“When thinking of where to settle, I was interested in going to where there was good clay,” ceramicist Mark Hewitt says of the home he’s made in rural Pittsboro, North Carolina. Moving from Stoke-on-Trent, England, meant a return to slower, more historical methods of craft—a simple sentiment, perhaps unusual in a world ruled by mass pottery production.
Hewitt’s father and grandfather had flourished in Stoke, an industrial town uniquely rich in coal and clay. Workers there combined these materials to create factory-produced ceramics which were globally recognized, earning the town its title as the “World Capital of Ceramics.”
Hewitt broke with his family’s legacy of factory work, choosing a handmade route instead. But why would he move to a small town in North Carolina? The answer is rooted in the tradition of wild clay, which requires a potter to dig and purify raw materials found in the wild.
Today, Hewitt notes, most potters don’t follow clay. “You can buy clay prepared, which comes from anywhere,” he says. “But that clay doesn’t have the particular regionality that I like.” In an age of commercial demand, big-box stores emphasize perfectly uniform tableware which requires a consistent, flawless clay to produce. Wild clay is its barefoot, offbeat cousin, uniquely responsive to a potter’s needs, producing no work precisely the same.
Raw clay’s texture, color, and finish differ based on location. Often, potters recognize these by touch or sight. Some—like Hewitt—recite precise characteristics by heart, underscoring pottery’s unusual connection to chemistry.
Each pot is influenced by a clay’s composition: metals and minerals differ from state to state, soil to soil. Potters experiment with sodium and silica, cobalt and copper—compounds seemingly more at home in a scientific lab than an artist’s studio—attempting to find the perfect glaze, the perfect clay, always in conversation with their material.
Like many contemporary potters bored by the regularity of industrial clay, Hewitt moved in search of material whose regional differences best fit his personal style. His decision to settle in North Carolina continues the state’s long history of ceramics. Hewitt calls pottery “a treasured manifestation of North Carolina.”
North Carolina’s earliest ceramics were made by Indigenous tribes, groups who first used regional or local clays. Cherokee collectives carry these traditions into the current day, while settler ceramic styles from England and Germany introduced the use of tools like kilns and kickwheels. All these influences are synthesized by North Carolina’s contemporary wild-clay ceramicists, inspired by the wealth of local material found just under their feet.
Naomi Dalglish, a potter who partnered with spouse Michael Hunt to found Bandana Pottery in Bakersville, North Carolina, notes that the hunt for wild clay isn’t always a laborious one. “Sometimes it’s just driving down the road and seeing some kind of construction project and being like, ‘Look at those sticky clods on the wheels of that excavator!’”
Ceramicist Tori Motyl agrees. Motyl has worked with wild clay both in upstate New York and her new home in the mountains of Asheville. She created an online guide for searching, field-testing, and digging clay. “The more you work in wild clay, the more you see that it’s everywhere,” Motyl says. “Everything is clay. You can’t not dig clay.”
Unearthing Wild Clay
Motyl advises clay hunters to look for telltale signs, areas of disturbed earth or barren land. The stuff is a nuisance to farmers and everyday gardeners but gold for the potter called by someone who digs it up. North Carolina’s clay varies in color and texture, but the state is best known for its dense, terra cotta-colored, iron-rich clay.
Motyl’s first digs were planned and mapped meticulously. Now, her wild clay is often found by friends and neighbors in the midst of home renovations or gardening projects. “It’s become a very organic thing,” she says.
Thirty minutes away from the mountains where Motyl digs is the town of Marshall, home to ceramic artist and entrepreneur Josh Copus. “There was this rockhound guy who thought he found some clay in this tobacco field out in Leicester,” Copus says. “The farmer that owned the land, Neal Woody, dug this ditch because they had a drainage problem. They kind of pitched up clay on this bank, and it looked unique—some really blue clay.”
That “rockhound,” a man named Gary Jackson, left a sample of the stuff with his phone number on a note at Copus’ studio, Clay Space, then located in Asheville, hoping Copus and his friends might be interested. “I called this guy on the phone, and I was like, ‘This clay, tell me where you got it. Take me to it.’” Jackson took him to the site, pointed out the clay, and quickly left. Copus calls him “some kind of clay angel.”
After the dig, Copus showed farmer Neal Woody the pottery he and his friends made using his land’s strange blue clay. “It did something to him,” Copus says. “I felt like he had this connection with the clay through farming, through the land, like it was a generational, energetic connection that was getting transferred through the object.”
Woody’s access to such beautiful raw material was unexpected, and his willingness to share even more so. “I thought what I found in the field that day was the clay,” Copus says, emotion present in his voice. “But it wasn’t. It was Neil. It was the person. It was the experience, the friendship.” That friendship lasted until the end of Woody’s life; by then, Copus had come to know his whole family.
