Photo: Elli Williams.

He might not have expected a career in pottery the first time he placed his hands on the wheel, but looking at his earth-infused pots sitting on the table next to the remains of ancient Jomon pottery from his childhood, it is hard not to want to see something of the inevitable.

“It was almost like my hands knew,” Nagakui said of the first time he worked with clay. “It led me to things I didn’t expect.”

What he didn’t expect is that while, as he says, he “cannot escape” those fragments of ancient earthenware ceramics, it is that infamous red clay endemic to central Virginia that has inspired his newest pieces.

“I want to create something different,” Nagakui said. “If I make pieces without using local clay, I feel like I am cheating.”

Nagakui digs up and filters the red clay and then mixes it with a commercial clay to use on the wheel. His experiments mixing other local clays, including white and yellow clay from a clay mine near Staunton, have produced interesting results and deep colors from the various minerals present, such as iron which creates a speckled effect. The clay inspires the pottery’s aesthetic.

“Nature is one big source. I like utilizing local clays; that is what other potters are not doing, and I wonder why. That is the fun part, actually—connecting to the soil and the environment and nature here,” he said.

Crowe sees ceramics as an art form that encompasses all of these unique influences while simultaneously steeped in tradition and mainly unchanged.

“I think that as opposed to fine art, where there is an incredible pressure to be original, which often produces more novelty than real work, that working in the vessel tradition, functional pots, it’s all been worked out,” he said. “Even the way that we fire, the way we make pots, hasn’t changed much in 3,000 years, so it’s a slow process of learning to let your own voice and take on the tradition come out.”

Clay city

While Crowe’s kiln has become something of a national pilgrimage site for traditional potters, Clarkson’s PVCC pottery class has remained an incubator of dreams for students.

“I’m so happy to share what I’ve learned and have somebody else discover what a wonderful material clay is,” Clarkson said. “One of the things I try to get everybody to understand is the possibilities are endless.”

Ilsin was one of Clarkson’s students and his biography, like Nagakui’s, demonstrates the diversity in the local pottery scene. Ilsin has been influenced by his upbringing outside of the United States—in his case Turkey. After moving from Ankara with his parents to attend college in Charlottesville, Ilsin took Clarkson’s ceramics class to fulfill a humanities credit but kept coming back for more.

His Turkish heritage is a steady influence on Ilsin’s pottery.

“Almost all my bowls are a combination of a negative and a positive curve, and that was something I’d seen in the Anatolian Civilizations museum in Ankara. There’s a lot of use of negative curves in the pottery that’s found in Anatolia,” Ilsin said. “What you find is that things come from your subconscious and all of the shapes you see growing up you end up starting to create. It’s really much later in my process that I’ve consciously designed a form and then decided to make that. Before I was really just sitting on the wheel and seeing what came out.”

While Nagakui lets the Jomon pottery of his youth meld with his artistic intentions in a subconscious soup, Ilsin has consciously channeled Turkish influences to create new forms, such as his whirling dervish pot, which highly resembles the form of a Sufi dervish in motion.

“The whirling dervish just kind of came to me; it was the first form that I knew I wanted to make. My success rate is like one to two in four, so it’s a pretty heartbreaking experience actually,” he said.

Clarkson achieves a uniquely indecipherable pattern by throwing clay against a tree to imprint the bark onto the clay.

“Playing in the mud—that’s the key,” Clarkson said as he opened a drawer revealing a hefty collection of found objects he uses to create his patterns.

His former mentee, Suzanne Crane of Mud Dauber Pottery, creates fossilized leaf patterns using plants from around her Earlysville studio.

“Part of the pleasure of this job is that I get to take my dog and go out looking for new things that have come up in the woods or a particular specimen of fern for a pot I have to make that day,” Crane said.

Her highly detailed process, self-described as just a little obsessive compulsive, involves pressing the leaves perfectly flat onto the clay and painting liquid porcelain on top before pulling off the leaf to create the fossil-like impression of its outline, veins, and even spores. According to Crane, it also “involves a lot of spit.” She creates the intricate triangle patterns by pressing a churchkey one painstaking point at a time into the clay. At this point she had to stop and marvel at my youth before explaining that a churchkey is simply a beer bottle opener.

While many of the artists’ I spoke to create work with overt references to the earth, Ilsin is taking environmental inspiration in a different direction.

“My process is pretty resource heavy,” Ilsin said. “I do what I can now to offset any carbon I’m putting out but I feel confident that I can actually be carbon free.”

In addition to using water from a rain barrel and reclaiming clay scraps and glaze, Ilsin is currently working on building a solar kiln, which would derive its energy from a 10 to 12′ satellite on top of his studio. By tracking the sun horizontally and vertically, the satellite would concentrate solar energy down into the kiln, heating the pot inside.

He hopes to extract from the solar kiln similar results to pit firing by using various kinds of plants, which when packed with the pot and heated to an extremely high temperature, would create unique effects on the surface depending on the chemical composition of the plant. Bamboo, for instance, would produce a “shiny flash,” according to Ilsin, due to its high silica content.

“I am trying to make it very affordable, because I want to build one for myself but I want it to be replicable,” he added.

budala13 — Alp Ilsin’s pottery reflects a collision of influences: physics theories and ancient Turkish designs. Photo courtesy of subject.

Sixteen years after first coming to Charlottesville, Ilsin has developed his own process for firing a crystalline glaze on his pots that, to his knowledge, no other potters fire the same way. These crystals are what give Ilsin’s pots their ethereal quality and undoubted recognition of belonging to him.

Ilsin draws this inspiration from a source of his heritage much closer and more direct than Turkey.

