Maine Kiln Works / Water Stone Sink — has designed and hand formed stoneware and porcelain for 50 years. Blending traditional and hybrid processes to create functional tableware and kitchenware as well as our Water Stone Sink line of artisan style bath sinks and vessels. Our handcrafted products are available in a range of glaze colors and styles from oxidation, reduction and crystalline firing kilns.
The Maine Coast workshop was started in 1971 by expatriate Texan Dan Weaver. Because handcrafted products add unique personal value to the lives of appreciative customers, design and artisan production for practical use has always been a guiding focus.
From designing the process, inventing and fabricating specialized tooling, mixing the clay & glaze, forming stoneware & porcelain and glazing and firing the finished pieces—Dan manages everything involved but process the raw materials. A skilled worker in wood and metal as well as clay—he enjoys incorporating contrasting materials and skills in products which reflect his eclectic interest in process design, formal utility and innovative technique.
“Does innovation come from trying to understand the world by building it, by creating a ‘model’ to verify our assumptions? The intent to refine—over days, weeks, months, years—through trial and error, mindful observation, adaptation, and play until there is a match between the aspiration and the physically verifying model ?
In all important ways, model building is the lodestone of artisan craftsmanship—”the desire to do a thing well for it’s own sake”. The goal is to explore the illusion of beauty—to honor the ideal—to bear witness, via the tangible thing itself. Although perfection remains illusory, our process of climbing towards it, through building—artisan engineering—is the most direct path we have to reconcile our conception, perception, and confusion.”
— my simplification of Joe Barter’s understanding