Clay — Phoenix, Arizona
Nathan Coons
“Every piece begins as nothing. That is the part that never gets old.”
Clay — Phoenix, Arizona
“Every piece begins as nothing. That is the part that never gets old.”
He started at seventeen. He has not stopped. The wheel is still the first place he goes when he needs to think.
Nathan Coons works out of a converted brick room in Phoenix, where the heat outside makes the studio feel like its own kind of kiln. He started at seventeen — not because someone told him he was gifted, but because the wheel required his complete attention. Six years later, he has not left.
He is self-taught. No apprenticeship, no lineage — only hours. Thousands of them. He has absorbed the Japanese conviction that the foot of a bowl is as considered as its lip, that restraint is not absence but precision. Two glazes define his work: a deep forest teal, quiet and resolved, and a white ground shattered with iron oxide — gestural, almost violent, every piece unrepeatable. The structure he controls. The glaze he releases.
He throws for hours and keeps only what meets a standard he has not yet fully named. The rest goes back. He is twenty-four, and he already knows what takes most makers decades to learn — that the perfect vessel is not a destination. It is the reason you come back tomorrow.
“The form I can control. The glaze I have to let go. That is where the piece becomes itself.”
“I have thrown this shape a thousand times. I am still learning it.”
