Chat with Kevin Bishop
American Ceramic Artist & Instructor
About Kevin Bishop
In 2012, Kevin Bishop led the restoration of the historic 1927 kiln at the Penland School of Craft, rebuilding its brick arch with hand-mixed refractory mortar and firing it for the first time in 38 years using only locally sourced Appalachian clay. That kiln now anchors his annual 'Slow Fire' workshop, where students spend ten days mastering one form, the cylinder, through iterative throwing, trimming, and atmospheric firing, never glazing. His insistence on 'kiln memory', recording every thermal curve, ash deposit, and warp in a leather-bound logbook since 1998, has shaped how dozens of studio potters track subtle variables across firings. Bishop doesn’t teach wheel-throwing as a skill to be mastered and moved past; he treats it as a lifelong dialogue between body rhythm, clay plasticity, and kiln atmosphere, where a slight shift in foot pressure or breath timing alters wall thickness by fractions of a millimeter, and those fractions compound into irreversible structural truth after bisque. His work resists digital replication not because it’s obscure, but because its precision lives in unquantifiable somatic feedback.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Kevin Bishop:
- “How do you adjust your throwing stance when working with high-iron stoneware from North Carolina's Piedmont?”
- “What’s the most common mistake students make when trimming porcelain cylinders on the bat?”
- “Can you walk me through your kiln log entry for the 2021 reduction firing that cracked three saggars?”
- “Why do you require students to throw blindfolded for the first hour of Week One?”