This anecdote encapsulates the often-metaphysical connection to wild or local clay which inspires many contemporary potters working with the material. Using wild clay connects potters more deeply to the land occupied by themselves and their neighbors, fostering community. The tradition of wild clay connects potters across history, too. Regional potters responded to the material needs of their communities and were uninterested in mass production, emphasizing the functionality of their pots and practicality of nearby clay.
“Potters of the past dug clay out of the ground because that’s the only option they had,” Copus says. “For me, this is a conscious creative choice.”
Despite this, many potters just aren’t interested in the labor wild clay demands. “Convenience predisposes people to doing it the easy way,” Hewitt says, and wild clay isn’t easy. Digging for clay is a brutal task in the heat of a North Carolina summer, which often ranges from ninety to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Purifying that clay requires time, patience, and dedication, which many home potters find unnecessary when they can simply drop by an art supply store and buy a bag for thirty bucks.
Working with wild clay requires a deep understanding of ceramics, or at least enough passion to learn. It’s up to the potter to discern if any clay they find is usable and, if not, what recipe can be written to make it so. “It’s like making a stew,” Hewitt says. “You can fry a steak, and that’s just one flavor. But if you want to make a stew, you need to combine different clay components or clay qualities.” The clay body is informed directly by the potter’s personal taste, sometimes literally.
Hewitt can identify what he’s dug by the grit he feels on his tongue. “Put some of it in your mouth,” he says. “That’s one of the field texts, empirical tests.” Similarly, Motyl smells the earth she disturbs, hoping for a mild scent: too much organic, decomposing matter makes for poor clay. She recommends wetting the clay to evaluate its plasticity—a term referring to clay’s flexibility. Hewitt agrees. “You can mash a little bit with spit in the palm of your hand,” he says. If you can bend it, “…you’ve got another indication that it might be plastic enough to throw into a pot.”
Jugtown Pottery’s Historic Clay Tradition
Established in 1917 by Jacques and Juliana Busbee, Moore County’s Jugtown Pottery began by employing local potters to produce ceramic functional-ware, responding to the twentieth century’s affinity for factory-made ceramics.
Travis Owens, descendant of J. H. Owen—the Busbees’ first employed potter—emerges from North Carolina’s ceramic tradition, which he characterizes as utilitarian. His family updated functional pots to be marketable and appreciated by a much wider audience. This mass appeal was vital in preserving what could have been an outdated and forgotten handicraft.
Today, Jugtown is one of North Carolina’s most important centers for ceramic art. Local institutions like the Mint Museum proudly display Owens family pots. Far from the pottery’s home state, acclaimed museums like Chicago’s Art Institute collect Jugtown pots, with objects selling for hundreds of dollars. Jugtown Pottery was supported by the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s own founding director, Ralph Rinzler, who saw value in this then-overlooked Southeastern craft tradition.
Working with folklorist and potter Nancy Sweezy, who was later hired at Jugtown in the 1960s, Rinzler founded workshops to support their success. Vernon Owens—Travis Owens’s father—became lifelong friends with Rinzler. Vernon’s work earned national recognition and himself a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Vernon then bought Jugtown in 1983; the pottery has been family-owned and operated ever since.
Today, Travis Owens still works alongside his father, mother, uncle, and sister. Everybody does a little bit of everything. “We all kind of take on a lot of roles,” he says. “Each day is different. There’s never a set schedule. We’re all a part of the whole process.”
Jugtown sustains the tradition of the regional potter, gathering wild clay from deposits remaining within several miles of the pottery. Their preferred clay body is not a single clay but instead combines a mixture of these wild clays, dug by the family among other Jugtown employees. The majority of Jugtown’s ceramics are wheel-thrown, finished in a wood or gas kiln with a salt glaze, continuing methods begun by J. H. Owen.
When asked about his family’s historic use of wild clay, Travis Owens considers the age of these traditions compared to this new-age ceramic vocabulary. “Clay was just clay, and you went out and you dug it,” he says. “All the terms that are used now to talk about clay preparation and what clays people are using… They’re not foreign to us, but it’s what we’ve always done.”
Indigenous Voices and North Carolina’s Clay
North Carolina’s Cherokee ceramicists similarly persist in the conservation of their craft. Unfortunately, Indigenous Cherokee ceramic traditions are often sidelined despite their importance to the state’s ceramic history.
Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, founded in 1946, serves as the oldest Native American cooperative in the United States working to preserve Indigenous methods. Qualla is located on the Cherokee Indian Reservation in an area known as the Qualla Boundary at the entrance to North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Qualla’s goals have remained unchanged since its founding, providing a year-round market for quality Cherokee handicrafts while supporting craftspeople in sourcing material and securing “better prices for their craftwork.”
