What makes someone a maker?
For ceramic artist and educator Kent Child, the answer goes back to childhood—watching his grandfather and father work with their hands, discovering clay in the Southwest, and eventually finding his way into Japanese folk pottery, wood firing, and ceramics.
In this episode of Made to Make, Kent joins Shannon Grissom to explore the people, places, materials, and traditions that shaped his creative life. He shares how teachers, mentors, students, and friendships, including renowned potter Conrad Calimpong influenced his approach to ceramics, including the profound impact of Shoji Hamada, Dr. Herbert Sanders, and Japanese folk pottery.
Kent also recalls building his first wood-fired kiln in Los Gatos and the decades-long friendships and annual firings that grew from that experience. For him, wood firing isn’t simply about producing beautiful pots—it’s about teamwork, storytelling, shared labor, and the community that forms around the fire.
The conversation goes beyond ceramics into a larger question: What is art really for? For Kent, art is fundamentally an act of communication and human connection.
They also reflect on what technology and smartphones have changed about the way we pay attention, talk to one another, and experience the world.
It’s a conversation about clay, fire, tradition, friendship, teaching, and the enduring human need to make something with our hands—and share it with others.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Welcome and the show’s creative mission
00:32 — Kent’s early life as a maker, shaped by family and childhood experiments
05:32 — Discovering ceramics and the influence of Japanese pottery
09:44 — Wood firing: collaboration, mentorship, and the creative community around the kiln
16:41 — The history and tradition of wood-fired ceramics, from functional craft to raku
21:52 — Clay’s connection to the earth, natural materials, and place
26:11 — What Kent learned from teaching—and art as a form of human communication
33:05 — Where to find Kent’s work and his ongoing community involvement
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The urge to make can begin in childhood. Kent’s identity as an artist grew from early hands-on experiences with his father and grandfather.
- Curiosity can lead to a lifelong creative path. Discovering clay as a child sparked an interest that eventually became a career in ceramics.
- Teachers and mentors shape artists. Kent’s development was influenced by important teachers, including Dr. Herbert Sanders, as well as artists such as Shoji Hamada.
- Tradition can be a powerful creative teacher. Japanese folk pottery helped Kent understand the beauty of function, simplicity, imperfection, and the handmade.
- Artists are shaped by relationships. Students, friends, teachers, and collaborators can influence you for decades.
- Making is often about community, not just the finished object. Kent’s wood firings demonstrate how shared labor, stories, and camaraderie become part of the art.
- Materials have their own lessons. Working with clay, fire, wood, and natural processes requires patience, adaptability, and respect for what you can’t fully control.
- Art has its roots in human need. Ceramics began as functional objects created through community knowledge and labor—and those origins still matter.
- Art is a form of communication. For Kent, the value of art ultimately comes down to the quality of connection between people.
- Creativity can connect generations. Techniques, traditions, stories, and knowledge are passed from one maker to another.
- Technology can change how we connect. The conversation raises questions about smartphones, attention, face-to-face conversation, and what we may lose when our attention is constantly divided.
- A creative life is built over time. Kent’s story shows that becoming an artist isn’t one defining moment—it’s a lifelong accumulation of experiences, influences, relationships, and acts of making.
ABOUT KENT
Kent is a ceramic artist, sculptor, woodworker, and retired educator whose life has been devoted to the intersection of creativity, craftsmanship, and learning. After many years as a professor of studio art at Gavilan College, he spent the final 17 years of his career serving as Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences and has continued his commitment to education as a trustee for the Gavilan Community College District.
Today, Kent focuses on creating wood-fired ceramics that celebrate both beauty and function. Drawing inspiration from centuries-old Asian ceramic traditions, he embraces the magic and mystery of the wood-firing process, where fire, ash, clay, and chance become collaborators in the creative act. His work invites people to experience art not only as something to admire, but as something to hold, use, and weave into the quiet rituals of everyday life.
