Pottery For Life
For 45 years, master potter Guy WOLFF ’70 has returned to High Mowing to make pots for the pottery sale. This year was his 45th four-day stint in The Pottery. Throwing pieces one after the other and chatting with High Mowing pottery teacher Mrs. Karl (and a steady stream of visitors), he filled the studio with a small ‘army’ of jugs, mugs, jars, vases and pitchers, each with the distinctive ‘Wolff ‘16’ signature on the bottom.
“I try to leave two or three thousand dollars’ worth of pots every year,” he said, figuring that he passed the $100,000 mark (in donated sales) some time ago. At the end of the week, he left Mrs. Karl in charge of firing, glazing and then selling the 100 or so pieces during the fundraiser that kicked off the Annual May Day Festival at High Mowing School.
“It’s a busy time,” Mrs. Karl allowed, as she surveyed the rows of drying pottery. Mrs. Karl’s own 70-year legacy in The Pottery is astounding, though she shuns any recognition of it. She began teaching 1946 and is considered the last remaining founding teacher at High Mowing School.
In addition to Guy Wolff’s pots, two local potters, Wendy WALTER ’85 and Alexios Karl, Mrs. Karl’s grandson, donated works to the sale, which was held in The Pottery. In the past, alumni Sharry STEVENSON Grunden ’74, Agnes CHABOT Almquist ’71 and David GRAHAM ’03 and many others have donated their work.
For many, the sale is an annual pilgrimage: the campus is decidedly chilly on the last Saturday morning of April and so it is pleasant to descend to the basement of the boy’s dorm into the warm earthiness of The Pottery. Under the lights, clay-dusted tables are crowded with gleaming rows of treasure in celadon, oxide, cobalt and the occasional soft pinks and greys of unglazed pieces.
“It’s the high point (of the Festival) for me,” said Jeannie BARTEN Hawthorne ’55. “I always go. There is something magic about Mrs. Karl; that she is still there, doing it. She was there when I came through,” Jeannie said. She remembered one occasion when fellow alumni arrived at the sale opening and lingered for a very long time. “After I had been all around to the different booths in the festival and returned to The Pottery, they were still there,” she said.
Proceeds from the sale are deposited into the Beulah Hepburn Emmet Scholarship Fund, which was established by the school’s founder, Mrs. Emmet, to defray the cost of tuition for ‘those who otherwise would not be able to attend High Mowing School.’ “We are deeply grateful to Guy Wolff for the steadfast support he has given the fund over the years,” said Development Director Heather Carver.
It’s not often that a person launches a life-long career before they even graduate from high school, but so it was with Guy, who took up his craft within a week of arriving at High Mowing as an underclassman and visiting Mrs. Karl’s pottery. With an apprenticeship at North Carolina’s Jugtown Pottery under his belt and residencies at a pottery-making village in Ewenny, Wales and Weatheriggs Pottery in England’s Lake district, Guy eventually settled in his studio in Bantam, CT, all the while finding his way, as he says, “as a truthful craftsman” and gaining knowledge from ancient pottery-making places and traditions.
“Starting a pot is like going to a different cocktail party every time,” Guy quipped as he worked at the wheel one morning during his February work session. He kept talking as he pulled the thick walls of a short cylinder of spinning clay upward, transforming them in seconds into an elegant vase. “You don’t know the way what you say will be received, at one party or another,” he said. “Paying close attention to the material under your hand — where it’s from and its properties — is something you could spend a lifetime doing,” he said. “What makes a pot so wonderful, so alive?” he asks. “If it comes from a 700-year-old town where people have been making those same pots, the answer is there, he said, in the dignity of that tradition, of reverence and knowledge of the clay that’s there.”
For Guy, that passionate investigation, though only four decades so far, has gotten him close enough to the answer; Guy Wolff pots are a favorite of Martha Stewart and are installed in The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, among other places.
Like many alums, Guy’s story of coming to High Mowing is immediate — not so much a memory but a facet of who he is in the world. His father, Robert Jay Wolff, was a New York Abstract Expressionist painter and close friends with Mrs. Emmet.
“There was incomparable beauty everywhere you looked,” Guy says of visiting campus for the first time. He and his father were touring schools, but once they arrived at High Mowing, the rest of the trip was forgotten. “It wasn’t ‘choosing a school,’ it was ‘this is the place,’” he said. With poor eyesight and having narrowly survived a stint in public school, Guy saw that High Mowing was his “one chance at getting an education.” The affirmation he felt at school and in The Pottery was all he needed to thrive — in his craft and in his classes. Mrs. Karl’s unspoken example of reverence for material and the discipline of the work seemed to Guy “utterly appropriate.”
And then there was The Pottery itself; an oddly-shaped room full of corners, lit by half windows on two sides and lined with rustic wooden shelves and hand-made tables, imbued, Guy says, with something of ‘each potter who has worked here.’
There have been thousands.
It’s more than that though. The room Mrs. Karl has made is indeed a magical place; abiding in simplicity, covered in a velvet layer of gray-brown silt and studded here and there with ancient examples of a living craft; and — unless there happens to be a class — reverently still. Expectant. Lingering longer than a moment or two often provokes a slight disruption; a softly chirped greeting from nowhere. “Hello,” Mrs. Karl will call out from a behind a corner in the glazing area or coming in from the kiln. If you seem willing, she will show you around and, in spite of the neatly lettered ‘do not touch’ signs resting on the tops of some pieces, she will hand you a pot to hold while she tells you its story.
