On John Neely:

I met John at Watershed in 2015 when I was working there as a summer staff member. I’d just come out of a decade-long relationship and needed a hard reset, which is how I ended up working in Maine for the summer at age 32. I watched John make teapots, our workshop cohort reduction-cooled my first train kiln; Atsuko cooked for everyone, and I felt my curious soul come alive after several years of dormancy. I moved to Logan as a post-bac student a year later, probably the most consequential decision of my life, and I was accepted as a grad student a year after that.

John had a handmade tool for every situation an artist might encounter in the ceramics studio. He was never too busy to give you his full focus though, and he always seemed to be aware of his place in a tide of human genius, as opposed to being a standalone example of it. John treated people like the books in his extensive office library: he tried to read them all, even the ones in languages that were foreign to him. I feel lucky every day to have been one of his students.