ARTIST STATEMENT
I am grateful that my life “threw me together” with fellow apprentice Daniel Johnston and our mentor Mark Hewitt in 1997, allowing us to work together and share Mark’s vision of what pottery in North Carolina could be. Even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, apprenticeship is a traditional working relationship allowing the apprentices to learn the relevant skills and techniques of a particular discipline from a master. As an apprentice I watched Mark attempting to adapt all the skills of his own apprenticeships and merge them with the taproot of the 250-year-old vernacular pottery traditions of the Carolinas.
He was producing vast quantities of pots at a prodigious speed and was constructing very dynamic and beautifully articulated large pots as well. And to this curated mix of the past, he was adding in his own formal and decorative ideas, some inspired by the industrially produced china of his youth in Stoke-on Trent, and others from his gleanings of modern and contemporary and world art.
This post-modern approach of combining traditional and non-traditional elements and carefully weaving disparate source material from world ceramic traditions into an inspired cohesive vision is the common point of what we share as a group. This is a tall order and would be more difficult by far without the grounded technical expertise that several years of apprenticeship afforded us. Obviously, everyone's journey is unique, and the individual choices, interests, and aptitudes of each member of this extended family create wildly divergent work that still has a family resemblance at its core.
ARTIST BIO
Matt Jones lives in Western NC, outside of Asheville, where he’s been operating his pottery and raising a family for 26 years. In addition to a full line of domestic table and garden ware, he has a reverence for the great jugs and jars that were the backbone of the utilitarian Carolina potters in the 19th and early twentieth centuries. He is known primarily as a decorator, inspired by the natural world and Chinese brush painting and European and American reinterpretations of blue on white painting that became commonplace 400 years ago. His slip trailing technique under alkaline glaze is equally impressive, and he has occasionally turned his decorative sensibility to political satire and social criticism.
LINKS
