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Mud in the Blood: Digging Local Clay Builds Community Connections in Western North Carolina [1]
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Date: 2025-06-18
[Series note: People have been making pottery in the mountains of western North Carolina for thousands of years. This Living Traditions series focuses on the contemporary artists and makers who are maintaining pre-industrial pottery practices.]
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It’s hard to avoid clay if you work with the land in western North Carolina. It’s instantly recognizable to farmers, landscapers, and builders – mostly because it’s a nuisance.
“It’s the sticky stuff that gets stuck on the bottom of their tractor wheels, or in a field. It’s where the water isn’t draining well,” said Naomi Dalglish. “So it can cause a lot of issues.”
Dalglish and her husband, Michael Hunt, are also intimately familiar with clay dirt of all kinds in their community of Bakersville and the surrounding areas. But for them, the clay isn’t a nuisance: it’s a treasure.
Dalglish and Hunt are the team behind Bandana Pottery, where they make functional ceramics ranging from cups, plates, and bowls to vases and large storage jars. Using local clay dug from deposits around North Carolina is a central part of their ceramics practice.
“The clay is a collaborator,” said Hunt. “It has its limitations, but it also has possibilities.”
These days, the vast majority of studio potters use commercial clays, which are made up of minerals like kaolin, bentonite, feldspar, and quartz and mixed to certain specifications at an industrial scale. Different ingredients and ratios yield different clay bodies, which result in a variety of colors, textures, and firing temperatures available on the market.
But for most of human history, potters have been restricted to the types of clays available in the ground in their own communities. Each geography produces clays with different characteristics, which has informed how each culture’s pottery traditions developed. For example, China has rich reserves of kaolin, a pure white clay used to make delicate and translucent porcelain. Because porcelain is soft and has a lot of plasticity, it is an ideal clay to be thrown on the pottery wheel, which was first introduced to China more than 5,000 years ago. It also melts at a high temperature, so it’s no coincidence that Chinese potters developed advanced high-fire kilns that also influenced Japanese and Korean pottery traditions.
Finished pieces in the gallery at Bandana Pottery. Historical pots made with North Carolina clays and glaze materials inspired Hunt and Dalglish to explore the possibilities of creating their own local clay bodies. (Photo by Anya Petrone Slepyan / The Daily Yonder)
Meanwhile, low-fire earthenware, or terracotta, was easily available in the Mediterranean. This set the parameters for the intricate vases, both decorative and functional, that define ancient Greek pottery practices.
In North Carolina, plentiful natural clay deposits have been the foundation for a number of ceramics traditions. For three thousand years, Cherokee potters have used local clays to create intricate and functional pots that are hand coiled, paddled, and stamped. Later, European settlers and their descendants began making wheel-thrown pieces using local materials for clays and glazes.
Historical, functional pots made from local North Carolina clays and ash glazes in the 1800s helped inspire Dalglish and Hunt to start experimenting with digging and processing their own clay more than twenty years ago.
“It started from seeing historical pots, and a depth and complexity to the material,” Hunt said. But he and Dalglish aren’t interested in making replicas. Instead, the pots and their materials served as “a springboard to a bigger, formal exploration.”
Making the Clay
The process begins with acquiring clay dirt. Clay deposits are plentiful in North Carolina, but you have to know where to dig. That’s where relationships with friends and neighbors come in handy, Dalglish and Hunt explained.
“One of the main ways we’ve found clays is by creating relationships with our neighbors,” Hunt said.
A farmer and former neighbor supplies much of the potters’ clay from his field, located just a mile away from the studio’s previous location in Bandana, North Carolina.
Dalglish and Hunt then mix large batches of the clay dirt with water, to create a liquid slip that can be strained through a mesh net. The size of the mesh varies, depending on how coarse or fine the potters want the clay to be. And it has important repercussions for the final objects the potters create.
“This is one of the first aesthetic decisions we’re making, is how fine a screen do we want to use?” Dalglish said.
Dalglish and Hunt mix the local clay dirt with water to form a slip, then strain the mixture into a large tub. They add minerals, like feldspar and silica, then pump the clay into large wooden racks to dry. (Photos by Anya Petrone Slepyan / The Daily Yonder)
Dalglish and Hunt mix the local clay dirt with water to form a slip, then strain the mixture into a large tub. They add minerals, like feldspar and silica, then pump the clay into large wooden racks to dry. (Photos by Anya Petrone Slepyan / The Daily Yonder)
Dalglish and Hunt mix the local clay dirt with water to form a slip, then strain the mixture into a large tub. They add minerals, like feldspar and silica, then pump the clay into large wooden racks to dry. (Photos by Anya Petrone Slepyan / The Daily Yonder)
Dalglish and Hunt mix the local clay dirt with water to form a slip, then strain the mixture into a large tub. They add minerals, like feldspar and silica, then pump the clay into large wooden racks to dry. (Photos by Anya Petrone Slepyan / The Daily Yonder)
Keeping coarse materials, like little bits of sand and small pebbles, in the clay gives it a character and texture distinctive from commercial clays. It can also provide structure for larger pieces, like sculptures and storage jars.
