MEET THE FIRESTICK COMMUNITY OF POTTERS...
sharing a studio, gallery, ideas, and inspiration. From beginning students to master potters, our common bond is the joy of working with clay.
sharing a studio, gallery, ideas, and inspiration. From beginning students to master potters, our common bond is the joy of working with clay.
ROBIN NAHIN, studio owner and potter
Robin, an avid potter and entrepenuer at heart, always dreamed of how things would be if she had her own pottery studio. So, she purchased the pottery studio formerly owned by Larry Carnes in 2017 and has been building her dream ever since.
Robin finds joy creating free form pottery full of color and texture and then planting succulents in them. Her creations are displayed in the gallery and in the garden at Firestick. You can also see them out on the GALLERY page.
You'll find Robin tending to her pots and plants, members and guests, and the studio Friday through Monday of every week. Come on by, she would love to meet you.
Robin, an avid potter and entrepenuer at heart, always dreamed of how things would be if she had her own pottery studio. So, she purchased the pottery studio formerly owned by Larry Carnes in 2017 and has been building her dream ever since.
Robin finds joy creating free form pottery full of color and texture and then planting succulents in them. Her creations are displayed in the gallery and in the garden at Firestick. You can also see them out on the GALLERY page.
You'll find Robin tending to her pots and plants, members and guests, and the studio Friday through Monday of every week. Come on by, she would love to meet you.
JOANN WEBB, potter
Joann finds pottery to be a very grounding and centering form of expressive art. A multi creative artist and potter living in Ojai since 1982, she studied ceramics at Santa Rosa and Ventura College and apprenticed with a few master potters over the years in Ojai, Hawaii and Italy, which included horsehair raku and primitive pit fire techniques. She facilitated many pottery workshops at the Ojai Foundation in upper Ojai, a semi-wilderness spiritual retreat center, where she found inspiration in working with the elemental alchemy of earth, water, fire and air in the rustic mountain ridge pottery studio. She has found great meanings in the life lessons and metaphors that pottery has to offer such as finding your the center in still point of the chaos, and the always powerful lesson of acceptance and non attachment, among many others.
ROSEMARY HOLLIDAY HALL, Artist, Teacher, and Co-manager
Rosemary is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice utilizes ceramics, sculpture, video installation, and performance to explore time, nature, and more-than-human agencies. She joined Firestick Pottery as a teacher and manager in 2021. Her teaching philosophy is based on open-ended play, exploration, and embodied approaches to materiality. For Rosemary, clay is a means to explore multiple ways of understanding and connecting with the world around us. Clay is everywhere, it’s the earth we walk on, the vessels we drink from, and the crust we eventually return to. It is a deeptime matter, that arises naturally through the slow decomposition of rock. And in this way, the history of objects made from clay is the continuous entanglement of nature and culture ~ as mountains become vessels. What she loves about clay, is how it asks us to relate to time, the environment, and our bodies. Creating through this material is a relationship to the earth and yourself, it is imprinting, grounding, centering, and always transforming.
Rosemary received her MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from the University of California Davis. She has exhibited work in galleries and performance festivals in Chicago, London, and Washington DC.
Instagram : rosemaryhhall www.rosemaryhollidayhall.com
Rosemary is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice utilizes ceramics, sculpture, video installation, and performance to explore time, nature, and more-than-human agencies. She joined Firestick Pottery as a teacher and manager in 2021. Her teaching philosophy is based on open-ended play, exploration, and embodied approaches to materiality. For Rosemary, clay is a means to explore multiple ways of understanding and connecting with the world around us. Clay is everywhere, it’s the earth we walk on, the vessels we drink from, and the crust we eventually return to. It is a deeptime matter, that arises naturally through the slow decomposition of rock. And in this way, the history of objects made from clay is the continuous entanglement of nature and culture ~ as mountains become vessels. What she loves about clay, is how it asks us to relate to time, the environment, and our bodies. Creating through this material is a relationship to the earth and yourself, it is imprinting, grounding, centering, and always transforming.
Rosemary received her MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from the University of California Davis. She has exhibited work in galleries and performance festivals in Chicago, London, and Washington DC.
Instagram : rosemaryhhall www.rosemaryhollidayhall.com
ESTEBAN SANCHEZ, Kiln Tech, Teacher, Operations manager.
Esteban has 6 years experience as a potter and teaches wheel throwing classes, keeps the kilns running smooth, and manages facility maintenance and operations. He has been part of the Firestick team for 2 years and studied pottery at Ventura College with Jen Chi Wu. He enjoys creating functional stoneware pieces like kim chi pots and practical dinnerware, but also stepping away from that occasionally with adding fun carvings and surface texture or whimsical sculpted faces to hand built compound forms. His focus is on keeping the kilns running efficiently twice a week and mastering the the fine nuanced variable skills needed for the firing the cone 10 downdraft gas kiln and achieving a consistent glaze reduction. He is a devoted married family man with 2 kids, and his other life's passion is being a professional drummer and has played with several bands in and around Ventura Co. and the Southwest area for the last 36 years.
Esteban has 6 years experience as a potter and teaches wheel throwing classes, keeps the kilns running smooth, and manages facility maintenance and operations. He has been part of the Firestick team for 2 years and studied pottery at Ventura College with Jen Chi Wu. He enjoys creating functional stoneware pieces like kim chi pots and practical dinnerware, but also stepping away from that occasionally with adding fun carvings and surface texture or whimsical sculpted faces to hand built compound forms. His focus is on keeping the kilns running efficiently twice a week and mastering the the fine nuanced variable skills needed for the firing the cone 10 downdraft gas kiln and achieving a consistent glaze reduction. He is a devoted married family man with 2 kids, and his other life's passion is being a professional drummer and has played with several bands in and around Ventura Co. and the Southwest area for the last 36 years.