The UTK Anagama-Melrose

I dug up these two images to show you that the pots haven't really changed that much over these years. Here are a couple of pots from about 1985 that were fired in the anagama kiln at Melrose, the University of TN graduate studio. I had somehow finagled my way in to getting a studio there as an undergrad because I was interested in the wood kiln and the salt kiln, both at the Melrose Studio. They were most likely in a kiln that was fired with Peter Rose. The pots are, what I called then, loose.
I just didn't know how to thrown that well, and was happy to be making pots that looked Asian. Japanese potter, Shiro Otani, had built* the anagama a couple of years earlier, and I was under the influence that lingered there at UT, after Otani's residency. As a matter of fact, Shiro was teaching at Arrowmont at some point, and I went to meet him and tell him that I was firing the kiln he had built. I brought a couple of pots with me to show him. He generously took a moment to look at them and didn't say a word, he just handed them back and smiled. As a young potter from Tennessee, I didn't know how to interpret his response. I think he was just being polite!
The kiln and studios were bulldozed in 2005 to make room for a parking lot.

*UPDATE:
The kiln was actually built by Ken Shipley, Stephen Frazier, Patrick Houston, and others after the kiln built at Arrowmont built by Otani.