“A lot of what using local clays is about is the expressive possibilities of particle size,” Hunt said. “We’re playing with the materials being fine enough to make pottery, but way coarser than commercial materials.”
Once the slip has been screened into a large tub, Hunt and Dalglish mix in commercial powdered materials, like feldspar, silica, and ball clay. The clay they use melts at such a high temperature that they need these added materials to help it vitrify (change chemical compositions and become waterproof) at around 2350°Fahrenheit, a common firing temperature for high-fired ceramics.
The mixture is then pumped into wooden racks, and left to dry to a working consistency before being brought into the studio and used to make pottery.
Speaking and Listening
This process is far more labor intensive than a typical trip to a clay supplier. But its benefits are multifaceted, according to Hunt.
For one thing, Hunt and Dalglish believe that digging their own clay is more environmentally sustainable than using commercial clays. They are using materials that might otherwise have been discarded, and it cuts down drastically on resources used for transportation–even their feldspar is acquired from a producer down the road. Processing their own clay bodies is also cheaper than buying pre-mixed clays, a not insignificant benefit for independent artists.
But most importantly, using local materials has been a font of creative inspiration, according to Dalglish and Hunt.
“It’s really fulfilling, because every clay has its own character and limitations that guide your practice,” Dalglish explained. “A lot of the clays that we have here aren’t super plastic, but when you’re carving the foot on a bowl, it just creates this beautiful texture with the rough sand and stone particles that are in the clay. And that kind of discovery in the studio will lead us on to explore different facets of the clay.”
Hunt describes all pottery as a conversation between potters and the clay they work with. But he says that working with local clay sometimes involves more listening than speaking.
“We’re constantly thinking, what do we want to do with the clay?” he said. But he also asks, “what does this clay want to do, if it can’t work in the way that maybe we’re accustomed to working?”
Dalglish and Hunt work in their studio. Using local clay bodies requires that potters ‘listen’ to the limitations, and possibilities, presented by the clays, Hunt said. (Photos by Anya Petrone Slepyan / The Daily Yonder)
Dalglish and Hunt work in their studio. Using local clay bodies requires that potters ‘listen’ to the limitations, and possibilities, presented by the clays, Hunt said. (Photos by Anya Petrone Slepyan / The Daily Yonder)
This process also builds, and depends on, community connections. When Hunt and Dalglish first began experimenting with local clays, they were supported by teachers at the nearby Penland School of Craft, as well as mentors like Will Ruggles and Douglass Rankin. Since then, they have mentored many apprentices of their own, including Josh Copus, who is known for his use of local clays and wood-firing method in the nearby town of Marshall, North Carolina.
“The apprenticeship is not one-directional,” Hunt said. “People are learning from each other.”
This sharing of information has helped develop a community of potters in the region who are interested in using local materials and supporting one another’s efforts.
“The pottery community in general tends to be pretty open with knowledge that they have,” Dalglish said. “So we get pretty excited and just geek out about [local clay] with our friends and share a lot of information in that way.”
But the community connection forged by local clays goes beyond just potters and artists.
Dalglish recalled one instance when a former neighbor, Ed, was preparing his field for the spring, and brought a scoop of clay down the road to their studio in his tractor.
“We were so touched that he thought to do that, but we were also trying to double check, what part of the field did you get this from? We wanted to make sure it was the right stuff,” Dalglish said.
Ed looked at them in mock indignation and said, “I’m a farmer, you think I don’t know my own dirt?”
“That’s one of the times that we realized that we all have a respect for the same material,” Dalglish said. “It’s through different avenues, but we could recognize it in each other. And even though a lot of things are different in our lives and perspectives, he’s someone to this day that we really value our relationship with.”
Hunt said that the development of these relationships is not the reason they set out to use local clays, but that “a really wonderful side effect is our connection to the place and the people where we live. The connection to not just the geology, but also to the community.”
This article is part of the Living Traditions project, featuring an assortment of stories and podcasts about folklife in central Appalachia. Read More Living Traditions Sign up for email alerts.
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