The J Schatz studio, listed on the national register of historic places, was originally the dye house for the Weybosset Mills in Olneyville, Rhode Island—a neighborhood of Providence mentioned over and over again in conjunction with things that are new, interesting, and just plain cool happening in PVD. Jim Schatz and Peter Souza of the J Schatz design and ceramics studio are major contributing representatives.

The two met in Florida three years ago, and later moved Schatz’s studio from Upstate NY to Los Angeles. But, as Souza remarks, “We felt really isolated in the city, so we took a trek last October and we scoured New England and the Berkshires looking for a community to be a part of. We fell in love with Providence; we found this gorgeous building that we were able to work and live in.” It is an ideal spot for them, with the roots they’ve put down, and are expanding upon, exhibiting their commitment to the area. The 160-foot long tunnel of a brick building houses two live-in suites on one end, their production studio in the middle, and their own apartment in the back. A continuous line of dormer windows along the top stream in natural light.

“We found a really great community here of artists and designers and folks that really welcomed us,” affirms Schatz. “We found a nice place to be.”

J Schatz studio | Photo by J Schatz

All work happens on site. Schatz started his ceramics career with the Star Egg Nightlights that project astral spots of light into a room, and then kept moving that ovoid shape forward through his work. It shows up in the company’s outdoor products of polished, modern, and colorful bird houses and feeders. The lighting line features table lamps, pendants, and uplights, all made of high-quality materials: glossy, brightly colored ceramics and rough, metallic, urban stoneware. The Porcelana Uplights are a standout, translucent porcelain cylinders with a glossy interior that throws the warmest tones of pink or orange.

Form following function is evident in all of the J Schatz products. Everything is beautiful to look at and touch, but these are real usable products, down to the brutalist coffee maker. “That happened because there was a Chemex coffee maker in our studio that kept breaking,” says Schatz of the origin of that design. “This is before I met Peter. His first visit to the studio he’s like, ‘What’s that?’, and I said, ‘It’s this coffee maker that I made because I was so frustrated with the Chemex breaking.’ And he said, ‘This is something we should be making.’ It looks crudely made, but it’s actually very ergonomic and nice to use. It’s now a production piece.” The dark, craggy look of the set is precisely what everyone’s morning cup of coffee should look like.

Brutal Coffeemaker | Photo by J Schatz

The two have recently purchased yet more property in the neighborhood for their Airbnb stock: a cottage with a terrific view and outside space. It will get the full J Schatz makeover, everything from tableware to room dividers, to vases and bird baths. “We’re putting the finishing touches on two more rooms and we’ve outfitted it completely in J Schatz custom work and new pieces,” explains Schatz. “And we’re going to have a yard and a garden, too.” Expect more outdoor work and housewares from them in the coming season. “Peter and I have a vision that complements each other,” Schatz says. Souza agrees. “We’ve integrated our products into environments that other people can share.” It’s a real treat to be able to live among a design team’s work, and the environments that J Schatz creates are a treat indeed.

Porcelana Uplights | Photo by J Schatz

J Schatz – James Schatz and Peter Souza, principals
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top photo J Schatz exterior | Photo by J Schatz

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Matthew Towers did not imagine clay would be his muse. Originally from Poughkeepsie, New York, he studied theater at New York University, where he received his BFA. An ardent lover of the stage and deep history of classical performance, he originally pursued the flooded industry of acting in NYC in the 1990s. Finding more frustration than inspiration in that scene, Towers began taking classes to pique his interest in other creative fields; that’s when he discovered the visceral, malleable, and erotic motions of clay. “For me, when clay and porcelain are very wet, it has this ability to fall, to crumple in unexpected ways like hair or clothing on the floor,” he says. “I was taking these classes and fell in love with how it moved and felt. And later on, when I began to learn more about the science of it, glazing, firing, etcetera, I felt inspired and fascinated.”

Towers did not compromise his love for classical theater for pottery and sculpture—he fused them. His current body of work, Catastasis, is named after the third act of a Greek play, in which the climax of the play surrenders itself into a series of complications that set up the fourth act, the catastrophe. “I like that pottery and sculpture have this sort of long, mediated history like the theater,” he says. “During the Sung Dynasty, considered the golden era of ceramics, the Chinese were the only ones who knew how to fire and glaze porcelain. It took Europeans hundreds of years to figure it out.”

