Clay Motion: Asheville-Based East Fork Pottery Scales It Up
The team at East Fork in Asheville making things happen in their open workspace. Article by Paul Clark. Photography by Jennifer Cole.
In case you didn’t already know, we LOVE beautiful homes. And we believe you can’t beat local pottery on those kitchen shelves. Especially pottery you can actually use (and happens to be gorgeous). Enter East Fork. Below is a great write up on East Fork Pottery by WNC Magazine.
Lunch can be loud at East Fork’s new ceramics factory. The meals the staff makes and shares twice weekly in the industrial space near downtown Asheville roll with laughter along the long, blond-wood table, tumbling over one another and bouncing off the building’s naked brick walls.
Connie Matisse, partner and creative visionary of the rapidly growing company, smiles, taking in the resounding conversations around her and the clatter of spoons scraping soup from the bottoms of East Fork’s simple, hand-glazed bowls. Nearby stands another long table, where a few young workers are noshing bowls of bright green kale salad and working on their laptops, helping with the many marketing and business dealings for the company, spawned from the artistic groundwork laid by Connie’s husband and CEO, Alex Matisse, and their business partner, John Vigeland. The rest of the crew, many of them visual artists in their 20s and 30s, work the machines in the back to shape, glaze, and fire the plates, mugs, and other pieces making their way to dinner tables far and wide.
There’s a warm, familial vibe here this bright wintery afternoon, a sign that East Fork’s new factory near Biltmore Village is proceeding just as it should—as a mesh of community, cooperation, and creativity.