CONNECT WITH KENT:
Website: https://SallyStreetStudios.com
Ready to play in the mud? Here’s a link to clay to get you started: https://amzn.to/3SGY9o7 Note: As an Amazon Associate, I may earn a commission from qualified purchases.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Shannon Grissom (00:00)
Welcome to Made to Make. Here we talk about creativity, the challenges that come with it, and why we keep showing up anyway. Because hey, we are all made to make.
Welcome to the Made to Make podcast. I’m your host, Shannon Grissom. Today I’m joined by ceramic artist and educator Kent Child, whose wood-fired ceramics celebrate the magic, mystery, and wonder of the creative process. His beautiful work is just amazing. Welcome, Kent!
Kent Child (00:38)
Yeah it’s good to see you again, Shannon.
Shannon Grissom (00:40)
Good to see you too. So were you always a creative child?
Kent Child (00:44)
Pretty much so I was influenced by my grandfather and my father. My grandfather was a a homesteader in Wyoming. And they basically had to make everything from the house to the barns to the fences. And my dad as as a young kid was really interested in met mechanical things. He took an old Model T Ford generator, hooked it up to a windmill on their ranch house.
had electric lights in on their cattle ranch near Cheyenne, Wyoming, way back in the early part of the twentieth century. And as a kid I just he would take me down into his workshop where I grew up and and learned to love making things. He made me a little workbench, gave me tools when I was probably eight or nine years old. I’ve been making things ever since. So I
I these days look back on my life and think of myself more as a maker of things to use a twenty first century expression rather than an artist. But I’ve always enjoyed that interconnection of uniqueness, creativity, making things with what you have lying around or scrounging and the very first ceramic pots I ever made, I was probably ten or twelve years old. We traveled
back from Wyoming on one of the visits after we moved to California and traveled through the southwest and and stopped and visited several of the Pueblo Native American communities and I was just transfixed by the ceramics and I was always interested and influenced by Native American culture. So I I had a book from the local library that talked about Pueblo pottery.
Went out in my backyard, dug up some clay and proceeded to blow up the first half a dozen pots that I made. But I ultimately ended and and we’re talking little tiny pieces like that, but I ended up succeeding in in transfixing that st soft, sticky, gooey, basically mud into a permanent hard object and had the kiss of the fire, the the
kind of interesting lights and darks and carbon tones. And and that was the last I did anything with clay until my junior year in college. And I’ve been I was majoring in art. I was primarily a two-dimensional artist doing painting and printmaking, but also doing sculpture, but sculpture was out of wood. then when I transferred to San Jose State University
In my junior year, I I started out in in the community college. And I knew that I probably would end up as a career being an art teacher. I was heavily influenced by the first art class I ever took in the summer be before my senior year in in high school. took a summer art class. I’d already started painting just on my own. And
I think that the magic that that art instructor lit in in in me kind of lit a fuse that slowly burned in the back of the wood killer my mind. the the instructor in the high school that I went to, I my parents had moved to California when I was only six and still maintained a connection back and forth to Wyoming. And that influence of relatives that just about everything on their ranches were
made from things that they had in their junk piles out behind their barn kind of thing. And that art instructor would talk about his his youth and background and turns out he was the grandson of a really well known arts and crafts movement ceramic family in Southern California that produced commercial ceramics. And although we weren’t doing anything with clay, that kind of stuck in my mind.
And as I was beginning to figure out, well, what do I want to do for a career, the idea of becoming a a high school art teacher is was step one in the ladder that I climbed throughout my my experiences. So my first ceramics class that I took was because at that point I was still focusing primarily on on painting and sculpture. But the ceramics just
The clay just suddenly reignited that childhood fantasy and the the idea of you could just go in your backyard and dig up mud.
Shannon Grissom (05:44)
Yeah.
Kent Child (05:45)
Simplifying it a wee tad and then light a match to some sticks and all of a sudden, of course I wasn’t doing wood firing at that point. I was working in a big university that San Jose State University had one of the best art departments on the West Coast back in the early sixties there.
there was another side influence. My first serious romance as a quasi-adult was with a young woman who was born in Japan. her her mother sent her back to Japan. Her mother was born in Japan, to parents in Sa in Gilroy, the community where I ultimately settled for my teaching career.
