HoboEye Art:
John Benn, Tacoma, Washington

John Benn is a master potter devoted to the woodfire process. He got into pottery originally when his sisters took a class. But that casual wandering became a way of life. Benn became hooked, and studied under Carleton Bell and Ken Stevens at the University of Puget Sound. He also met his wife and fellow potter Colleen Gallagher there. The two have pursued their craft and built a family on Harstine Island in Puget sound, 30 miles south of Seattle.

Woodfire, Benn said, cultivates a reverence for fire. Fire, of course, can push back. When John was an MFA student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he decided to try firing pots in a 50-gallon metal drum. Outside, on the Intitute’s grounds, he filled the bottom of the drum with sawdust and some acetone, then lit it with a flaming paper airplane. The result was a 50-foot plume of flame that literally knocked him down. Nearby, inside the museum, an ancient fabric exhibit was taking place. Needless to say, smoke and fire were not welcome. They called the police on him.

Beyond those comic moments, Benn has genuine reverence for the fire and its ability to affect the process of pottery. The combination of earth and fire is a miniature cosmology in his kiln. After all, it is how planets are formed.

He thinks of fire as a river within the kiln, and each of the pots is positioned as stones in that stream. Ash is the element carried by that river, and the flow of the river determines the patterns on each pot. “You’re giving up fifty percent of the control,” Benn said during a recent conversation. Over time, he’s learned how to manipulate the process, comparing it to “jazz-like improvisation.”

Like devotees of jazz who know that the pursuit is about the knowledge of time, of how to speed it up and slow it down, to flow in the moment while being immune to it, Benn negotiates that unique relationship potters have with time. The ability to stand before a piece of ancient pottery and see the fingers that manipulated that clay, intuiting the process and melting the centuries and cultures standing between the two potters.

Benn understands tenacity and its essentialness when seeing a dream to fruition. Woodfiring requires an infrastructure, an elaborate one at that. And it took him and Colleen years to gather the means and wherewithal to build the two kilns in which they now fire. In the early 90’s, he’d given up on his dream, convinced it wasn’t in the cards. His friend Hiroshi, a Japanese-American and fellow potter living in southern Oregon, called him in delight. Hiroshi was going to build a wood kiln. After years of trying to get the resources together, fickle history played a part. Under the leadership of Bill Clinton, Hiroshi was one of many who received monetary compensation for time spent in the U.s. government’s internment camps during WWII. He used the money to pursue his dream.

Almost twenty years later, John Benn has taken that example and opportunity to realize his own dream. One he’s pursued doggedly with great elegance and reverence for craft. He and Colleen currently fire in two wood-burning kilns: a salt kiln with a Bourry-style firebox and a 25 foot-long Noborigama/train kiln.

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