Robin Cage: Kissed by Fire

by Charles McGuigan

Originally published November 2015

It’s a rambling shotgun of a building on a side street in Woodland Heights, a clapboard with large storefront windows on the front elevation. In past incarnations it was a woodworking shop (short-lived), a barber shop (part of it, at any rate) and a grocery store (a place called Gill’s Market, where neighborhood kids would ride their bikes on steamy summer afternoons to buy a Co-Cola or a Nehi). Thirty years ago, Robin Cage bought the place from a man named Earl. After the papers were signed, Robin transformed all 2,500 square feet of the building into the 43rd Street Gallery, which houses her pottery studio and kiln, along with a violin shop, which occupies the rear of the building.

Robin Cage greets me at the door and we pass through the gallery, which is neatly appointed with shelving and racks filled with hand-thrown pottery from a variety of artists along with hand-made jewelry and other crafted wonders. We work our way into the back rooms where Robin makes her pottery. These are working rooms where everything is coated in a pale red dust like a Martian landscape. Robin rubs her hands down along the pale blue apron she wears. Her forearms are sinewy. There is a low and constant hum, which is the kiln, “the beast” as Robin calls it. Out of its belly that same evening it will surrender finished pottery after twelve hours of constant firing at a temperature of about 2300 degrees.

Robin takes a seat on a stool in front of a work bench and gently presses the tip of a foam rubber brush against the edge of a bowl that is a chalky, pale orange. It has already gone through the bisque fire, prepped now and solid, so Robin can adorn it. This clay, dry and porous, sucks up the pigment like a sponge. The bowl sits on a banding wheel that spins slowly so the rim receives an even coat of this watery pigment that is pewter-colored. When fired, after the glaze is applied, it will turn a rich cobalt blue.

“Kissed by fire,” says Robin. It is a transformative kiss, the stuff of fairy tales, that alters the very nature of clay, pigments and glaze.

When she completes the lip of the bowl, Robin selects a bamboo-handled brush with an elk hair tip, dips it into another cup of pigment, and with rapid flourishes of her wrist creates a structure like a tree, and then a slender stem sprouting leaves.

“I was strongly influenced by Asian brushwork because it’s some of the best around,” Robin says. “I studied in Vermont with Malcolm Wright for a time and he studied in Japan. I’ve been doing this kind of brushwork for thirty-five years now.”

Robin’s mother, Barbara, enters the shop. She still lives in the town where Robin was born and at eighty-eight still drives up to Richmond to help out at the gallery. “It’s probably the only reason the dust level stays down to a dull roar out front,” says Robin.

Robin grew up in Halifax, a town of about seven hundred, in the heart of tobacco country near South Boston. Her father, Robert Fielding Cage, was a tobacco auctioneer and he plied his trade around the country and the world, from Kentucky to Rhodesia. While in Rhodesia he took some art classes and later took another class at the Corcoran Gallery up in Washington, D.C. “He was a painter and sculptor on the side,” says Robin. ”Being an auctioneer gave him a lot of flexibility with his time so he was able to pursue other things, but he really loved the auctioneering. Mostly he was a self-taught artist and most of his work was abstract.” On the side of the 43rd Street Gallery, in the center of an informal garden, stands a twelve-foot high chalice, a sculpture Robin’s father created out of old leather cutting dyes that came out of the defunct Craddock-Terry Shoe Corporation, which had once been the largest single employer in Lynchburg.

Robin acknowledges that part of her creative impulse probably came from her father. But more than that, both her father and mother gave her support and an understanding that what matters most in this life is finding your passion and pursuing it. “I think that when you grow up in a family that supports you being an artist or being independent, it makes it easier for you to live that lifestyle,” says Robin. “My dad was definitely not an accountant so he didn’t expect me to get a job and I never really did.”

When she left Halifax, Robin did her undergraduate work in sociology at William and Mary and after graduation followed her main professor out to Bowling Green University in Ohio to earn a master’s in corrections and criminology.

But her education in the social sciences would end there. Her professor’s wife, Roxie, had something in her basement that would change the course of Robin’s life—it was a pottery studio—and the moment Robin threw her first pot, she knew what she would be doing this for the rest of her life. “That’s where I started out,” she remembers. “I was just fascinated by the process and we got along really well. I had a very good time doing it and found it so much more interesting than crunching numbers. I was sort of worried that if I went ahead and took a real job I wouldn’t be able to shift back, so I never did. If you don’t make any money it’s easier to live off not too much when you’re getting started. I just ended up getting sidetracked and never looked back.”

When she returned to Richmond, Robin did a two-year apprenticeship with John Freimarck. “I worked in his studio and at one point lived in his house up on Atlee Road,” she says. “He paid me a little bit to be an apprentice because I was doing it full-time with him and learning the trade as best as possible.”

When the apprenticeship ended, Robin headed north to study with Malcolm Wright for a year. “Once you put your hand on clay you never look back,” she says. “It’s intangible, but I do know enough people that have the bug and that it’s hard, if not impossible, to let go.”

With the training under her belt, Robin returned again to Richmond and set up a studio down on Second and Stockton Streets years before there was any gentrification there. “Now it’s the new arts district, but back in the 1980s it was still completely manufacturing,” she says. “I mean I’d be working at night and walk outside and feel like I walked into a Hopper painting or something.”