And she was an art major at the college after World War II with her her mother went to Japan before the war, met and fell in love with a a local Japanese fellow. War came, he perished in the war, and the woman was there with two young children with her her parents and grandparents still living over in California. And so after the war, the the mother and her two children, the widow mother.
came to California. And long story short, because of my Japanese girlfriend, who was an art major that at the same community college I went to, she got interested in ceramics and took some ceramics classes. And although I really didn’t have anything to do with clay at that point in my life, the that was the strand of of the heavy influence that made me really begin to get interested in the history of
Asian ceramics and particularly Japanese pottery, which has had a huge influence on the ceramic world. And it happened that the professor at San Jose State, Dr. Herbert Sanders, was a well-known scholar. He’d been a Fulbright scholar in Japan, personally met and and worked with a fair number of the most famous Japanese folk potters there.
A folk pottery movement in Japan. And the summer after I took my first ceramics class, one of the world’s most famous ceramic artists, Shoji Hamada, living national treasure of Japan, came and taught a summer workshop at San Jose State. I couldn’t afford to take the class, but he had
I was the studio technician in the sculpture studio, and that’s where they housed he and his son while they were working. So as I was doing my kill attending and so forth for the sculpture program, I got to see he and his son working and throwing in the afternoons after the class. And that’s what turned me into in really interested in the traditions of Japanese wood-fired ceramics.
By then I’d moved out to Los Gatos. In those days Los Gatos was a place of cheap rent and quite a few of my fellow art majors and particularly in ceramics moved out there at the same time so that we could have access to property to build a kill on. And I built my first kill which was a wood fired kill and got my master’s degree using ceramics as the area.
Shannon Grissom (09:28)
I wanted to touch on the I remember years ago you talking about and it might have been an annual event where you did this wood fire with a group of people. Gr and I I know you went somewhere special and did this whole wood fire I I mean it was a long it was probably twenty years ago I talked to you about this and I can’t remember but I know it was
Kent Child (09:53)
You have a better memory than me, Shannon. Well, I I usually go at least once, sometimes twice a year, up to Ferndale, which is on the north coast, just south of Eureka, in Northern California. And a former student of mine, a man named Conrad Calumpong, was born and raised in Gilroy.
his parents were both immigrants from the Philippines. And Conrad came in to to my world, if you will, when it was the second year the the summer of between my second and third year of teaching ceramics at the community college in Gilroy where Conrad grew up and Conrad came to me
during the summer session because he was one of twelve kids, almost all of which came to the local community college kind of stair stepping, and he was one of the the younger ones and assigned to me in the summer program, which was a a federally funded program designed to introduce high potential young high school students that because of their family economics and and social situation
might not go on to college past high school. And so they would take college classes in the morning and then work on the campus in the afternoon. And he was assigned to work for me. And so he came in on his lunch hour before he would start working. I put him to work digging a hole in the cold, hard, I should say hot, hard Adobe soil. Dig a big hole in the back
behind the ceramic studio because I wanted to put in a foundry for doing bronze casting for my sculpture classes. And Conrad came in on his lunch hour a few days into this six-week summer session and asked if he could try on his lunch hour try to do something with clay. And so I gave him some clay, loaned him some tools. And Conrad is now actually internationally known, written about in books and magazines.
even was had a a multi-page article in in the annual craft what used to be called craft horizons now it’s American Craftsman Council Quarterly magazine. And Conrad then went back and finished high school concurrently with continuing to take classes during what would have been normally his junior and senior year in high school also happened to be
his freshman and sophomore year in college. he was just brilliant, creative, one of the best ceramic individu artists I’ve ever known, but also just a magically wonderful, warm, friendly person. And he ended up then going to UC Davis and got his his de bachelor’s degree then went to San Francisco State.
