Ask a potter to tell you about their craft and you will traverse time and distance, reaching back into cultural traditions and communities the world over. Embedded in this collective memory is fire, a source of heat, light, warmth; a primal force so blazingly brilliant it can sunburn at its hottest temperatures. For a pottery practice, the harnessing of fire requires attention, labor, skill, and loads of time. Not to mention all the wood that must be cut.
The wood-fired tradition is what brought potters Alex Matisse and John Vigeland to the Southern folk traditions of North Carolina pottery and eventually to a partnership that would transform. From a wood-fired kiln, built by Alex on an old tobacco farm, the two made pots in the craft traditions that raised them up. Alongside co-founder Connie Matisse, who sweated and believed and documented every step on that rural dirt floor in Madison County, the trio fed a hungry wood-fired kiln while the seed of East Fork emerged. So the lore goes.
John, Connie and Alex in front of the original kilnAn excerpt from a 2018 blog post by Connie Matisse lays out the vision:
Alex and John both see East Fork Pottery one day running as more of an atelier, with many craftspeople making work informed by a shared aesthetic sensibility and respect for technical precision. This requires a serious departure from the traditional North Carolina Pottery business model that Alex and John were brought up in. With our combined strengths, Alex, John and I intend to introduce North Carolina’s ceramic heritage to a new and broader audience, paying reverence to its rich and longstanding tradition while exploring new forms and contexts and adapting the work to our own time and place.
That vision did come to pass and that same year, the wood-fired studio pottery moved into its first factory space and East Fork began the nascent march toward large scale industrial ceramic production using gas kilns, a journey referred to by the founders as East Fork’s own “Industrial Revolution”.
“The idea was that we would do the two things [wood-firing and gas-firing] in parallel,” says Vigeland, “but it [the factory] was enough work to keep up with that we ended up never firing the wood kiln again, which wasn’t the plan.” Also not in the plan was John’s assumption of the role of Chief Financial Officer at East Fork Pottery, which happened swiftly with a single NC Department of Revenue filing.
He would not return to a wood-fired practice for eight years.
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I met John Vigeland for the first time in Alexander, North Carolina, on a portion of the 24-acre parcel of land he purchased in 2020 with a couple of friends. A crunchy gravel driveway leading up a picturesque hill, lined with tall grass and cornflowers, bears the apt name: Friend’s Lane.
Two structures, simplistic and beautiful, sit at the top of Friend’s Lane, surrounded by a sweeping mountain vista––all rolling hills, green grass, and valleys blanketed in sunlight.
From the door of a tiny house, John Vigeland bounds out, tall and kind-faced, covered head to toe in denim, with a long arm extended in a happy-go-lucky wave that is equal parts Mister Rogers and the boy-next-door. The charming house is John’s pottery studio, the first he’s ever built with his own two hands. Craft envy made him do it, says the autodidact, a process that took “three years of weekends” to build. You might intuit a bit of who John is when you consider his willingness to build a whole house with the use of minimal power tools for funsies.
Friend’s Lane is the site of the first wood-fired kiln and pottery studio for East Fork since the original wood-kiln was disassembled back in 2015, the bricks given to other potters to become new kilns.
On Friend’s Lane, John points out the newly planted trees—Mulberries, American Persimmons, Chestnuts, and Apple trees grafted with scion from the original East Fork pottery. Stepping beneath the red corrugated tin roof of the kiln shed, the scent of pine and earth fill the lofted space. The wood kiln occupies the heart center, flame-shaped and covered in iron oxide to mimic North Carolina’s red clay, with a catenary arch tall enough for John’s six-foot-seven frame.
John Vigeland’s kiln is an amalgam of traditions bearing resemblance to kilns found across Southeast Asia (see:Thai kilns), the Carolinas, and most closely, to the wood kiln Alex built in 2009.
John kept the fundamental mechanics of a historically good kiln, but made incremental tweaks to suit his height and firing preferences. For one, his kiln is shorter nose-to-tail than the original East Fork kiln. John wanted to maximize the front space, which typically runs hotter than the back third of the kiln and produces effects he aesthetically prefers. A slight gradation was added to the floor to account for cold spots that originated from a flat floor, something he remembered from firing the old kiln.
The process of firing a wood kiln takes about two weeks from beginning to end, with four days of loading, four days of firing and several days to cool the pots from the molten hot temperatures of active firing. John might say it took six years from conception to actualization. Before the labor of making clay and throwing pots, a studio, kiln, and its attendant shed must be constructed, something John did mostly by himself. Nothing about the process is easy or efficient, which makes one wonder, why on earth would a person go through the trouble?
“Firing pots with wood-fire is a grueling, relatively uncontrollable and inefficient process,” says Alex Matisse. But the reward, he says, are surfaces rich with nuance, depth, and character.
To John, the wood-fired process is rewarding precisely because it is labor-intensive, unabstract and materially embodied. “It’s kind of satisfying to know a process with your body that way,” says John. “I like doing it,” he shrugs. “It’s a pleasurable, meaningful thing to do.”
Though he articulates a response, something unanswerable hangs between us. The closest distillation I can grasp is: In craft, as in life, beauty and grit coexist– pleasure and pain, light and dark, control and surrender.
Perhaps the most interesting developments this time around are the things John pulled from East Fork’s factory processes. He installed a sensor system for the wood kiln to record data from each firing. He brought his glazes to the glaze lab at East Fork and test-fired in the gas kiln. While industrial processes require data-driven processes, John sees a real cohesion between the intimate material knowledge a potter knows and the ways that science and technical data can inform craft. In some ways, the wood-kiln looks forward just as much as it looks back. And John, too.
As he approaches the kiln’s very first firing, in a kiln he built himself, with hundreds of pots he threw on the wheel inside the workshop he built, he feels less encumbered by a desire to perform, or prove something. Not to say there isn’t doubt or existential dread. He is an artist, after all and the wood-fired process is rife with variables. But there is a contentment, a sweetness in the embodiment of the work, an appreciation for his hands and how they remember the honest movements of shaping a mug, a bowl, a vase, and a perspective forged over time.
The goal was always to grow East Fork and then return to a wood-fired practice. Years later, the journey from studio pottery to factory to the hilltop on Friend’s Lane returns the founders back to themselves, changed.
The Vigeland kiln fired for the very first time in September 2026. A limited number of wood-fired mugs and bowls will be available online and in stores on September 29th at 11am ET.