Staff member Amanda McCoy explains that Qualla broadened her craft knowledge, providing her the opportunity to experiment with clay. McCoy learned from Dorine Reed George, a ceramics educator at Qualla and independent potter. Like Travis Owens, George inherited her craft knowledge of paddle stamping, shaping, and pit-firing through family.
Though her father fired pottery for the Oconaluftee Indian Village for over forty years, George learned largely from her mother, Lucy Dean Reed, an expert potter who herself learned from Cherokee elders. “Mom asked me to help her one day,” George says. “I’ve been helping for twenty years.”
Pottery centers like Jugtown emphasize the local nature of their material. Cherokee potters at Qualla expand the definition, importing wild material from Lizella, Georgia, a historic homeland of the Cherokee Nation.
“This would have been local clay for our people,” George says. “We still consider it local because all of this was owned by Cherokees before any type of pioneers or explorers came onto this land.” The clay connects George and other Qualla potters to their ancestors, as does George’s methods of constructing her pots.
George forms and decorates her vessels through paddle stamping, a Cherokee technique dating to the 1500s. Paddle stamps are carved instruments used to shape ceramic vessels by slapping their sides, at once altering its form and imprinting designs.
George’s access to these stamps would be impossible without her mother. Reed was a member and co-founder of the Potter’s Guild, a position which allowed her access to historic designs unearthed in excavations of Cherokee sites. Importantly, Reed taught her daughter that “you can’t learn and expand your horizons, your creativity, without working hands-on,” George says.
Reed allowed her daughter—and other contemporary Cherokee potters—the opportunity to work hands-on with designs recalling their tribe’s history. Through this, Cherokee pottery continues to evolve, adapting traditional designs to modern practices.
“Traditions can be made at any time,” McCoy says, affirming that pottery at Qualla is a living practice.
Ceramic Community in North Carolina
Today, the historic clay community of Seagrove boasts more than a hundred working potters—the largest concentration in the United States—and a gathering place for diverse ceramicists who enrich the state and its clay culture.
Starworks Ceramics, a clay-processing facility located just minutes from Seagrove, has been a major draw, pulling contemporary and experimental potters from around the world to North Carolina. It’s the only ceramic supply company in the United States using exclusively wild clays to create customized clay for artists and hobbyists. Their products allow North Carolina potters with limited studio capacity better access to local materials.
Originally from Japan, Starworks director Takuro Shibata and his wife, Hitomi, moved to Seagrove, supported by a friend made through clay. While working as resident artists at Cub Creek Foundation in Appomattox, Virginia, the couple visited Seagrove with Nancy Gottovi—executive director at Starworks—who connected them with the area’s potters.
“North Carolina has a very strong potter’s community. I’m very fortunate to be here among many people who use local clay,” Shibata emphasizes.
Copus agrees. “There’s the pottery community, and the wild-clay people are even a tinier subset of that, so we’re thick as thieves, and people are great at sharing.”
Two of Copus’ close friends, Michael Hunt and Naomi Dalglish of Bandana Pottery, agree. Copus co-founded Clay Space in Asheville, where Copus’ clay angel dropped off that first little bag of blue material he instinctively recognized as valuable. Dalglish and Hunt, neither originally from North Carolina, have seen their use of wild clay bind them to the state which has become their new home.
“Our connection to the local community here is different,” Hunt begins. “We know our farmer neighbor who we don’t have a lot in common with otherwise. We can have this relationship based on dirt, something that’s really important to both of us.”
Hunt calls clay a “community bridge,” and he’s right. Hewitt found a new home in Pittsboro as Shibata did in Seagrove, both emerging from global hubs for ceramics and electing to settle in small North Carolina towns where relationships come easily. North Carolina’s clay draws potters from around the globe and fosters lifelong lineages of potters rooted in the state’s soil, potters in conversation with the material’s long history.
Wild clay is a story, and for Copus, the objects he makes from clay are just one chapter. Finding and digging the stuff is a labor of love, a journey of understanding. Everyone in North Carolina’s clay community is on the journey together, sharing their learning of this strange material which binds them.
“I’ve had a twenty-year friendship with this person that I never would have met without clay,” Copus says of Woody. At first, Copus feared the farmer would expect compensation for the material harvested from his land. Instead, Woody responded with one of the most “evolved things” Copus ever heard.
“That old dirt is worth nothing to me,” Woody said then. “As it sits in that field, it’s nothing but a nuisance. It’s what you do to it that gives it the value.”
Copus says that moment transformed his relationship with wild clay.
“I don’t think there’s anything magical about the material itself,” Copus says. “It’s how clay reminds you of a thing, or a moment, a feeling, a place, or a person. Clay ties me and connects me.”
Astrid Bridgwood is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a master’s candidate at the University of Edinburgh studying modern and contemporary art. Much of her scholarship is rooted in a familial connection to ceramics, with her father being a practicing potter emerging from England’s Stoke-On-Trent potteries.
