About the studio

Green River Pottery has grown a bit since its beginning in 1998. For its first ten years, half an hour outside of town on the High Road to Taos, the studio was a private space, next to an old general store, where I threw pots, built kilns, sifted clay I’d found in the desert, or in the foothills. A little bell would ring & I would head over to the old store & talk to visitors.

Moving to Santa Fe in 2009, the studio began expanding, with classes, interns, and these days a small dedicated staff. Along with a gallery of stoneware pots we offer a few classes and space for people to sign up & work on their own. Our approach to clay & creative work reflects the incremental & experimental growth of the studio itself - we learn by doing, encourage each other’s independence & self reliance, always knowing that everyone is on their own creative path.

Theo Helmstadter photo by Rob Gauss

About the potter

Born in Upstate New York, I graduated from Oberlin College having studied philosophy & French. Before that, back in junior high, I’d started spending a lot of time in a metal shop, learning to forge, weld, make & use tools. I loved the pursuit of the useful form, and the way this intertwined with the pursuit of beauty itself. My teacher, Murad Sayen, told me this was a basic idea - if you make a knife or a wrench and it works really well, is useful, chances are its form is good too. It is beautiful.

The work I was doing back then seemed archetypal, like something people had always done, though I never thought of it as ‘creative’ particularly. I put it aside & then after college, working as a bike messenger, river guide, outdoor educator (and yes also as the nightwatchperson for Haystack School of Crafts), then finally as a classroom English teacher, I started pursuing apprenticeships to working potters.

For the last twenty-five years I've been in the studio full-time. Five years ago I established a separate workspace where I can once again work alone, back out in the country, half an hour from town. I divide my time between there (studio A) and Lena Street in Santa Fe (studio B) where Green River continues to offer classes & space for independent work. I learned clay by doing, through apprenticeship. So I love being able to offer internships & work-trades to a few people at a time who are just starting, finding their way to clay.

About the pots

The pots are stoneware - a rugged, durable, clay. They are fired to a high temperature (2350 Fahrenheit) in the kiln and during the long, intense, ‘reduction’ process the clay and glazes are transformed - darkened and given depth. I love how this process, especially since I start from a local clay I dig in nearby Abiquiu, New Mexico, is not quite predictable or controllable.

A lot of the ceramics that inspire me are old, and seem to form, as clay so easily does, a connection to the distant past. Many great pots were made by potters long ago who worked rapidly, skillfully, prolifically, meeting the needs of daily living. I also get a lot of inspiration from the vast empty northern New Mexico landscape - the restrained warm colors of the Colorado Plateau, the monumental forms of its rocks, tumbling from the mesas, the generous deposits of sand and clay, the arroyos that change shape with each rainstorm, the visible presence of the distant past, the Jurassic era, when this whole place was sea, and seashore.

Clay is formless, abundant, and represents the final decomposition of the landscape, of the rocks that shape mountains. I'm fascinated by this paradox, the age and durability of clay, its permanence together with its faithfulness to the fleeting, passing, present. Time is a basic element of my work - my goal is to evoke the feeling of time, and the sense of passage from one time to another.

The pots are designed for use. They are food-safe, microwave, oven, & dishwasher-safe.