Studying at at San Francisco State with a former academic colleague of mine, and ended up coming back and teaching ceramics at the high school that he sort of walked away from before his junior year in high school. after maybe seven or eight years of teaching, he then with his wife moved up to Ferndale.
where he built a large traditional Japanese what’s called anagama or single chamber kiln and be began his and this was going back probably almost 40 years ago. And he then occasionally would come down to to the Bay Area, obviously visiting family, would get in touch with me. And so we stayed kind of connected there. And
Fast forward to two thousand and two, he got wind that I was retiring from my p by then I I’d stopped teaching at Gavilan College, community college in in our area, San Benito and Sa southern Santa Clara County. And he got wind that I I had retired and and got back into my ceramic studio after my seventeen years of being a a college administrator and invited me to a wood firing.
And it reignited the magic that when I had wood fired kill I built and during my junior and senior year at when I myself was a college student, that wood firing usually requires a team effort. it’s a lot of work. it takes a long time. typically for a large kill like Conrad’s, it’s a team of anywhere from maybe five or six to a dozen people.
And working nonstop around the clock for 72 hours, throwing wood into the kill. And it then creates one of the uniquenesses of the wood firing world, and that is the camaraderie and connection and personal friendships that you develop being a part of that team. It’s almost in a way like the the finished products that come out of the kill.
Their value is a warm memento of that human connection. The sharing of ideas, life stories, memories, friendships that can span, you know, literally like in Conrad’s I I met him when he was s seventeen years old. And he’s in his seventies now, and I’m in my eighties and we’re still playing with clay.
Shannon Grissom (15:56)
That’s
Kent Child (15:57)
Putting it in a big chunk of
fired clay bricks formed as a kiln and going to all that work of cutting and splitting wood and then throwing it in there. But the uniqueness of the wood-fired world and ceramics is that friendship and camaraderie. And that quarterly magazine the American Crafts Council that I mentioned came out maybe two years ago, multi-page article in the magazine was
Basically based around that aspect of the wood firing part of the art world, and the craft world in particular, is the community that you form as a part of the process. And in traditional, whether it’s in China or Korea, Japan, other Asian communities, the wood firing ceramics was almost always originally.
a byproduct of an agricultural community that during the winter months made ceramic for functional use for all the products that in those days, if you go back, you know, four or five hundred years ago, the dishes that people used, the storage containers, products that had a function were made by members of the community working collaboratively. And they would build large, large fields that would ta you know
house the work during the firing process of a whole community and would take two w two weeks at least to to load and then fire and then cool and unload. And what came out of that was was the concept in Japan of of the unknown craftsman, the and the unpretentiousness of something that’s made primarily for function, for utilitarian use. And where
one particular form of of Japanese ceramics what originated really in in Korea was what’s called raku ceramics. And in Korea it was a a a a a method of firing rapidly where you could would fire a piece instead of over you know three days to to a week at a time, you would fire it in a matter of an afternoon.
And when the piece was finished, it would lift the lid off the small kiln and take the pot out with a pair of tongs. And again it was used materi to rapidly fire roof tiles. back during the feudal period in Japan, they would go Japanese military would go to mainland Asia, Korea, China.
and find craftsmen that were doing particularly fine work and literally kidnap them, bring them back to Japan, give treat them with respect and and house them and give them the the materials that they needed to practice their art for. But basically they were captured saved, if you will, is one perverse way to look at it. And one of those was
the original Korean raku potter who started in making functional pots, probably by demand, bowls for eating food, cups to drink tea out of. And one of the tea masters in Japan discovered these really basically very, very simple crude, from a technical standpoint, totally the antithesis of like
of fine porcelain, highly decorated, refined work and wanted to reverse the tea ceremony, which in Japan holds a really, really strong element of social hierarchy but interconnection of people unique in in that culture. There’s nothing like it, you know, in in in other cultures that I’ve ever been aware of. and Senno Rikyū this this
Tea master then stumbled upon the these pieces that were rapidly fired. Relatively simple and primitive and and the glazes were very, very monochromatic, but because of the effects, chemical effects that happened in wood firing, would come out with interesting flashings and and variegated color.