Catastasis Vase, Porcelain, 24 inches, 2015 | Photo by Nathan Carnes

The Catastasis series consists of sculptures that fold and bend in lines that are visually textural, but unexpectedly smooth to the touch. Towers sees them as the expressions of carefully manicured wigs, discarded clothing, and the body in motion. His sculptures reflect his interest in male sexuality, especially the ways that hair has historically represented changes in culture. In early European culture, for example, long hair represented male virility; later, men began wearing flamboyant wigs as an expression of wealth and fashion. For Towers, these shifts in hairstyle mark a subversive and historically relevant change in cultural perspectives about gender and sexuality. His use of soft pastel glazes, countering bold red, and rusty oranges, coalesce into something beautifully erotic, bold yet somehow fragile.

Outside of his sculptures, Towers also creates beautifully ornate and functional pottery such as bowls, cups, and plates that reflect his stylization that is both contemporary and classical. “I view making functional pottery as an extension of my need to decorate and ornament my surroundings—as a testimonial about who I am, who I want to be, and how I view the world,” he explains. His work stretches away from pottery as a traditional craft and highlights its capacity as functional fine art, believing that pottery has the capacity to be subversive, to reflect culture, and to challenge it via humor and hyperbolic expression. “I employ decadence, sensuality, humor, and flamboyance to toy with identity as well as the meaning of function.”

Catastasis Vase Form, Porcelain, 2016 | Photo by Matthew Towers

Matthew Towers is currently an Associate Professor of Ceramics at the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford, where he teaches a range of classes including traditional pottery, abstract sculpture, and clay and glaze chemistry. His upcoming show, Reaction Bubble, opens at Real Art Ways in Hartford beginning March 4th, and is a collaborative project between Towers, interdisciplinary duo LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus), and choreographer Deborah Goffe.

Matthew Towers, sculptor
Hartford, CT
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Top photo Crush Bowl, porcelain, 15-inch diameter, 2015 | Photo by Roger Castonguay

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At Three Wheel Studio in Providence, Rhode Island, glossy finishes and dreamy colors dance and swirl over exquisite handcrafted ceramics. In addition to works by Chen, Three Wheel features beautiful creations in glass, wood, and metal by both local and out-of-state artisans. The whimsical pieces and thematic collections are delicious to the eyes: from trays and vases to the most perfectly imperfect tea kettles and mugs you’ll ever see, you’d be hard-pressed not to find something to suit your fancy. (Or, you know, your family’s fancy, as these one-of-a-kind items would make a darling holiday gift. Just look at those hand-painted birds with the puffy cheeks for crying out loud!)

Ceramic plate from the Flower, Birds and Berries series by Dwo Wen Chen

A RISD graduate and native of Taiwan, Chen injects his life story into each of his pieces, all of which are created on site. While the Flowers and Pigments collection is an extension of his graduate work, the Chicks and Roosters collection is an homage to his childhood, when his mother would hatch chickens in his sweater drawer. A regular old mug from the store around the corner definitely won’t come with a backstory half as charming as that.

The playful nature of Chen’s work—from the bright, youthful colors to the quirky shapes and sizes—is truly what sets Three Wheel Studio apart. It seems all the more delightful knowing that Chen only recently felt comfortable enough to call himself a studio potter. “It started one day when I opened up my kiln and found an almost perfect little tea bowl with just the right glaze,” he says. “To a potter, that was a perfect day.”

Dwo Wen Chen in his studio

Three Wheel Studio is located in Providence Rhode Island. Follow the studio on Facebook and Instagram.

Top photo stonware dinner plate | Handmade by Jun, $86 | All photos courtesy Three Wheel Studio website

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We all have our daily rituals with the mug loves of our lives. Whether it is a hodge-podge assortment of found cups from thrift stores or a beloved collection inherited from your grandmother, much of the day passes between a hot cup of coffee or tea. Portland, Maine potter Ayumi Horie wants you to fall in love with your mug all over again through a process she calls “slow activism”, believing that the power of ritual and dialogue can change the world.

Ayumi Horie | Photo courtesy of the artist

Horie stretches the imagination of ceramics beyond just functionality. She notes “growing up gay and half-Japanese in a very white and Catholic town in Maine, has given me a certain perspective that both straddles being an outsider and being privileged. I think I’m on the leading generational edge of how we as a country are becoming much more multi-cultural and hopefully much more accepting of difference. My work addresses vulnerability and embraces what it means to be human, regardless of race, gender, and culture.”

Her current passion is the collaborative project The Democratic Cup; a collection of thirty-two ceramic artists and illustrators coming together to inspire social change through design. Among the collaborators is Ayumi’s partner Nick Moen who also works in ceramics and pottery. The cups created are decorated with political activism imagery that hopes to encourage conversations based on mutual respect and understanding, and works to “inspire and reject the status quo”. All of the proceeds from the fundraiser will be donated to progressive organizations that are actively working to end oppression and bring about gender and social equality.

