April 12, 2012
Past Dunkin’ Donuts and over a small creek, a tall pole topped with a yellow teapot marks the turn to Clinton Pottery. When I walked into the big, white barn, no one was manning the counter; no one came out from around the corner to watch over my shoulder as I browsed. I was alone in the room, save for the stacks of pale yellow plates and baskets of shiny round mugs seeming so vulnerable and unguarded. After tracing every rim of every bowl and doing tinkering of my own, hoping someone would eventually hear me and come down to check his merchandise, I timidly followed the bellowing Beethoven upstairs. Jonathan Woodward was hunched over a potter’s wheel, whistling. Completely washed by natural light, long tables stretched across the room, topped with rows and rows of pots. There were bowls big and small, pitchers, cups, all dry and crisp, crimson-colored, yet to be glazed.
Jonathan’s eyes are kind and clear, sea foam green—the same color as a colander down stairs. These youthful eyes and easy smile offset the grey creeping into his beard. “Pull up a chair!” he said in an agile accent. “You’ll get to see the beginning stages of the Bicentennial mug!” And he slapped a ball of wet clay down on the wheel, his sturdy hands gently guiding and shaping it until it became the round, elegant shape Hamilton College is so familiar with. Jonathan described his morning routine of making pots, his “pre-work work,” he calls it, a “meditation,” always to the same symphony.
“I don’t feel right when I don’t do it. I have to, as a potter, feel that I’ve produced something every day, come to the wheel and make something. As long as I’ve touched it…it keeps me sane, like an anchor. It’s what the earth is made of, the planet, the rocks and stone, the ground beneath our feet. This—spinning. The earth—spinning. And I get my hands on it!” he said with a boyish enthusiasm, bringing him to pause and glance from his clay-slicked hands to the creek view in front of him and back, evidently astounded at his own fortune.
After Jonathan was asked to leave school in England at age 16, his sister saw an advertisement in the newspaper: a potter seeking an apprentice, to fill his tobacco pipe and make his coffee, they supposed. Four decades later, Jonathan is still throwing pots.
“It all came off that wheel—like alchemy!” he said, delightfully triumphant, and a cloud of dust followed his hands into the air. “I made a family from it, this life, everything. I’ve taken clay and turned it into all this.” He remembers, though, when that wheel’s only function was as a coffee table. Not yet older than an average Hamilton grad, Jonathan had begun the journey from clay spinning under his young fingers in Sussex to the barn he lives and works in today. Chasing to the states a girlfriend that would become his wife and mother of his two children, the two worked other jobs in order for pottery to be a part of Jonathan’s life.
I didn’t see many Bicentennial mugs in the making because, by this point, Jonathan was up and off his stool, nearly waltzing in his dusty crocs, his knit hat flopping about, describing the tight layout of his first space located where the Dessert Booth is today. Jonathan worked for an Italian furniture salesman named Vito, learning invaluable lessons on business and retail. In order to sell pottery at the same time, friends helped out here and there, but mostly the shop stayed open thanks to a “self-service” policy where the doors were left unlocked and customers could come, take what they wanted and pay later.
“People like to be trusted, so I trust them,” he says.
After shuffling showrooms a couple more times, Jonathan settled into the barn synonymous to us all as Clinton Pottery, though it has come a long way from the derelict conditions in which he found it. He has since reconditioned, refurbished, and filled it—shelves lined with glistening ocher, cobalt and plum glazes, and workroom walls coated with earthy pink dust. Also evolved is the mug that so often carries Commons coffee across campus. “It’s such a simple, peaceful thing. Everything has been stripped away but a single line,” Jonathan said, but it wasn’t always like this. “It became simpler and simpler, more and more pure, and people gravitate towards that, I gravitate towards it.”
I had one of these mugs in my hands now, warm and filled with tea, listening to the simple aphorisms by which Jonathan lives his life, settled in a soft leather chair facing a window that frames the creek running below.
The window’s sill was beautifully dry and pale, unfinished wood, and just as Jonathan said, “I share every time I can share,” I noticed the little lavender pot perched atop it, no bigger than a ping pong ball, overflowing with crispy dry petals draped in cobwebs. Most students can recall last year when KJ was peppered with little white boxes with “Happy Everything” printed on the top. Inside each box was a pot just like this one, a little gift, a surprise. Jonathan admitted to putting the boxes there, tickled at the memory of sneaking around, a high-pitched laugh escaping him as he tells the tale. He does it often, sometimes bringing hundreds, other times just pulling one from his pocket and inconspicuously slipping it onto one of the short concrete columns before the Martin’s Way crosswalk.
Clinton Pottery’s relationship with Hamilton is characterized by this generosity. For example, over 10 years ago when CAB’s Acoustic Coffee House concerts began, Jonathan insisted on donating mugs for the raffle, rather than making the group of students pay.
While we talked, a Hamilton alum called to order mugs for her wedding. Jonathan joted down the woman’s lengthy order, name and address, and said, “Alright, I’ll ship those off right away, and we can just take care of the money later!” I sipped the last of my tea and reached to return the mug, but Jonathan denied the gesture, remembering I’ve mentioned my birthday is tomorrow, and yet another mug will make its way up the hill.
Jonathan connects the greater community in similar ways. In the summer, he sets up a “community wheel” on his deck, inviting anyone to come and make pots—for free if they find used clay around, or for 50 cents a pound. He also does public throwing at the Farmer’s Market and various craft shows across Vermont, bringing along a smaller wheel for children to use too.
Simple ideas founded and maintain the simple life that Jonathan Woodward has created for himself and his family, and that is reflected in his pottery. “Rudimentary’”and “fundamental” are the words he uses to describe his work, “based on a mere gesture,” but still, “It excites me! It’s all engaging!” Jonathan says with honest energy as we sweep the showroom, passing his ornamental work and stopping before a cluster of mug-filled baskets, of which he makes up to 40 a day.
Though an ever-evolving and flexible business, the future of Clinton Pottery is secure. Flawless tumblers with landscape-inspired glazing and signed “Woodward” in simple scrawl are a new edition to the showroom and indicate a younger Woodward’s hand, son Alexander. He has talent that humbles his father, and they now work alongside each other in the shop, Alexander assisting his father, in addition to producing and selling work of his own.
The story of Clinton Pottery is rich and deep, full of frays that if followed lead to stories of babies born in cars, impromptu Raku kilns and games of musical chairs. One might even say Jonathan Woodward is the only one capable of telling Clinton Pottery’s story, because however haphazard and out of order the narrative, more like an abstract painting than a map, and incessantly interrupted with knee-slapping laughter and bouts of astonishment, it’s that veracious passion that built and sustains Clinton Pottery. You can catch Jonathan Woodward from 10-6 Monday through Saturday at Clinton Pottery, the white barn on Utica Street, and indeed, it will leave you, if not with a mug in hand, at least a way of seeing your glass half full.