And he started using those simple bowls that were really basically rice bowls for their intended purpose, and used them and changed the traditional Japanese tea syrup. And those raku tea bowls are still in in use and coveted to this day. And so I s for my graduate degree built that little wood fired kill in in Los Gatos and
Now Los Gatos is home to billionaires in the tech world. Recently visited I at the time that that my my wife and I and our first daughter were living there was in a little cottage that’s a part of a small horse farm. Now there’s probably a big mansion built field with room to play and my daughter could go and look at the horses. my kill was behind.
near the the barn and be firing my kill gaze over and see horses in the pasture. That’s an important part of the wood-fired culture. You can’t do it in the city particularly. I mean you can, but but it’s not necessarily a an an ideal. You want to be out in the country. And it gets back to one of the core elements to me on probably most people working with clay and art.
Is that it keeps you and reminds you almost continuously of the earth and the material simple materials. Clay is probably one of the most dominant particles on the surface of Mother Earth. And it’s it’s that working with that simple material. And then the glazes that are used also make use of like wood ash, powdered sand, if you will.
other materials, just natural materials, but there’s tremendous chemistry behind it and and and a lot of physics involved in making pieces. And you can come at ceramics as an art form with that kind of geological and and physical and chemical approach. Or you can think back to the Native American potter who was using sheep dung as a fuel and and sheep dung happens to burn
slow and doesn’t blow pots like I did would when I was a little kid in my backyard
Shannon Grissom (23:17)
Yeah.
Kent Child (23:18)
how to transform that material from the natural earth to something that’s permanent and and I at one time my my f first spouse her her father and stepmother moved to Arizona and we went to visit and he loved to go out into to just
The raw desert, if you will, for fishing and hunting. And he took me out to an area where as we’re walking around looking around, all of a sudden you’re finding little broken shards of of Native American Pueblo pots that date back probably 500 to 1,000 years when they were. And it’s that connection of one of the earliest functional uses
of the material clay were our primitive ancestors, cave dwellers if you will, that basketry was the first the first probably functional use to be able to transport the materials as a hunter and gatherer in society. But fine particles like you know if you took the corn, native corn or in in California they acorns pounded in flour.
You know, you’re moving your camp from one place to another to follow the herd of deer that was your dinner meat. half your flour was left on the trail behind. And and so somewhere somebody figured out, well, if I take some some mud from the river bank and line my basket, now it’s not going to lose that fine material. And the basket wears out and probably was tossed next to where they had a fire, and all of a sudden the
Somebody somewhere figured out heat, burned away the basket, but transformed that clay lining to a permanent material. And then the early and this happens happened all around the world. You could be in Africa, you could be in Asia, you could be in what’s now America or South Latin America. And the earliest ceramics were basically clay imitations of basket coiling.
Shannon Grissom (25:37)
wow.
Kent Child (25:38)
And then gradually, somewhere, somehow, somebody figured out how to spin a hump a hunk of clay on a potter’s wheel. And and that that of course transformed the way clay could be shaped, sizes got larger and began to become more refined. And here we are today, the potter’s wheel is a magic tool. but at one time it was was a a simple
Temple process.
Shannon Grissom (26:11)
Well you’ve yeah, you’ve had an amazing career. I was wondering and and you already touched on this, some you have taught and you’ve been an administrator, you’ve you’ve you’ve done every aspect of it. What have your students taught you?
Kent Child (26:27)
Well, the students taught me infinitely more than I ever taught them. And and you know, I’ve I’ve had conversations like this. quite a few of the people that go to that Northern California wood fire and had their careers in community colleges like I did or universities or even the UC system. and in common when we sitting around Hill and start talking about our careers and
kind of nostalgizing and probably there’s a lot of filtering out. But the reality is we all learn more from our students and keeps us reminding that we humans are all on a continuous path of learning. Yes. And part of it it the core particularly in in in teaching suram something like well, any art form, like you know whether it’s visual art, theat theater, theatrical arts.
music is the common thread, one of the best definitions of art that I’ve ever stumbled upon, Shannon, is that and it’s maybe one of the simplest, art is simply quality of communication. And obviously communication is is a key component, particularly in you know like I’m looking at your paintings and behind your visual art is is a unique language onto itself.
