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For the past decade, ceramic artist Casey Zablocki has been creating rugged sculptural forms in a wood-fired kiln surrounded by Montana’s Lolo National Forest, Clark Fork River, and Mission and Rattlesnake Mountains. It’s a physically gruelling process. “It takes a crew of six of us to roll everything into the tunnel-shaped kiln,” he explains, dressed in classic outdoorsman gear: jeans, checked shirt and baseball cap. “For one firing, I use around 11 cords of wood – harvested sustainably from fallen or standing dead trees – which need to be chopped and split into small pieces.” Once lit, the kiln is stoked to almost 1,300°C and kept ablaze for eight days. “We run it 24/7,” he says. “It’s intense. A marathon. I’m throwing chunks of wood on top of my work to get the effects and surfaces I want.”
In 2022, Zablocki’s ancient-looking plinths and pots were the subject of Modern Relics, a solo show at New York’s Guild Gallery that was a turning point in his career. “The works instantly sold out,” says Robin Standefer who, with her husband Stephen Alesch, runs Guild Gallery, Roman and Williams Guild store, and the architecture and design studio Roman and Williams. This September, they will host Zablocki’s second show. “It focuses on a single avenue of his practice: ceramic furniture,” she says. “Instead of vessels and vases, we’ll be showing chairs, tables and benches on a monumental scale.” Prices start from $20,000.
Zablocki talks at speed and exudes a frenetic energy. “I don’t know if I’m ever calm,” he says. His creative practice requires a huge physical effort. Where once he worked alone, he has now been able to hire a team of assistants, and his approach encompasses lifestyle adjustments: less beer and cheeseburgers, more 5am stretching routines. Three days a week, he hits the gym for an hour of training followed by a sauna. “I sweat for about 20 minutes and try to use that time as meditation, to get my mind right before I enter the studio,” he says. “Then Tuesday and Thursday are my cardio days; I either hike up in the mountains or run next to a river with my dog, so I get to spend time in nature and have quiet moments with the trees, the birds, the water and the rocks – the elements that are so important to me.”
The Montana landscape is a constant inspiration – from the brutalist forms and the earthy colour palette to the wild energy of natural features such as the mountains in Yellowstone National Park. “I live in the city of Missoula, but literally out of my back door I can hike into some of the most remote mountain areas in North America,” he says. “We’re surrounded by public land that you can run through, cycle through, camp in. You might run into a grizzly bear or a mountain lion; there’s a sense of wildness and excitement.”
The vastness of the terrain is translated into large-scale work. His new pieces also incorporate local Montana clay, dug up near an old mine (and occasionally flecked with gold). “It’s porcelain and it’s beautiful,” he says. “My work is becoming the landscape. I’m becoming the landscape.”
Zablocki is not a Montana native. He grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, surrounded by Lake Superior – “a very small old mining town: a lot of fighting, a lot of drinking, but also a lot of nature,” he says. “I grew up in woods and gullies.” From high school he went into construction but, inspired by his potter uncle, decided to study ceramics, where he fell in love with wood-firing.
His burgeoning practice led him from Colorado to North Carolina, from Denver to New Jersey, crisscrossing the country to apprentice with specialist studio potters such as Joe Bruhin, who runs Fox Mountain Pottery in the Arkansas Ozarks, and Peter Callas, who in the 1970s built the first Anagama kiln in North America. A year in Finland, studying at Kuopio Academy of Design, also had an impact.
“I was trying to learn as much as possible about these processes and create my own style,” says Zablocki, who came to Montana 11 years ago to do a residency at The Clay Studio of Missoula. The community centre runs the outdoor kiln where he does his own firings, working with a team that might include his studio assistants and other ceramicists. “I stack the kiln so that the flame travels through in a certain way and drops ash at certain spots, creating this painterly quality,” he says. “Last month was the first time that I fired all large work and it was one of my best firings ever. I think it’s my strongest work.”
This self-confidence has been hard won. He sums up the first 17 years of his career as “people telling me my work was terrible and that it would never sell”. On two occasions he nearly took a different path: “I thought I wanted to be a chef; I thought I wanted to be a baker.” He remembers one night in particular: “We were camping on a beautiful mountain lake, drinking whiskey, and a guy that my wife works with convinced me to become a baker.” They built a bread-baking oven based on a wood-fired kiln and their business grew to the point where they couldn’t keep up with demand.
“We got in touch with Casey when he was at the point of stopping his ceramic practice and baking bread full-time,” says Standefer. She discovered Zablocki’s work online in 2017 when she was preparing to open the Guild store in New York’s Soho. “I love brutalist ceramics in the tradition of Peter Callas, and Casey is part of that continuum.”
Another source of support has been South Korean ceramicist Hun Chung Lee, a master of celadon-glazing techniques, with whom Zablocki spent four months in 2015. But it’s Zablocki’s Montana network that plays a critical role in his daily practice. “For a long time, my ego wanted me to have my own kiln, my own property, a massive studio,” he muses. Now, though, he sees the positives in his unsuccessful attempts to buy a nearby plot of land. “It’s kept me in the community,” he says. “I mentor a lot of The Clay Studio’s wood-fire residents, and being around these young, talented artists, learning from them, is more important to me than working in the woods by myself. This is the place – with this kiln, in this community – where I am supposed to be.”
Casey Zablocki is at Guild Gallery, New York, from 12 September to 9 November
