Ben Wolff’s Handcrafted Pots | Open Studio

Ben Wolff works on a “roped-rim” pot using a homemade pattern-making tool called a coggle.
Credit: Megan Haley

The music is twangy, languid, slow as a muddy river. It is a perfect foil to the action unfurling in the video—the rise and fall of a slippery chunk of clay, growing and collapsing, over and over, guided by sure fingers, until finally, in its last instant, it blooms, opening into a flowerpot.

The pot is a handmade Ben Wolff pot; the bluesy song is called “Mud,” by Ben and his music partner Simon Biddle. Ben is equal parts potter and musician, just as his elegant pots are comfortable in the home or the garden. A third-generation artist, he came to the craft early, as evidenced in a fading photo that captures a moment in amber: a beautiful 3-year-old up to his elbows in mud, standing confidently behind a potter’s wheel.

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“I doubt I had Play-Doh,” Ben muses, from his basement studio in the town of Goshen, Connecticut. “My parents probably gave me clay.” He’s kept some of his earliest pieces, including one that’s “just a round blob with a hole in the middle.” His dad fired it, having written 1981 and Ben on the bottom, which means Ben was about 1 when he made it. But by the time that photo was snapped, “I already knew what the clay and the wheel felt like, the sensation of it spinning, the wetness of the clay, and the smoothness.”

So… Ben’s father is Guy Wolff. And as any serious gardener will tell you, Guy Wolff pots are the ne plus ultra, the pots that plants dream of occupying. Their lovely shapes, steeped in historical tradition and antique design, effortlessly enhance a garden’s beauty, and sometime in the 1990s, fervent gardeners took note, including Martha Stewart. Guy appeared on her TV show, and in later years, Ben, a potter in his own right, would appear too.