Jody Johnstone
“I'm a wood firing potter and I guess that is a bit of a specialty within the very wide world of pottery. I first got interested in pottery and woodfire in general. When I was first in Japan, and that was during my 20’s after I graduated from college, I had gone over to Japan to teach English and I ended up staying in Japan for four years. At that time, I had moved up to Tokyo and I was working in an advertising agency. But I had a little bit of time on my hands on weekends and I would kind of tromp around the city and visit shops and I started seeing pottery really like everywhere I looked. And I would go into shops and start to buy things. I lived in Kyoto and Kyoto has a great tradition of pottery and their streets that lead up to kind of famous tourist destinations there are pot shops on both sides of the street. So I guess, how I first got into it really, was sort of looking at it and starting to use it and be a customer of pottery. I didn't do any potting at all. But then I moved back to New York City to work in a TV production company and it was up on the Upper West Side and right in my neighborhood was a community pottery studio called Super Mud and I don't think it's there anymore. It was up on I think like 106 Street on the West, Upper West Side. And I was able to walk there from where I lived. And that really was how I got into the making side of it. My first teacher was Louise Harder, and she's a great wood fire potter in Bethany Connecticut. And it turns out that she was going to build a wood fired kiln for the owner of the studio up in Walton, New York, which was about three hours north of the city. So I just joined in on that right away,” says Jody Johnstone, renowned potter located in Swanville, Maine.
Jody fell in love with pottery right away after spending time in Japan and she wanted to get into an apprenticeship right away. She didn’t want to go back to school as she was presented with an opportunity of a lifetime.
Photographed by Frances Mahoney
Jody points out the different patterns and colors the pottery can showcase after the wood fired kiln process is complete.
“Some time, that one winter, I think this was in 1993, I got a phone call from Jeff. And he said he was going over to Japan and asked me if I would like him to see if he could arrange anything for me. And I said, “Absolutely!” And he called me back when he returned, and he said, “I have found a place for you to go study.” And it was with a master potter named Jun Isezaki in Beeson, Japan, and he says Jun Isezaki was a second generation potter. His father had been a very famous potter too, and he says Isezaki Sensai was a prefectural treasure. So he was very famous and he took apprentices on and I was actually his third apprentice at that time. He had had a string of apprentices through the years, and most of them now are famous potters also with their own system of apprentices. But he took me on and I was sort of the junior apprentice. There were two other senior apprentices before me, they were actually young Japanese men and I was maybe, almost 10 years older than them, and an American woman so that was a little bit contentious. Not always the super friendliest scenario really, because over there, the junior apprentices would sort of take their direction and orders for the day from the senior apprentices. But having gone all the way over to Japan, I wasn't that interested in that particular hierarchy. So I, you know, I just kind of went around them a little bit, I have to admit, to forge my own relationship with the teacher. But yeah, and I did, I spoke Japanese pretty fluently at the time. And I didn't mind the strict, it was kind of a male system there….my teacher was pretty open in terms of working with women. He was really one of the more cosmopolitan-thinking of the traditional potter. Certainly, he had had women before, he had had Americans before, so it was great, it was a great place to land. And I didn't get any sort of that kind of, like, sexism or anything from my teacher, but it was there around me. And so I was able to navigate that fine,” says Jody.
After coming back from Japan to the states she was on a search for a studio. She looked all over Connecticut and other places surrounding the state but then she stumbled upon an advertisement in a magazine for a studio located in Swanville, Maine.
