Hunt Prothro

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Description

I’ve been working all my adult life as a potter and a part-time teacher of pottery. I studied with Marguerite Wildenhain at Pond Farm, in Sonoma County, California during the 70’s. Since then I’ve been living and working in the studio I built in Washington County, Maryland. Currently, I work in cone 10 porcelain using washes of stains and underglazes over a textured pattern. The glaze is usually a thin solution of pure Gerstley Borate which resembles a patina more than a glaze. The inside of the pot is often painted in counterpoint to the exterior, related, but distinct. The rim is a third area, a point of transition; it’s a zone of change with all the attendant hesitations and gestures of finality. Each piece represents a specific, authoritative, yet ambiguous point in time and place. There is no narrative save the one inculcate in the making of each piece The thrown form itself is a metaphor and tells a story, an ancient story of beginnings and endings with the recapitulated density of a material memory and the suggestion of a consummated desire. The work needs to be held to be understood. Heft is important, not only lightness and balance, but a sense of mass, yet weightless, like a bird leaving a nest. I work within these parameters as a poet works within a narrow, mythic form. One of my students said to me the other day when I told her, in response to a question about my life, that I was the first member of my family for 5 generations to make a living as an artisan, and not as an intellectual: “Yeah, Hunt, we didn’t think pottery was intellectual either, until we started taking it from you.” I liked that line, but still, it remains to follow your fingers, reaching into the bones of the form, beneath the voluptuous, encrusted surfaces, through the layers of translucent washes, to the point of a transient singularity, where touch pushes back again, like the wind in the trees.

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