Ayumi’s own work is a fusion of individual creations such as mugs, plates, jars and other various earthenwares, as well as ongoing collaborative projects such as Portland Brick. Her pottery series White Pots (video above) is focused on slowing us down by creating images of white decals onto white pot surfaces which are “invisible unless you are up close, and even then they are impossible to read unless you handle the pot. Turning the pot lets the light catch the opalescent drawing….touch and holding them is integral to understanding what they are”.

Ayumi Horie is a potter and photographer living in Portland, Maine. To learn more about Ayumi, you can find her art and wisdom in many magical corners of the internet (Twitter and Instagram).

Top image courtesy of the artist

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Based in the India Street neighborhood of Portland, Maine, Portland Brick is a collaboration between storyteller Elise Pepple and me. The project celebrates the everyday stories of the city’s residents. Historic, contemporary, and “future” memories are stamped into bricks that repair sidewalks with the city’s own stories. Instead of commemorating the famous “fathers” of the city, our project highlights the immigrants, the women, the marginalized, the voices that typically are not heard. We aim to rewrite the historical narrative that too often upholds the values of the privileged, rather than telling the real stories of the people who lived there.

An area that boasts the first street settled by Europeans, the India Street neighborhood of Portland, Maine, was originally mostly residential, before becoming mixed-use (business and residential) and falling into economic decline in the mid-twentieth century. Over the past few years, it has been undergoing massive gentrification, with new, upscale restaurants and luxury condos taking over what were abandoned lots. Historically, it was an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse neighborhood, home to African Americans and people of Irish, Jewish, Italian and other European heritage, some of whom were involved in antislavery causes.

The challenge for us became how to create a more personal vision of a neighborhood through Tweet-length phrases about human connections. Making stories tangible as physical objects gives them a new life and a new importance. Some stories will shift from being a story told within a family circle to one that inhabits a public space, while others contain long forgotten facts that will be revived from the dead. We hope that the bricks will generate a new cycle of audio stories shared between strangers, friends, families, and visitors.

Through local organizations, online submissions, historical research, and the efforts of Maine College of Art students, Elise collected stories that often came in multiple forms. Fragments of gossip, oral interviews, newspaper clippings, and historical records all contained information that on first impression might seem dry and generalized but was rich in narrative below the surface. Through a storytelling event in the neighborhood, a TEDxDirigo talk, and through social media, we have been able to further connect with residents.

Horie drawing letters using the sgraffito technique | Photo by Ayumi Horie

We walk to work on brick sidewalks, we build our homes beside them, we live our lives on them. I love the alchemy of transforming the ground beneath our feet into the brick beneath our feet. Fifteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, Maine was covered by a glacier. As the ice retreated, it pushed down the coastal shelf, flooding the southern shoreline of Maine and depositing a layer of mud, hundreds of feet thick in some places, above and between bedrock. This layer is what Portland is built on, and it’s a city largely made of brick.

The clay used for this project was saved from the excavation of the land that my new studio was built on, and is commonly called Maine Blue Clay. After the Great Fire of 1866, most of Portland and its sidewalks on the peninsula were rebuilt with this clay. I considered carving the words into clay and the now-common practice of using water jet methods on commemorative bricks, but these techniques felt too harsh and would under-utilize the beautiful plasticity of clay. I wanted to retain the puffiness of soft clay in the fired brick. The appearance of stamped clay, on the other hand, has always reminded me of flesh pressed down by a finger or the shape of a pillow after a head has rested on it. I wanted these bricks to show that they were made by people, full of tiny imperfections and the unevenness of the human hand.

To make a custom stamp for each brick, I first drew letters using the same sgraffito technique that I use on low-fire pots: I poured white slip onto slabs of nearly bone-dry earthenware, then scratched through the slip with a sharpened pin tool. I drew the letters in different sizes, scanned them into Photoshop, and cleaned them up. Next, I typeset each stamp. Sam Richardson, a recent graduate of the New Media department of Maine College of Art, converted the stamp images into 3-D files, then milled and printed them at Engine, a nearby fab lab.

Rochelle Garcia, Molly Spadone, Janine Grant, and several other students helped fabricate the bricks. After slaking the bone-dry clay, they blunged in red grog to help with shrinkage and warping, and then sieved the mixture. Using David Peters’s method of drying slurry in wooden frames lined with bed sheets outside, they wedged the clay. Traditionally, bricks were made using a sand-struck or water-struck method, where soft clay was slapped into wooden molds that then released the clay. After a lot of trial and error, we found that the simplest of methods was the most effective: we threw a ten-pound block of clay into a thick plywood mold reinforced with clamps, and then unscrewed the clamps to pop the brick out.

