Smith, Jamie Zane

Jamie Zane Smith tells us he has a strong personal commitment to building Wyandot pottery. He’s working to retain an integral sense of form inspired by sensibilities from a time when people lived in the full awareness that they were not separate from the Earth.

Jamie uses traditional resources to create pottery that speaks to the modern world. For him, his creating of pottery is a participation in the flow of Nature, from a perspective where humans and Nature are not dueling entities but rather a single continuous flowing of prayer in a language of glory to the Creator.

Jamie has learned much through watching his uncle, Richard Zane Smith, creating his own form of Wyandot pottery. Jamie spent a year in Wyandotte, Oklahoma, studying with his uncle. He learned that the making of pottery is a spiritually honest form of sensibility. There’s also something about getting his hands into and working with clay that speaks to his heart. From Richard he also learned the ancient ways of how to harvest his clay and make his paints, anywhere he might be.

Jamie says he grew up in the city and has traveled the world since finishing his formal education. The time spent with his uncle convinced him that the rural way of life is the life he wants to live with his wife and their two daughters.

These days he and his family live “lightly and simply” in an old two-room schoolhouse in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. In a small valley at the point where two creeks meet, the schoolhouse hasn’t changed much since the days when his wife’s grandparents attended school there. Jamie says the peace and the beauty of the ever-changing wooded landscape are a constant inspiration for him. He marries that inspiration often with some of the hallmarks of ancient Wendat pottery: heavy collars, crowns, multiple shoulders, scalloped and notched rims, and rounded bases.