A work of art

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Correspondent

Most of the stacks of copper red glazed plates in Nancy Lamb’s cupboard are more than 50 years old. Few if any have chips.
“They’re sturdy,” she said taking a dish down and rubbing it.
She flicks the bottom and the ring hangs in the air.  That tone, she says, comes from being fired at 2,500 degrees. That’s what makes it stoneware. She’d know that exact temperature since she made it.
Lamb founded and created Iron Mountain Stoneware, a Laurel Bloomery, Tenn.,-based manufacturer. Its pieces have been on display and sold in high-end retail stores in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York City, and now, for the first, the pieces are on display locally.
Through July 6, the William King Regional Arts Center exhibit “Shaping the Earth: Iron Mountain Stoneware of Laurel Bloomery, TN” showcases Lamb’s work.
“The show at the William King Arts Center brought tears to my eyes,” she said when she went to the opening on Jan. 25. “This is the first show in my own hometown.”
Lamb moved to Damascus in 1961, looking to make handmade stoneware. She said all the “fine” eating ware that she saw had the same old gold bands and the same old roses on every plate, cup and saucer.
“Plus no one used them,” she said.
She wanted to make something sturdy, something that would hold up. Build something to last.
“In my design no two pieces are the same,” she said. “It gives it life; it’s not so much just stamped out.”
Before Damascus, she had worked in Taiwan, Denmark and Finland studying ceramics. She opened her factory here because the area is rich in clay and natural resources and, too, the people needed jobs back then.
By 1965, she’d found her support, had met her husband-to-be, engineer Harold “Joe” Lamb, and opened Iron Mountain Stoneware in Laurel Bloomery with partner Albert Mock.
They started out in with 16 employees, most of them from Damascus, Konnarock and Mountain City, Tenn.
Lamb’s sister Sally Patterson and sculptor Jim Kaneko also worked at the plant.
It was a family affair. Parents brought their kids to work. Others worked with spouses, siblings or children.
“We had whole families working there,” Lamb said.
They mixed clay, cast and finished the ware. Fired it, glazed it, fired it again and then cleaned and packaged it.
“The ware was created in Laurel Bloomery with the nearby earth by the people here and the simple beauty of living here,” she said.
By the 1970s about 75 people worked at the factory.
“We sold stock to many people in Johnson County, Tenn., and they were our biggest supporters, they were part of the company,” she said.
Twice a year, she said, the factory would have a sale and people from all across the region came to buy.
But with rising fuel, insurance and wage costs, Iron Mountain Stoneware closed in 1992.
It wasn’t the material that forced the doors closed.
“(Clay is) the most abundant raw material, It’s earth,” she said.
She still works on clay every now and then, if it’s not too cold in the afternoons. She works on tile and brick in her shop out back. The glazing she said will always be her favorite part.
“You can manipulate it and you put it in the fire and the fire paints it. It’s always a surprise.”
Lamb has recipes for glazes all her own. She said she’s thinking of leaving all her documents to East Tennessee State University so they’ll be preserved.
At dinner, Lamb eats from a plate that she calls Over the Hills. It’s brown with two swaths of brown and round trees along the rim. It’s the view from her studio window at the factory.
“Not everybody gets to live a dream but I have,” she said.