A Portland Brick freshly stamped | Photo by Ayumi Horie

We wanted each statement to refer to contemporary digital culture. We wanted our stories to be as brief as a Tweet and as succinct as an Instagram caption, so that they would read like poetry—and fit within the bricks. Using hashtags was a way to insert more information and sum up the phrase, and we liked their playfulness. Of course, the bricks’ hashtags would not work as hyperlinks, but they could be Googled, because the full phrases are also on our website. For instance, the sentence “On this spot in 1911, mothers could pick up free fresh milk for their babies. #pasteurization” provides just enough information to pique curiosity about the history of public health and the importance of pasteurization. The hashtag also connects our brick to every other online reference to pasteurization. Other hashtags include #torrone and #panettone (Italian sweets) #redhotdogs, a classic Mainer food, and #newmainer, a term that’s intentionally inclusive. One bilingual brick reads, “On this spot in 1898, Jun Sing operated one of the first Chinese laundries #goldmountain #金山”. In this instance, the hashtag works from an insider’s point of view, being the moniker that Chinese immigrants gave to America in the nineteenth century.

Rather than use the stuffy, formal language endemic to traditional monuments, we chose to use vernacular wording more in line with those we want to honor and the contemporary audience that we want to affect. With the sentence, “On this spot in 1956, Priscilla and Loretta’s shoes could be heard click-clacking on their way to church,” we hoped to evoke a specific image and a second sense in order to paint a more holistic picture of the neighborhood. (India Street was a fairly noisy neighborhood because of the nearby railroad tracks and the Crosby Laughlin Foundry, which manufactured heavy marine equipment.) “On this spot in 2014, 1 snowy owl took up residence #grandtrunkrrblg #pigeonsupper” reads another brick, the number “1” being a less formal, more appropriate solution than “one.” Composed in the great tradition of Twitter and Instagram, #pigeonsupper connotes a well-fed owl.

Composing each phrase was a linguistic challenge that Elise and I worked on. Which word would stand alone, which word or words made large? What might catch someone’s eye as they walked down the street? Among the largest words are “lost,” “elephants,” and #celebrates.” Who wouldn’t stop to find out more? Our intention was for the bricks to function like shiny coins noticed out of the corner of one’s eye, or twenty-dollar bills found on a sidewalk, turning a so-so day into a lucky and thoughtful one. Some people will come across the bricks as visitors to the city; others will come to regard the bricks as reliable old friends who age and weather with each winter that passes.

Installed Portland Brick Project bricks in the India Street neighborhood of Portland, Maine | Photo by Ayumi Horie

The largest cluster of bricks is installed at the intersection of India and Commercial Streets. At one time, India Street ended on a point of land that jutted out between two coves, but in the 1850s, the coves were filled in to accommodate rail lines, and Commercial Street was constructed. Long ago immigrants disembarked from ships docked in the harbor, and walked up India Street; today, this spot serves as a gateway to the city for the thousands of visitors from cruise ships every summer.

The bricks are numbered, with the first one reading, “All of these spots are on Wabanaki land,” a pivotal and too-often-forgotten fact about whose place this first was. Given all the recent political jockeying around issues concerning immigrants and refugees, we rarely look back far enough in our country’s history to see the shakiness of our own entitlement to citizenship.

All the other phrases begin with, “On this spot in . . .” or “On this spot every. . .” This introductory phrase sits perpendicular to the rest of the sentence and to the building fronts, so that the words can be caught from either direction. It’s no coincidence that the second numbered brick reads, “On this spot, every year, Ghassan Hassoon celebrates becoming a U.S. citizen #newmainer.” We live on layers and layers of history. Through this project, we underscore the diversity of Portland and how meaningful this neighborhood is to all the individuals and groups of people who have lived here for more than four hundred years.

We hope the Portland Brick Project will be reimagined and replicated in other cities as anti-monumental monuments to everyday citizens. As a potter, I feel that the transformation of clay to brick adds a crucial layer of complexity to the project. The humor, poignancy, and specificity of the stories make it successful and highlight what we love about our city.

Installed Portland Brick Project bricks in the India Street neighborhood of Portland, Maine | Photo by Ayumi Horie

This article originally ran in Studio Potter, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2016, “Function/Architecture”, a publication dedicated to connecting potters and strengthening the dialogue within the pottery community.

Top photo Ayumi Horie works on “Portland” bricks in her studio. | Photograph by Janine Grant

The post The Portland Brick Project appeared first on Take Magazine.