The pursuit of a potter can be both artistic and metaphysical. The process of creating pottery can be the road map toward going inward to experience a powerful meditation. One of the most important stories in the bible is The Potter and The Clay, in which God is the Potter and we humans are the clay. Although the work of the potter presents as a powerful biblical story, the journey of the potter might not be religious at all and reside somewhere between the metaphysical and the contemplative. After all, the motion of turning the wheel is repetitive and in that sameness a person can experience a powerful new revelation about one’s inner self. Turning the wheel is like taking one more journey around the sun.
We learned about these principles of the pottery process and more when we talked to Greg Relaford, who lives in the small Washington town, Poulsbo.
Greg Relaford is the Technology Director at Seattle Academy, a private school serving middle and high school students. He has a B.S. in Mathematics, Physics and Marine Biology from the Evergreen State College and prior academic study in chemistry. His journey toward discovery pottery is a circuitous one and as much a mystery as the pottery process he is passionate about.
From Coal Miner to Potter
He was born in Missouri, where he lived on and off for about seventeen years. He also lived in Minnesota for about five years, and another five years was spent in West Virginia. Then he experienced life in the big city—New York City for a year and later Boston. Long distance travel took him to Istanbul, Turkey for almost two years. He describes his moving around as largely motivated by love interests. During these years he worked at various factory jobs, and all of those places have closed down. After he met his wife, Kathryn Owen, they returned to Seattle. (Kathryn is a native of the Seattle area.) For twenty-seven years and counting, the Seattle area is the place where he has lived the longest.
While he was in the eighth grade in rural Missouri, boredom got the best of him and he more or less stopped going to school. At nineteen, he got a job in a steel foundry and by the time he was twenty-one, he worked in an underground coal mine in Illinois. “The place where he worked had high seams of coal and was like looking at the side of road cuts, just digging into one layer in a road cut –that’s what mining does,” he explained. Most of Illinois has coal underneath and it covers most of the country. Coal covers a good chunk of Washington too, but it’s not good quality. Black diamond, Washington is named after coal. Black Diamond is the traditional nickname for coal. Most of the coal regions have a name like Black Diamond. In his coal mining years, Greg did a lot of work with heavy equipment. For example, he operated a front-loader that was about sixty feet long, four feet tall and weighs as much as an armored vehicle. During these years he utilized a form of mining that has been long replaced.
Greg Relaford,
Potter: A Journey Around the Wheel
by Patricia Vaccarino