🎧 Working Potter Peter Jadoonath

Appears in the December 2024 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

Here’s the deal—I don’t understand how I ended up here other than I really like to make pots, and I refused to quit. Making things is something I’ve always done. Creativity manifested itself in many ways over the years, drawing, painting, playing in a punk band, and eventually making lots of pots.

I did not have a formal exchange of guidance and energy with a mentor after I graduated from Bemidji State University in Minnesota in 1998. That was due to my own stubbornness and fear of being taught. In hindsight, I probably could have saved $20K in expenses and gained twenty years of knowledge had I worked with someone, but then again, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to arrive at my own solutions. 

After undergraduate school, a friend and I began setting up a pottery studio in Lowertown St. Paul, Minnesota, in March of 2000. During the early years, I did a lot of art fairs, traveling through the Midwest and beyond to set up my booth. It was here I began making friends of all ages: like-minded people who were making a life centered on making art. Finding a community has a lot to do with how I have continued moving forward. I think if I had pursued pottery to the exclusion of bonds of friendship, it would have been very difficult. Not just from a sense of discovery and learning, but also morale. The path has lots of highs and lows and having a community is so important, I am sure to cultivate it everywhere I go.

Establishing a Practice

As I traveled through communities and time, so did my studios and work processes. For the first fourteen years of making pots, I worked in basements. In 2014 we moved to Shafer, Minnesota, which is 45 minutes northeast of the Twin Cities. My studio space is in a pole barn and is 800 square feet (74.3 m²). It is formed into a few sections, yet it still has a common flow to it. There is a making area, a green/leather-hard area, a bisque area, and in the center of it is a soda kiln that has a chimney growing horizontally through the wall, exiting outside where it continues its vertical climb. There also is a vented material room where I have a clay mixer and store all dry material. Connected to the studio is a small room where I set up a permanent photo station. Additionally, I have two drawing stations where I can cleanly store all tools, media, and paper for drawing and painting. All the furniture and shelving units are on casters, which allows for easy cleanup and reorganization.

Most of my work is done standing up: wheel throwing, hand building, drawing, etc. Although, I do sit a lot when drawing on pots. It helps to steady my hand. I try to organize the space for comfort of how I want to move and think.

My work-life balance is all over the board. Our kids are young and outnumber us, and they keep us on the balls of our feet. In the winter, we like to go downhill skiing. In the summer we go camping; take trips; watch, play, and cheer at baseball games; and do lots of swimming and water slides. The oldest is in traveling fastpitch softball, which is a family commitment/adventure on its own. I lift weights, ride my bike, and love playing guitar. I find the guitar to be endless fun and learning for me; it’s good to be a beginner at something. I try to play first thing every morning before everyone is awake while sipping coffee. I’m happy as can be.

The spring and fall are my big deadlines, and sprinkled in are all the other things I commit to during the year. My studio fluctuates between relative calm to madness at the end of a work cycle. I spend half the work cycle making and the other half painting and firing the pots.

Making Work

My goal, all along, was to make pots that are drawings and drawings that are pots. Images that blossom appendages and forms that smear into imagery. The hardest part for me was finally being willing to fail in front of myself and everyone else. While it was an evolution over time, a great deal of what I needed to come to terms with was to forget everything I believed to be true about good and bad. 

Nowadays, I make these pots only for me. If people like them, then that’s a bonus. The goal is still the same: make three-dimensional drawings. The solutions I came upon were to lower my firing temperature to cone two, change my clay body to a groggy Redart clay, utilize underglaze to build imagery and surface embellishments, apply more slab and coil construction methods, and fire interchangeably in a low-temp soda kiln and an electric kiln. The characters and imagery I build are in trivial, existential conversation, inspired by real-life experiences, bits of phrases I hear or read, mundane life events, oddball thoughts, gargantuan fiction, dark comedy, and absurdity.

Lessons Learned 

When I began this journey 24 years ago, I was fortunate to be presented with a learning moment. Back then I had gotten to know Bob Briscoe through the art fair hustle and a friend that worked with him. Briscoe is a retired potter and former host on the St. Croix Valley Pottery Tour. He has always been very generous with everything, especially knowledge and opportunity. He wanted us young potters to find our footing and every fall he would host a fall home sale; it was filled with pots, bountiful hospitality, and community. While I always visited to enjoy the warm quality of the event, I realized then that Briscoe was betting on himself.

Now, our annual Backyard Pottery Sale has entered its 15th year and has blossomed into a unique celebration of community and pottery in its own right. Our Backyard Pottery family has grown over the years. Some of these folks were my peers way back when, others were acquaintances, some were students, some were neighbors, and some were strangers. But what has become evident is that we all became friends. The importance of the event can be found in the fact that our kids cry when the sale must come to an end. The guest artists have become aunties and uncles to them, and they bring their kids to spend the weekend as well. The kids make new friendships and the adults strengthen theirs. While the pots are what brings us together, it’s no longer what solely binds us. One of my favorite moments of the weekend is our annual wiffle ball game with our neighbors, Tom and Maggie Jaszczak, who host their home event the same weekend. What does wiffle ball have to do with pottery you ask? Nothing and everything.

Four years ago, I was asked to become a new host for the St. Croix Valley Pottery Tour. Surreal is still the only word I have for it. During my formative pottery years, I attended “The Tour” every spring to look at pots—upside down and inside out. Seeing that many pots and asking that many questions to myself had a profound effect on my desire to pursue making pots. To be one of its hosts now is hard to believe. A friend who is a martial arts expert said something to me recently, “People who are considered masters at something are not masters at all, they are just people who built a community.” That’s all any of this is, just building a clay community. I’m lucky to be part of that.

I’m constantly reminded: There are no guarantees in any of this. Twenty-four years ago, I thought I made the choice to make a living with pottery, but in reality, I made the choice to make a life in pottery. If there was anything I could go back and tell my younger self, it would be, “Don’t be too hard on yourself.”