August 30, 2001
NMC fired up about new kiln
Father-daughter builders use 3,000 bricks
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
With all the building going on at Northwestern Michigan College's main campus, a small construction project last week hardly raised any dust.
But putting in a new kiln to replace the 30-year-old one is a big deal to pottery teachers and students in the Fine Arts Department.
"In some ways you could consider this a small thing considering all the buildings going up," said Mike Torre, a pottery instructor at the college. "It is a big thing to us and we have had help from everybody else. It has been a real community project."
Norm Averill built the old kiln nearly 30 years ago, putting it in a separate building next to the Fine Arts Building. Before that the kiln had been housed in a garage next to what is now the site of the Administration building, with pottery classes held in the basement.
A workhorse over the decades, the kiln was used by thousands of students as pottery has been one of the most popular art classes, both for regular students and in extended education classes. Its longevity has formed the backbone of the department.
"Thirty years for a kiln is a classic," said Tracy Dotson of Penland, N.C., who built the new kiln.
Forming the 3,000 bricks into a kiln took ten working days for the father-daughter team of Dotson and Ellen Day Dotson of Leeday, Texas. Both artists themselves, Tracy Dotson has been built nearly 240 kilns around the country over the past 35 years. He takes between four and six projects a year now, more recently with his daughter helping, and accepts jobs only in places he wants to visit anyway. The beauty of northwest Michigan was a natural draw for him to bid on NMC's new kiln.
"Each kiln is unique and I try not to go build one in the same area," said Dotson, a production potter by trade who dubs himself an old Hippie. "I love flames- contained flames- house fires and forest fires scare me. A lot of what I like about building kilns is passing on what I've learned over 35 years."
Ellen Day Dotson has helped her father build two kilns, acknowledging that she has pottery in her blood. A sculptor, the younger Dotson said she enjoys the bonding time of working with her father on a project.
"We get to go places together and hang out, we do work well together," she said. "I was raised by two potters and I was in the high chair eating clay; I've always been around it."
Using insulating soft bricks shipped in from Georgia, the Dotson team created a kiln with 120 cubic feet inside, twice as big as the previous kiln. This kiln is tall enough to stand in and will require a quarter the natural gas to fire than the previous kiln did. It also has a stackable brick door that must be built each time before it can be fired.
The new kiln is expected to last another 30 years, though the project almost did not get off the ground.
When the Fine Arts department decided to replace the kiln this year, members began shopping for bids. When the prices for a pre-made kiln came in at $40,000, they decided to postpone the project.
Then former pottery student Sally Rodgers, now an instructor at a college in Indiana, returned for a faculty art show. She highly recommended Dotson after he built a kiln at her college.
Pictures of the old kiln were soon dispatched to North Carolina and two weeks later Dotson was hired, bidding the project for a total of $16,000.
A grant from the NMC Barbecue Board helped fund the project and personal interest from Tim Nelson, NMC's president, helped nurture it along.
"The president's father is a potter and he came by to check on it," said Ruth Ann LaMott, administrative assistant at the college and a former pottery student of Averill's.