It’s uncommon enough to be really good at throwing ceramics on a potter’s wheel. How does a person become an expert in throwing pots that are the size of a first-grader? In Kevin Crowe’s case, it was a simple matter of economics.
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Kevin Crowe says it took a lot of trial and error to learn how to throw large pots: “Every time I thought I’d arrived at a technique that was really successful, I would usually find that technique described in detail in a book about pottery from 300 years ago.” In pottery, he says, “It’s all been done before.” |
In 1982, Crowe, having lived in Nelson County for six years, had finally finished building a large wood-fired kiln on his property. Inside, it was over 6′ tall, and Crowe couldn’t afford enough kiln shelves to fill the upper 3′ of that space. “I had to make 3′ pots to fill the void, because you can’t fire efficiently [with an open space inside the kiln],” he says. Though the huge pots were hard to sell, they taught him a lot about throwing. And they got him noticed, too. “I started picking up a lot of requests to do workshops,” he says.
Fast forward to today, and Kevin Crowe is one of a handful of names associated with the art of large-scale ceramics. He’s taught workshops from Wales to Utah, Vermont to Florida. Potters contact him from all over the country with questions. “I get e-mails and I get phone calls—how to fire larger ware, how to throw a particular way, how to achieve a certain form,” he says. “I also get calls at very odd hours from far away about firing kilns. Somebody’s stuck at a certain point, and it could be 3 or 4 in the morning”—since wood-fired kilns require continuous tending for periods of up to a week. “It’s sort of a hotline.”
At this year’s conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, Crowe, 61, and his mentor Jack Troy gave a talk on wood firing, accompanied by the screening of a documentary about a firing at Crowe’s kiln in 2008, to which he’d invited potter friends from around the country. Back in the 70s, when he told his urban-dwelling college pals that he was moving to Nelson County, “they thought I was dropping off the face of the earth,” he says. Not so, it seems.
