Jason Hartsoe

Jason’s ceramic education was pursued through avenues of apprenticeship and assisting master potters on the job. This includes work and studies at Winchcombe Pottery in England, with Dan Finnegan in Virginia and with Michael Hunt and Naomi Dalglish of Bandana Pottery in North Carolina. He has since participated in the Archie Bray Summer Residency in Helena, MT, in the three-year residency at Penland School of Craft, and has been a year-long visiting artist for the University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy. Jason currently maintains a studio practice at his home in Western North Carolina.

"My work relies on it’s acknowledgment of it’s status as antecedent.  I believe that successful art requires a firm foundation in the work that came before it.  It operates by recognizing and capitalizing on the surprising unity and collective nature of seemingly disparate ceramic traditions.  The common language of forms created by the diverse cultures of our world, crossing the myriad technological divides are all dictated by themes of functionality and a common human scale. 

I look not only to the forms themselves but also to the traditional methods used to make them.  I have pursued my education through the process of apprenticeship and working closely with master potters, beginning in Japan and continuing through England and here in the US.  This slow education allowed for an organic training and development of the eye for form and instructed the hand in how to respond to the material.  

As a functional potter I am unapologetically deeply reverent of tradition. However, I demand that my work resist a static complacency in merely the replication of the past.  The challenge of my studio practice is to escape the dangers of the derivative and to allow the free experimentation with preexisting fundamentals and to synthesize them with a fresh, contemporary approach and consideration. My design is to encourage something new from the past and in so doing, to create something vital and lasting.   It is my hope that perhaps it will succeed in demonstrating a kind of new translation of the better themes of our functional forms."