And though she kept the space for five years, it had a lot to be desired. “It was a very small space and you’d have to turn the heat on when you got there and when it was cold in the morning the pots would be frozen,” she says. “Clay does not take kindly to being frozen when it’s wet, so it just flops.”

In those early years, Robin spent much of her time getting her name out there, along with her work. “You just start applying to shows and once you get enough work together you go on the circuit,” she says. “I was probably doing fifteen and twenty shows a year. I was going up to Connecticut and down to Florida and out to Ohio and Michigan. That’s just what you did to get going.”

Sometimes her work would sell, other times it wouldn’t. “On the good days you get a hotel and on the bad days you sleep in your van,” she recalls. “It’s much easier to do that when you’re young than it is as time goes on. The market’s changed a lot over the years and I think it’s a much tougher living on the road now than it used to be.”

When she finally purchased the shop, things began to change. “The advantage of having a brick and mortar location like this is that my emphasis was getting people to come to me instead of going to them,” Robin says. “I could also sell other people’s work. Today, I probably have twenty to twenty-five local artists whose work I sell.”

And there are a number of galleries—most of them within a few hours’ drive of her home—that now carry her work. “My primary gallery is Appalachian Spring in Washington, D. C., they’ve got four locations up there so it’s a nice steady stream with them,” she says. “I also have A Touch of Earth in Williamsburg and Matrix Gallery in Blacksburg.”

Robin leaves the studio for a minute to check the kiln which has been purring along all morning. When she returns, she says, “I’ll have to go back in about fifteen minutes because there’s a certain part in the firing called body reduction where you change the settings on the kiln a little bit so that it pulls the iron out of the clay body and gives some of the richness of color that I get out of the firing.”

And with that she sits down and begins working on another tray of clay pieces. These are small, long trays, that are crimped every couple inches—olive trays, Robin tells me, what she calls bread and butter items. “They’re great for the holidays,” she says. “The prices are reasonable.”

For the next couple weeks, Robin will be turning out a lot of pottery for her annual open house which starts right after Thanksgiving. As she finishes each olive tray she returns it to a six-foot length of pine board. When they’re all finished she balances the plank on her palm, like a server with her tray, and carries it over to shelving that contains row after row of bisque-fired pottery waiting to be painted. In all, she’ll finish painting over a hundred pieces of pottery today and then dip each one in a specific glaze.

“I have a large propane kiln,” Robin says. “It’s big enough to walk in, it’s called a car kiln. It holds a lot of pots—maybe two hundred—per firing. I’ll spend most of the remainder of today doing brushwork and glazing this load and tomorrow and I’ll load them in the kiln.” And then she’ll fire them for twelve to fourteen hours. “I’ll leave it overnight and slowly start opening it the next morning,” she says. “Then I’ll be in the kiln by noon or two o’clock that afternoon to see how it came out. I’ll probably have four large firings by Thanksgiving, with any luck.”

Over the years, Robin has experimented with every kind of pigment and glaze imaginable and she has gotten the temperatures just right for successful firings. Yet things sometimes don’t turn out the way she expected. “I still mess them up,” she says. “So when I have my open house in November we have what’s called our annual adopt-a-pot sale which is all my scratch and dents. I sell them all at one time. I collect them all year long. They have cracks in them. I did glaze experiments that didn’t work. But people love them and some of them are actually quite nice but they just don’t fit in with anything else I do.”

As Robin speaks, her hands are in constant motion, dipping brush in pigment, touching the tip of the brush to the dry clay. When I tell her I am amazed by the deftness of her handiwork, no brushstroke wasted or miscast, she says, “You get faster, but it doesn’t get easier. I’ve been very fortunate to have a strong body that hasn’t been hurt by doing this.” And she hoists another pottery-laden plank up to her shoulder and moves over to the shelving.

When she comes back to the work bench, she picks up a stoneware coffee mug made by another artist and takes a sip. She holds it up for my inspection. “A mug is the best example of something you don’t make money on,” Robin tells me. “I found this thing a potter had written up when I was in Cape Cod. What he said was something like this, ‘You wedge the clay. You throw the pot. Then you trim it, then you have to put a handle on it and you have to dry it very slowly or the handle’s going to fall off.’ But you never make one mug, so I make twenty. Then I have to clean them. Then they have to go in the bisque and I have to have enough of everything to fill a bisque so sometimes it will be a month to six weeks from the time I’ve thrown something to the time it’s finished. So after it comes out of the bisque, I clean it off, get all the dust off, wax the bottom, then I do the brush work. I put the glaze on it, clean the bottom again, put it in the kiln, fire the kiln for the second time, twelve hours, unload the kiln, clean the bottoms, decide which is going to wholesale, which is going to go in the gallery here, price them and then they go out on the shelf.” She says this without stopping and you get a feel for just how much work goes into the creation of a single mug.

And stoneware mugs and plates and olive trays like the ones Robin makes will last a lifetime. Because there is a permanence in pottery and something very personal in each piece Robin Cage makes with her own hands.

“I’ve got some great customers who have remained constant over the years along with new ones all the time,” she says. “That’s just amazing to me: that folks I just love appreciate my work and that they enjoy taking it home and living with it. I still can’t imagine anything else that I could have done this long and enjoyed this much.”