Forestville ceramicist Joel Bennett fired up for art

With his clay-dust-covered sandals and smudged black sweatshirt, it’s hard to picture Joel Bennett as anything other than a master ceramicist.

But he once planned to become a doctor. One night in the late 1960s at UC Santa Barbara, Bennett was studying for an organic chemistry test when a knock came at the door - and the course of his life was changed. A friend who was an art major pulled him out of his room and led him down a dark stairwell and to big double doors that opened to a ceramics studio crammed with people drinking wine, listening to Janis Joplin and throwing pots on pottery wheels.

“I was very moved by the earthiness of it,” Bennett said. “The next year, I dropped all the science classes, signed up for ceramics and drawing and never looked back.”

Now, more than 40 years later, Bennett is an established artist living in Forestville. He’s traveled the world, exhibited his work at local and international galleries and taught ceramics at Santa Rosa Junior College for 31 years. As far as he knows, he was also the first person to bring the ancient tradition of pit-firing to modern-day Sonoma County.

Pit-firing is the technique of baking clay in a pit dug deep into the ground; it dates back over 30,000 years. Before kilns, pit-firing was used to fire pottery, which was then burnished with stones (instead of glazed) to make it more durable and functional. The atmosphere in the pit causes a chemical reaction between the clay and any other material that is burning with it to create distinct patterns. The fire, which can heat the pit up to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, creates the pattern and the materials - like seaweed, copper carbonate powder, steel wool or baking soda - create an array of colors, from mauve to rust. A layer of sawdust on the bottom of the pit smolders to create a deep black.

Traditionally, pit-firing was the only firing that happened, but Bennett pre-fires his pieces first to help keep their form and uses the pit to add the artistic level. His organic chemistry knowledge comes in handy, too, he said, as he experiments with different organic matter and witnesses the effects of fire and oxidation on his creations. The process is essentially a dance between science and art.

“You can have a little bit of control,” Bennett said, “but the unpredictableness is what I love.”

Bennett teaches two classes a year at SRJC and, once a semester, brings his students out to the beach to experience pit-firing for themselves. They arrive early in the morning, dig a pit about 3 feet deep and 6 feet long - big enough to layer sawdust, pottery, organic materials and wood. The pit is lined and covered with corrugated sheets of metal and the pottery is fired for about 6 or 7 hours. The pieces are pulled out when the sun is going down, and the magic combination of chemistry, tradition and art is on vivid display amongst the ashes.

“It looks like an archaeological dig at the end,” he said.

Bennett and his students pass the 6 or 7 hours of firing by enjoying a potluck lunch, playing Frisbee and entertaining questions from curious passersby. It’s an unusual scene, but, for all its novelty, pit-firing has attracted art students in the Bay Area for decades. Back in the 1970s, Bennett said he once attended a pit-firing event near Pescadero, sponsored by San Francisco State and other local universities, that attracted about 1,500 people and “got kind of crazy.”

Bennett used to bring students to pit-fire their work in Point Reyes and Doran Regional Park on the Sonoma Coast, but now he’s restricted to privately owned Dillon Beach, where neighbors once called the Tomales Fire Department after seeing smoke. The Fire Department, however, was not concerned, according to Bennett, stating that people pit-fire on the beach there all the time. In reality, the process is very safe and contained, he said.

Along with his own pit-fire setup at his home studio in Forestville, Bennett has a raku kiln and a light-filled pottery studio cluttered with unique and beautiful pieces that chronicle his life as an artist. There’s a cubist-inspired sculpture of his arm, torso and leg that he made after he slashed a nerve in his hand while cleaning a fish. There are clay fortune cookies of all sizes from the alternative “greeting card” business he ran for a short while. There are ceramic triptychs hung on the wall with images of people and animals fired into the glaze. There are mosaic platters and a one-of-a-kind “earthquake sensor” with flexible ceramic cylinders that respond differently to measurements on the Richter scale.

And, as evidence of Bennett’s other passion, there is an abundance of ceramic musical instruments and posters from performances by Batacha!, an Afro-Cuban band he has played piano with for decades. Inspired by the African “udu” drum made from a type of water jug with an additional hole for sound resonance, Bennett has amassed a collection of drums and shakers, including his favorite piece - a large hollow rooster, perched on wire feet with two detachable wing shakers.

Bennett also has spent considerable time traveling the world, introducing the pit-firing technique to ceramics students in Cuba, where his tradition of blessing the fire with rum was born. And he’s worked with renowned artists in Vietnam where he helped create a 5 kilometer-long mosaic wall in Hanoi that was funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

If you want to learn more about pit-firing you can take one of Bennett’s classes at the SRJC. You can also can see more of his work at numerous local galleries, including the Chroma Gallery in Santa Rosa and the Kokomos Gallery in Calistoga, or go to his website, www.joelbennett.org.