Terry Stone

T.Stone Ceramics
Greatly influenced by Kerouac’s On the Road and Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, I left my Georgia home and moved to the West in 1980. I hitchhiked around the country and worked various odd jobs (making artificial snow, care-taking mountain lions, etc.) until I accidentally stumbled upon Arcosanti, an experiment in urban design located in central Arizona. Arcosanti was my home for nine years and it is there where I learned how to make the ceramics I sell these days.

Arcosanti was my higher education ... a place unusual, creative, and closely aligned with the desert environment that surrounds it. Importantly, I met hundreds of people from around the world who helped influence my art and social views. Without Arco, I might not have had an opportunity to visit such places as Denmark, Germany, and Poland. Nor would I have been trained in ceramics.

I apprenticed making ceramic bells, stuck with it for a couple of years and then managed the ceramic bell production at Arco for almost six years…from 1989-1995. Paolo Soleri, (the man who developed Arcosanti) and I had a stormy relationship over the designs that would be carved on the bells. He preferred the designs to be more angular and geometric…based on his drawings, which, in retrospect, seems fair enough. But I was incapable of following the “straight line” and developed my own wiggly, spiky motifs. By 1995, I was ready to launch my own ceramic business, using the same carving technique I had learned, but developing original bell and planter shapes and carving nothing but wiggly, spiky, snaky designs. With Soleri’s blessing on this new enterprise, I left Arcosanti and moved to Prescott.