So I finally finished my new pottery site. Despite the fact I haven’t thrown a pot in two years, I have so much work that no one has ever seen I wanted to create a new site to highlight my efforts.
That’s a bit of a strange thing to admit, isn’t it? Building a showcase for work you’re not currently making. But here’s the thing — I spent years at the wheel producing pieces I was genuinely proud of, and most of them have just been sitting in boxes, on shelves, or quietly living in the homes of people who bought them without much fanfare. It felt wrong to let that work continue to exist without at least giving it a proper home on the internet.
The site is at pottery.davehamel.com and it has over a hundred pieces organized into collections — bowls, vases, mugs, yunomi, teapots, plates, and a section I’ve called Older Work, which is exactly what it sounds like. Some of it goes back many years. Some of it I’d honestly forgotten I made until I started photographing everything.
The process of building the site was itself a kind of archaeology. You spend a lot of time with your older work when you’re writing descriptions for it. Remembering what you were trying to do, what you were thinking about, whether you actually pulled it off. In some cases, yes. In others, it’s pretty clear why certain pieces were still sitting in a box.
I’m not sure when I’ll get back to the wheel. Life does that thing it does where it fills up and the studio starts to feel like a luxury. But at least now the work exists somewhere that isn’t just a shelf in my basement. If you’ve ever been curious about what I’ve been making for the past decade or so, go have a look. There’s a lot of it.