Welcome to Lost Mountain!
- Mark Heimann, Studio Potter
Here are pictures of my house in the timberlands of western Oregon. It’s a treat to be living here, surrounded by natural beauty and able to hear the songs of the ravens, owls, coyotes, jays, and a myriad of other native critters. To this chorus, we add the songs and sounds to those of our goats, peacocks, chickens, cats and dogs. It’s a zoo, and we love it. Something different every day…
Oregon has been my home since 1981. I emigrated from Sanibel Island, Florida, where I built and operated “The Wheel”, my first clay studio and gallery. After I moved to Oregon I became certified as an advanced paramedic and was employed in the Emergency Medical Services field for ten years. I had no studio! But luck and fate guided me to Lost Mountain in 1991, and I plunged back into the world of ceramic art.
The picture on the left is a view of my studio. It’s a big pole building that I saw in a dream the night before I actually visited it (no kidding!) The small addition is a glazing area and gallery. This view looks across the pen where Parker and Strider, our two beautiful Alpine pack goats, live. They were raised from kids by my good friend and mate Rebecca (”The Goatess”) and me. I am four years new to the goat world, Rebecca is fifteen years knowledgable — she has taught me a lot about our horned friends. They are rascals and a wonderful part of life here and on the trail. There are few things on earth cuter than a baby goat!
We now have six laying hens that keep us supplied with more eggs than we can eat. They are hilarious, great personalities (who knew?). Our two dogs, Akira and Aerial, keep them safe from brer coyote and raccoon. All of our critters get along quite well - a peaceful menagerie if there ever was one.
The middle photo shows the studio, viewed from the front gate. Several giant Douglas Firs, some scraggly rose bushes, and two weeping cherry trees stand sentinel duty. Bamboo is beginning to take over…
The interior photo above shows one corner of the studio, where I turn (”throw”) pots and do most of my sculpting, slip-trailing, and carving. And, as you can see, it’s also a huge bulletin board - notes, pictures, favorite flotsam and jetsam, bottles, and other memorabilia fill the shelves and walls.
The studio has separate corners and rooms for slab and extuder work, glaze formulation and application, display space, and packing/shipping. I am installing a new, “beefier” Skutt kiln so that I can experiment with mid-range electric firings and glaze techniques. That little ripple is resulting in the redesign of my entire working environment. For the better, and more ergonomic, too.
The rest of this multi-use building is filled with an ever-changing array of equipment, boxes, packing materials, tools, and a massive amount of strange stuff that I have collected over the years. I am working on a new gallery space ~ comfortable and well-lit, easy to heat, and relatively dust-free.
My main kiln, pictured above well into a glaze firing (it really roars), is located in a well-protected corner of the building. It has fifty cubic feet of stacking space: room for a lot of pots, big and small. Several firings have contained over two hundred pots.
Tech-talk: It’s a propane-fired updraft “car” kiln. “Car kiln” means that its floor rolls out on rails to facilitate loading. “Updraft” means that the fifteen burners blast into the kiln from under the floor, and the generated heat flows directly through the layers of pots and out the twin flues cut into the the top of the arch.
The throwing, slab-building, and sculpting area of the studio is heated with a woodstove. There’s just something that attracts us potters to fire…