RACHEL GIBBONS
Potter Chas Frisco paints detail onto one of his cloud plates in Milt’s Barn at the Museum of Northern Arizona.
Potter Chas Frisco on ceramics, soccer and the beauty of changeability
SVEA CONRAD has Frisco is comfortable with unpredictability. As a potter and a soccer coach (he is in fact both) you have to be – when so much as a flame flickering a little differently, glaze leaking unexpectedly, some salt you added to the sawdust of a pitfire, a pass gone sideways or a goalie having an off night, can alter outcomes completely. “In ceramics you’re not quite sure what’s going to happen every time,” Frisco said. The beauty of it? You can always re-fire something. Go back to the wheel, or the table, or the slab and start again. Or accept the slightly different outcome, consider it worthy nonetheless. This is something Frisco learned early on. That and clay, like the steps it goes through to become something, is nothing if not-forgiving. “I try to stay away from
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12 | flaglive.com | Jan. 6 - Feb. 2, 2022
throwing things in the garbage,” he said. “I don’t know who is going to react to what, if a piece will speak to someone in this way or that way.” Born and raised in Kansas, Frisco’s first experience with the material was in an 8th grade art class. His parents, though not artists themselves, encouraged their kids – Frisco is the youngest of four – to explore mediums of all kinds. His siblings were all interested in drawing and painting, but Frisco soon realized three-dimensionality was more his calling. “I thought to myself, ‘I have to figure out how to keep this thing in my life.’” He said. “Initially I wanted to be an architect so it was also a matter of doing that and working in [pottery] at the same time.” After finishing his bachelor of fine arts at Wichita State, Frisco would go on to get his graduate degree from the same university – this time focusing entirely on ceramics. He still laughs at his mother’s
RACHEL GIBBONS
Chas Frisco paints detail onto one of his cloud plates reaction when he told her he’d be pursuing ceramics fulltime. “When I told her I wanted to go to school to be a potter, she thought I said pauper.” He likes to use the term in lieu of sculptor or ceramicist because, he said, it keeps him on his toes. “It checks my ego,” Frisco said. “Ceramicist sounds like a scientist, sculptor sounds like I’m this big deal. Being a potter, I want to align myself with the idea that potters
work hard but are still creative, they are intelligently digging up clay and throwing it.” Now a 30 year veteran of the medium, Frisco’s work straddles the line between functional and sculptural, ephemeral and physical. Landscapes, dreams and careful detail all interact in the shapes that emerge from the pitfire – which he digs and constructs himself – or the kiln. His body of work is not confined to mugs and pots but expands far beyond: to brace-
