Hi, Connie Matisse here. My name will be familiar to our newsletter's most enduring readers but new for those who've come aboard after 2022, so I'll indulge an introduction. I'm one of East Fork's co-founders and Alex's wife.  I wore a lot of hats at the company, shaping how it looked, felt, and acted in the world and serving as  its CMO and CEO, before passing the baton and following a call down a different path.

As we welcome a new color to our Core Collection, the team asked me to recount how these eight colors—Longleaf, Heron, Blue Ridge, Black Mountain, Panna Cotta, Amaro, Eggshell and Morel—came to be. Alex and I met in 2009 when he was 25 and I was 24. He'd just bought the land — now home to Township10 — where he planned to build his pottery. (“Pottery” is the word those in our ceramic lineage use both for the forms we make and the place where it is made). Six months later, while hunting ginseng on the mountain, we ran through a short list of names for the pottery and landed on East Fork. (And thank goodness — there were a few real duds.) In those early years I waited tables in Asheville, slaughtered chickens at the farm up the road, read aloud to Alex while he threw, kept us fed, and schlepped glaze buckets to and fro. Then around 2011, I kept doing all of that but also got a smartphone and started following Alex around the workshop like a documentary golden retriever.

From 2010 through 2015 we made pots in a Southeastern folk vernacular, heavily decorated in floral motif with kaolin-based slip squeezed out of a Clairol hair dye applicator, and fired to cone 12 in a 26-foot-long, 6-foot-tall wood kiln that we fired up three or four times a year. When that thing was cooking at around 2,300 degrees we blasted 100 pounds of salt into it through the stoke holes with leaf blowers. That’ll singe off your eyelashes and meld your skinny jeans to your thigh skin just once before you learn a lesson. It took Alex about three months of throwing pots six days a week, eight or nine hours a day to fill the kiln, then about a month of cutting and stacking wood, four days to load it, three days to fire it, one day  to cool it, a day to unload, a day to angle grind and dremel all the sharp bits off, and then a few days for me to cook food for two hundred people, Alex to  bush hog the field, and throw a party for everyone  to come shop. The pots that came out of that kiln were colored tobacco and umber, wheat and walnut, molasses and loam. In other words: brown-ish. Firing in a wood kiln is potent but squirrely magic; much trust must be handed over to Brother Fire.  You can guess and hope but can’t be sure what the pots are going to look like. Eventually we got itchy  for more control. We wanted to make complete sets  of dinnerware and get more pots into more kitchens. And so we bought a gas kiln in the winter of 2014, which opened a door to a whole new world of color.

Continue Reading

The East Fork Table - The tried-and-true pieces that have earned a permanent spot on our shelves. Shop Now

Be Our Guest, Visit East Fork

Our Community Partnership

Refer your Friends: Give $20, Get $20

View in Your Browser

Copyright © 2026 East Fork, All rights reserved.

No longer want to receive these emails? Manage Preferences or Unsubscribe.
East Fork Pottery, LLC 531 Short McDowell Street Asheville, North Carolina 28803