“This is the influence of my dad essentially, talking about quasi-crystals and stuff like that. It’s strange actually—he was here in the ’60s getting his Ph.D. at UVA, growing crystals for his Ph.D. work, and 50 years later, I’m here, and I’m growing crystals, but with a completely different aim.”

His father’s influence is clear—diagrams cover chalkboards and line the studio walls. Phrases like “solid state physics” and “five-fold symmetry” get thrown around and fly right over my head.

Ilsin’s cerebral approach to his work underscores his desire to make things heretofore unmade, the way that he wants to make them.

“One thing about me is that I’m lazy. And not necessarily lazy in a bad way, but when there’s a hardship, if there’s a wall, I don’t want to take down that wall—I want to go around that wall,” Ilsin said. “Finding more efficient solutions to problems is actually where creativity lies. Instead of saying I need to do this thing because this is what you do, you say ‘no I’m not going to do that thing because I don’t like doing that.’ That’s what I’ve done with the mugs, with the handles.”

The handles of his mugs, referred to by customers as brass knuckles because of their rounded indentations, have, according to Ilsin, kept him afloat as a potter over the past few years. When he realized that he did not want to pull handles for his mugs by hand, he decided to make his own handles by punching shapes out of a slab, modeled after an Ottoman mug he saw in a museum in Portugal.

Handing me a mug he said, “This is an especially uncomfortable one here,” referring to the awkward grip created by the many indentations in the handle. Ilsin has worked to modify the original Ottoman design to become more round and therefore more comfortable to hold.

However, novelty presents its own problems when it comes to selling the pieces.

“I like making things that haven’t been made before,” he said. “There are some unique challenges to selling things that haven’t been made before. You go to shows and people look at it and say, ‘Oh that’s so cool,’ but do they want to take it home?”

Fine lines

“Pottery has a negative connotation in a lot of worlds,” Randy Bill, the founder of City Clay, said. “But as far as I know, clay is just a material; it’s what you do with it.”

Because UVA doesn’t teach pottery as a fine art, serious practitioners of the skill have been drawn to the area organically. Bill founded City Clay in 2011 as a place that would allow beginners to discover the art form but also give more advanced artists access to some of the expensive equipment they need. Charlottesville potters look to City Clay with the hope that the more people learn about clay, the more they will appreciate its value.

“There is no differentiation. I rail against the notion that craft is not art. It truly is one in the same,” Janice Arone, potter and co-owner of The Barnswallow said.

However, the perception can affect what customers are willing to pay for a piece of pottery.

“Most of the people are asking for the same price as a Walmart price,” said Nagakui.

Suzanne Crane put it a little more diplomatically: “There has been a lack of opportunity for Charlottesville citizens to see and understand high end, really well-made craft, and therefore to understand the prices,” she said. “So City Clay is fantastic. The more people who take classes in clay, the more people understand clay.”

As Clarkson made clear, it’s never easy for ceramic artists to make a living, but there is a sense that people are starting to evolve their expectations about what handmade pottery should cost.

“It’s our fault. I don’t know necessarily how to make people appreciate what I do because as soon as I start talking about my process, it’s so technical, you glaze people over,” Ilsin said, no pun intended. “With the development of City Clay, hopefully the appreciation is rising.”

Not only is the appreciation rising due to spaces like City Clay and the program at PVCC, but participation is as well.

PVCC art professor Tom Clarkson, whose work is often inspired by materials and textures he sees in nature, has mentored many of the area’s best potters, including Alp Ilsin of Budala Pottery in Belmont and Suzanne Crane of Mud Dauber Pottery in Earlysville. Photo: Elli Williams.

“I think people get their hands dirty and see what a wonderful material clay is. The more people who can get involved the better it is,” Clarkson said.

Whether it is novelty or finding one’s voice, these makers are undeniably creative. They use plants and tree bark, local red clay, car mats, crystals, spit, and beer bottle openers to create their art. Each maker’s work is as unique as the hands that created it.

While the potters themselves are constantly innovating and evolving, so is the Charlottesville pottery community as a whole.

“Charlottesville was a hard town to sell pots in,” Crowe said of his past 40-some years in the area. “It’s great with 2-D, film, literature, poetry, theater, but it didn’t have much of a nurturing support base for ceramics when I got here. And that’s changed somewhat.”

As a young face in the ceramics community, Ilsin sees a bright future clouded with new types of challenges. How do you sell your pottery in a crowded online market? What new technologies can augment the handmade forms? But he’s hopeful that a resurgence in the appreciation of the concrete manifestations of the creative processes some people call craft will help the ceramic artists. He even has a sense of humor about it.

“I think that more than surviving it will grow. We might actually be starting a new wave now. There’s a new generation of people who value handmade work,” Ilsin said. “And perhaps that in the end will give way to 3D printing.”

Kevin Crowe may have arrived a rash young man with a singular dream, but the scene that has grown up around him has made him a wise old hand. For Crowe, the timeless value of his art form lies in its utter practicality, the fact that his pottery winds up in the hands of the friends and family that make up his community, providing the opportunity for moments to share food, to share a drink, to relate to each other, and to replenish.

“It was a slow shift, so I wasn’t aware of it year to year, but now when I look back I see that’s it’s been profound,” Crowe said. “I think those quiet subtle differences that sort of change our compass, the way we relate to each other, that we relate to culture, are the ones that really have a lasting effect, that take a real strong hold. They’re not subject to change in aesthetics or fads or fashion or quick cultural shifts. I think that they’re deep and they’re profound and they’re the ones we tend to chew on.”