Hayne Bayless

Hayne Bayless is a studio potter in Ivoryton, Connecticut. He managed to avoid art in college, earning a degree in journalism instead, and after ten years at a perfectly good newspaper job he quit to make pots. 

He sells work through galleries and craft shows, and has won top awards at the Smithsonian Craft Show and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show. 

“The techniques of hand-building, such as extruding and slab construction, take advantage of clay’s power to capture gesture. I love what spawns in the friction between what I’d like the material to do and what it would rather do. 

“The unintended result is often misread as a mistake and dismissed, but it’s one of the most fertile sources of new ideas. The trick is not to fool with clay’s desire to express. It will offer – or impose – its own ideas about what to make and how to work.”