Rose Katz on her path from studio pottery to industry
·52 min·15 clips
The scale changes everything. The account starts with industrial ceramics feeling strange: procedures, factory rhythm, clay supply, and a version of ceramic work measured in millions instead of one pot at a time. Then the place starts to make sense. Gettysburg holds the center. The tile factory made small mosaics and trim pieces, including two-inch and one-inch forms that ended up underfoot in public pools, restrooms, and other shared spaces. Ordinary tile, basically everywhere. That ordinariness gives the episode some of its charge, because this is not precious studio work on a pedestal. It is ceramic labor built into public life. The rail spur matters too. The conversation spends time with the physical problem of feeding a factory, where a line from the main railway to the back of the building replaces bag-by-bag material handling. The silos are remembered as roughly one hundred to one hundred twenty feet tall, which says plenty about the appetite of presses and kilns that do not stop. The factory has a rhythm. Twenty presses run around the clock, four kilns keep firing, and tile moves through in a steady industrial stream. Craft is still there, just in a different form. It lives in material judgment, sequence, equipment, and the disciplined repetition that keeps the system working. The tone stays generous and grounded. Industry is not treated as the enemy of studio pottery. Learning the factory becomes another way of learning clay. The numbers do real work here: millions of square feet, twenty presses, four kilns, nonstop shifts. They make visible a ceramic world people stand on every day without thinking much about who made it. The episode is patient by nature. Its pleasure is watching confusion turn into competence, until a new material language starts to click.
