All Fired Up, Local Artist Finds Kinship with the Kiln at Firestick Pottery

“People kind of panic because the [pottery] wheel is spinning just like the world is spinning in space, and if you think about everything that’s wrong it’s really hard to find center. But if you just focus on center and don’t let your mind play games with you ... everything else will fall into place.”

This is the explanation that Joann Webb, manager and teacher at Firestick Pottery in Ojai, offers for the most common challenge facing first-time potters: how to center your clay on the wheel. That her advice works just as well for dealing with the myriad challenges of 2020 is a thought I have repeatedly while interviewing her at the pottery.

Webb begins her story in January 2020 when, then age 61, she took to social media to announce she was leaving professional cooking to be a full-time potter. She had been a potter since she first studied the medium more than 40 years earlier at Santa Rosa College, but this time was different. This time there was no side gig in the kitchen to pay the bills. She had quit that job to manage and teach at Firestick Pottery, where she would also make her art.

“It was a big deal,” she says, and I believe her. Who hasn’t daydreamed about making such a pronouncement to the world where the thing you’ve always loved to do is the thing you now officially do?

Webb, a native of Ventura, had traversed a creative path, and the Pacific Ocean, to arrive at this point. Her journey took her from Ventura County to Hawaii and back, and was unusually marked by disasters, both natural and manmade. Hers is a legacy of both physical labor and a rich creative life as a leather crafter, hammock weaver and, for the previous 23 years, chef for retreat programs at The Ojai Foundation in Upper Ojai and the Quail Springs Permaculture village in Los Padres National Forest.

Webb says that her experience “cooking for retreats, primarily as a vegetarian chef, has really shaped my relationship with preparing food in a health-conscious way that nourishes body, mind and spirit through all the senses.” She used her pottery to create a visual as well as edible feast, describing examples of her retreat dishes like “a coconut cashew and sweet potato yellow curry served in a deep red and cobalt blue ceramic bowl, with a basmati rice pilaf served in a Tenmoku-glazed serving dish.”

While at The Ojai Foundation, Webb experienced two fires. The more recent, the 2017 Thomas Fire, destroyed the foundation’s kitchen and pottery studio. When some of the youth rite-of-passage programs Webb had been cooking for at the foundation moved up Highway 33 to Quail Springs, she followed, spending two more years before handing over the reins to an aspiring young chef in order to make the leap to managing Firestick Pottery.

The fires in Ojai weren’t Webb’s only experience with disasters. Starting in 1982, she and her then-husband lived in a house in a jungle on the side of a volcano on the Big Island in Hawaii. By 1991, the house had been surrounded in lava, a shot of which featured in that year’s July issue of National Geographic.

When their house became effectively inaccessible, they did a work exchange to stay at a local retreat center, Kalani Honua. Webb, who had taught herself to weave hammocks and become a member of the Pacific Handicraft Guild while living in Hawaii, fell back on her earlier experience helping a friend cook at The Ojai Foundation and began cooking for Kalani Honua.

Meanwhile, Webb and her husband rebuilt in another community on the Big Island, Leilani Estates, not far from a geothermal plant. Two drilling-related geothermal blowouts later, Webb was back in Ojai for good. She was also pregnant with her son, Andrew, now 28 and an accomplished chef and apprentice potter himself.

With wildfires, lava and geothermal blowouts under her belt, it’s no surprise that Webb didn’t let a pandemic get in the way of her recent career change. She says she and pottery owner Robin Nahin were concerned after the shutdown in the spring, when the studio got very quiet, but chose to use the time for facility maintenance and, for Webb, experimenting with her own work. These days the 3-plus-year-old pottery studio has never been busier with classes and workshops. “People [are] going back to the arts.”

One of these workshops is a direct result of the Thomas Fire and its destruction of the pottery studio at The Ojai Foundation. In 2019, Webb received a Creative Community Thomas Fire Recovery Grant from CreativityWorks and the Ventura County Arts Council. She used the funds to start a monthly raku firing workshop, teaching a 14th-century technique characterized by working with glazed pottery at high temperatures. She explains that “the word raku signifies enjoyment of freedom,” a yearning that seems apt for our time.

Despite her focus on the recent upswing in personal and public creativity, I can’t help asking Webb for her takeaways from close proximity to so many disasters. “Everything’s temporary. Life is precious. Enjoy the moment because you never know what tomorrow brings,” she says, “It’s that whole centering-on-the-wheel thing. If you’re always thinking about ... all the problems that are out there, you’re kind of missing the beauty of the moment.”

Webb chuckles as she acknowledges she’s veering into carpe-diem clichés, but knowing her story, they have the ring of hard-earned wisdom. She then goes on to say something that, delightfully, doesn’t sound cliché at all: “I’m just having a lot of fun right now.” Yet again, I believe her.