New Stoneware show December 12-13 — Green River Pottery

Winnowing:

New Stoneware by Theo Helmstadter

Friday December 12, 4pm - 6pm

Saturday December 13, 9am - 5pm

For the annual — how many years has it been? Maybe twenty? year-end holiday show this year, I present new work with the theme of Winnowing. This is something I’ve been doing a lot of in 2025.

Much is made of the need to gather, to hold, to join and create community. Equally important, and opposite, is to separate, to sort, to release and discard and decide between. The result of this is concentration, the distillation of value, simplification, revealing what is important. This process of winnowing is one way to encounter beauty — to create it, even. This is the focus of the pots I’ve made for the second half of 2025.

It’s a privilege to have a very big studio, and a liability that comes with it is that junk piles up — rather than deciding what to do with things, you put them in boxes. Like the lids shown at the top of this page. I have like a hundred of them, from teapots that didn’t pour, or jars whose glaze didn’t work out. For years I’ve just thrown them in a box. Until this summer, when I started winnowing.

Limitation, it is said, is essential to creating. Realizing that you do not have unlimited years to make pots gets you started earlier in the morning, and helps you say no sometimes. How does it actually affect the pieces you make, the way you trim them, even the way you fire the kiln?

One answer is that it makes you look through your pieces as you’re making them, rather than at them. You see the space around them, you see the space they contain, almost more than their forms themselves, let alone their surfaces. If this vase, above, were a short story, this year I’d be thinking more about its theme, or setting, and less about its plot or characters. Those will vanish someday, I will forget, though the feeling of reading this story will stick with me.

Maybe these ideas are ridiculous. You can drop by & debate them with me, or just say hi, that second weekend of December. On the Saturday, the Lena Street Lofts will have their annual holiday festival, with lots of galleries to browse & music, food, shopping.

And, I’m delighted to say, once again our Green River students, interns, production crew, & teachers, will also present work for sale on Saturday from 12pm - 5pm.

Please join us & we’ll celebrate another year of life in the studio, and have a look at some of the best pots that have emerged from it. The not-so-good ones — hmm. Those have been sorted out, separated, winnowed.

— Theo Helmstadter

theo@greenriverpottery.com

505-614-6952