“I had been looking in Massachusetts and in New York State, but I really couldn't find anything that fit my parameters. I think my parameters at the time were five acres or more, and just for the land $20,000 or less and I didn't find anything like that and I had started to get discouraged. I think I had looked at every property that matched that description, west of 91 in Massachusetts over the course of a couple months while I was back at my parents house. And then this place that I landed in, in Swanville, was advertised in Ceramics Monthly, which is the trade journal that most of us get and the owner was selling this. There was a totally livable and really charming cabin and a falling down kiln, there was a studio, an unimproved building at the time, big barn, just beautiful. Ten acres and it was an affordable price and it was February, but I came right up here, and I had never been to Maine before. So my first trip to Maine was in February and I came here and it’s so cozy with the wood stove and the previous owner had made cookies. So I didn't even notice that the cabin was actually kind of a cold building because at the time she had it so cozy. And my place is only about 10 minutes from downtown Belfast, too. So even though it was February, I drove into Belfast, and the co-op was open and the movie theater was open. You know, I could just see it was a great welcoming town. So I just, I called my father and I said, “I love it and it's going to be perfect.” And I just went right into the local law office and had him draft up an offer for me. So it really felt like fate that I found this and, I mean, I never had been to Maine, but it really has turned out to be such a good place for me,” says Jody.
Jody’s skills in woodfired pottery truly show in her artwork. Her style seems traditional but really adds a modern taste as they’re some fun surprises when her pieces come out of the kiln. She runs the kiln twice a year and it is treated as a celebration. She and other potters sit around the kiln, taking turns tending to the
fire and making sure everything looks good.
“I built the original kiln in 1997 and I fired it for 17 years. And it started to wear over that time and in 2015 I tore it down to the footprint and I actually had it rebuilt by professional kiln builders. But while I was in Japan, I had spent a good amount of time observing professional kiln builders. There was a great kiln being built just around the corner from my teachers place and he would let me go up there in the afternoons and just watch what they were doing. So I had really tried to document as much as I could of the kiln building process when I was in Japan. And the kiln builders had been really kind to me. I was kind of a novelty, you know, being an American girl interested in what they were doing. So they had shared a number of their kiln plans with me. And I had studied those and just tried to absorb the dimensions, even though they weren't going to be exactly to my kiln, but just try to understand kiln building and dimensions and design. And so I designed my kiln and took about a year to build it. It was, you know, as you go process, I'd be down there every day and laying brick I built the form that the bricks went up against. And then when the whole kiln was built, the kiln is 17 feet long. It is big, it's 24 feet long with the flu. So once the kiln, once the bricks came together up over the form, then I burned the form out. And the kiln was standing. So that was a big job but once that was done, you know, I didn't go back to it each year. Then the rest of my work revolves around the making of the pots and the firing of the kiln. So I I fire twice a year in May and October and that's pretty much when it gets warm enough to be outside again for two weeks and before it gets too cold again to be outside for two weeks at a time, because it's about a two week process to load and fire the kiln. It's a five day loading and an eight day firing and it's an around the clock process. So either myself or one of the potters who is here firing with me is down at the kiln 24 hours a day for eight days,” says Jody.
Photographed by Frances Mahoney
Jody and her kiln cat inside their Anagama, the place where many pots are wood fired twice a year.
Photographed by Frances Mahoney
Jody throwing a pot for next season’s wood fire process.
Jody has grown to appreciate Maine as it has built her brand in a way she never thought. The community of creatives she is alongside of, and the beautiful property she renovated and made hers, means a lot to her.
“When I moved to Swanville, I don't know if it's the case anymore, but I had called my code enforcer to make sure that I could build the kiln before I bought the place and asked them about the codes against burning. And they said, “There are no codes in Swanville.” So that was perfect and my neighbors, who I love, are very unimpressed with me, because they like to tell me that they burn more wood a year than I do. So right, you know, so it was the practical aspects are perfect up here for me. I can have space around me that wood is plentiful and nobody is fazed by wood smoke. I think there's a respect here for working hard and I'm not sure that, you know, my neighbors knew what to do with me when I moved up here from Connecticut. But now after all these years, you know, they see me working, they know I'm working, you know, just as hard as they are at what I'm doing. The Belfast area, you know, this midcoast area has been so supportive in terms of buying pots, coming out, you know, that I have sales here a couple times a year and people have been coming out and adding to their collections for years. So I think there's an interest up here in craft and the kiln. I tell the story about Japan and a lot of people have remained really interested in that. So it was a really great place to land. It was really by chance because of that ad in the trade journal but it was the perfect place for me,” says Jody.