But it keeps reminding all of us the the commonality we have with our fellow human beings. And fine art filters through a lot of the the riff-raff and the confusion and the commonality and the arrival and gets to the essence of what’s the most important to people: compassion, affection, family, community, and
I think as we’re now in the twenty-first century and and the effect of technology, I mean just the uniqueness of you and I being able to connect with this and and we’re hundreds of miles apart from each other.
Shannon Grissom (28:39)
Yeah.
Kent Child (28:40)
Communication has taken so much change over the last fifty years with technology. And now I see where where Kathy and I live here in Hollister.
We’re situated kind of halfway between a middle school and a the high school in town. And we see kids when school starts up and it’s just gonna start up in a week or two as they’re walking. We used to see groups of kids in in deep conversations. Now you can see individuals or a small group, but they’re not communicating there. They’re not interacting with each other. Holding
their smartphone in the in front of their eyes as they’re walking or stumbling along. Art cuts through that. And obviously technology can have tremendous facilitation in the art world as well. Think of how technology has changed and and and influenced music and the effects of AI and all. But an old timer like I, I’d I would still rather go back and chop wood and
Obviously I buy my clay from a man clay manufacturing facility now. I don’t dig it out of the b bank in the backyard. Most traditional potters, where they settled was near natural deposits of clay.
Ceramics was going to be their their way of making a living near natural clay deposits so that they could dig it out of their backyard. And now I buy it where it’s brought in from truck by truck from all over the United States and processed up in San Jose and in the heart of Silicon Valley and one of the neighbors is some of the world’s most famous high tech places.
But that’s one of the fun things of the art world is it gets back to the quality of communication and if you’re sitting in front of an easel with a a brush in your hand and and paint on your palate and working, at some part of your brain you’re feeling the same magic that occurs with pigment on a flat surface that you know.
Somebody like Da Vinci or Modigliani or famous artists. it it’s that continuous connection with human the human element and seeking quality in an in a a direct way of communication that transcends you know anything other than art. And art
has besides beauty, it it it manages to bring out the soul, the the the thoughts, the inner thoughts that are what give we human beings on this surface of this planet our our quality and and and meaning in life. And you know, I don’t know there’s not a single culture on the surface of this earth since we were primitive Stone Age people.
where art wasn’t a part of that culture. And it links it links the human progression from hundreds of years, thousands of years ago. And I ha I like to hope and believe that that will continue on for hundreds to thousands of years into the future. And we artists hopefully are a small subset of the human society that have built around that idea of
quality of communication and the spirit and the soul of being human and being a member of family, a group, all mankind, animals, plants that makes living on earth such a wonderful thing to experience.
Shannon Grissom (33:05)
Well said. So where can people find out more about you online?
Kent Child (33:12)
Well, probably the only place is my wife Kathy and I thanks to Kathy is a magic person and one of the biggest I’ve ever known. Wonderful person, but also extremely embracing of and skilled with technology. So we have a a website that’s called SallyStreetStudios.com. And on that website you see comments that we’ve made and
and examples of her painting and my pottery. and she also then does put things I think it’s on Facebook probably or one of the social media platforms where i she’ll put feeds there that it people have to go to our websites again sally streetstudios dot com that can see what we’re doing recently and
Like we just finished an annual San Benito County Arts Council annual event called the Art of Eating. And it celebrated the 20 years of the Arts Council’s existence. And myself and three other San Benito County artists all made and contributed original hand-thrown bowls for dessert that served in.
People that come to the event get to take the bowls home as a memento. And you know, it’s that common it’s that being a part of community.
Shannon Grissom (34:48)
Yes, yeah.
Kent Child (34:50)
Kathy and I are a part of our community through our our website.
Shannon Grissom (34:56)
the community’s lucky to have you both. Yes. Well, thank you, Kent, for being on the show. You you’ve been incredibly inspiring. And thank you all for listening, everybody. Please be sure to like, subscribe, and share so that I can bring more inspiring creators to you. We’ll see you next time. That’s a wrap.