The pandemic may be firing a burgeoning interest in pottery at Monument Mountain High | Southern Berkshires

GREAT BARRINGTON — Behind the high school, on a swath of lawn between the auto shop and the track, puffs of tan smoke rise from tin garbage cans and the breeze blows it southward. 

A handful of people are there, happily dealing with fire and very hot things. 

Longtime ceramic artist Michael Wainwright is using long tongs to pinch student pottery out of a small kiln that has just fired up to 1,850 degrees with a propane tank. He sets the pieces in the cans, a student assistant adds newspaper to create smoke, and art teacher Neel Webber quickly covers them to put out the fire and let the smoke do its work on the pottery.

Three Raku kiln firings happening throughout the day turn out the work of 60 ceramics students at Monument Mountain Regional High School, Webber says.

Raku is an ancient Japanese technique in which the glazed pottery, after heating to high temperatures, is then starved of oxygen in a container with combustible material. Raku creates unpredictable colors, textures and patterns. 

Sheffield Pottery supplied the Raku clay and glazes, Wainwright brought glazes, equipment and skill — he has long held an annual Raku firing party every July 4th weekend — and Monument graduate and Sheffield-based ceramic artist and teacher Patsy Cowen assisted, along with student assistant Mia DeRis.

Most students had to be in other classes during the firings, and came out during breaks. 

Monument’s art program is legendary — art classes are usually “packed,” Webber said, and in general are at or over capacity. But 60 ceramics students is a lot. So are the 100 students who are signed up up for ceramics next year.  Webber has a theory.

“I think it’s a post-COVID thing,” he said, wiggling his fingers in the air. “They just need to work with their hands.”  

Indeed, young people are still recovering from lockdowns that featured social starvation and too much screen time. Working with clay has a grounding effect — it’s all hands on with the four elements in play.

Mia DeRis, 17, a junior, is already thinking about how she can fit ceramics into her future. She thinks the way to do that is to make her living doing something else.

“I’m thinking of majoring in business,” she said, “so that if I want to keep doing ceramics that will give me a base.” 

For Wainwright, however, pottery is a full-fledged career. He’s created work in large volumes over the years that’s been sold in stores across the U.S., including the likes of luxury retailers like Neiman Marcus. He’s branched out into glass, cutlery and serving pieces. His headquarters are at the far south end of Main Street near the Sheffield line.

Wainwright has a passion for backyard Raku and its magic.

“Raku,” he said, “is the closest thing to immediate gratification.”

Assistant Patsy Cowen, who teaches afterschool ceramics for the Project Connection program at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School, says that, like Webber, she’s also seeing an increasing interest in working with clay.

“It’s at capacity,” she said of her classes. She has eight students in a wheel throwing class, and around 10 to 15 in a handbuilding class.

Cowen also works as a purchaser at Sheffield Pottery, which her parents have owned since the 1980s. The pandemic she said, boosted business as artists and young students who relied on studio spaces had to create their own at home and buy equipment. 

“It kind of put people in this position where they had to figure it out themselves,” she said, noting that social media ceramics influencers also had a role to play in making pottery more accessible, trendy, interesting and “inviting.” 

“It’s very therapeutic,” she said, “and it’s something that you can do to relax during a very stressful time like COVID.”  

Like a pottery wheel, the story circles around: It was Webber who got her interested in ceramics while she was a student at Monument — not her parents the pottery supply store owners. 

“My parents,” Cowen said, “never pushed it.”