Ceramist Alex Matisse is a member of a storied family of artists and inventors, including his great-grandfather Henri Matisse and father Paul. Raised in a small New England town, he was making things from clay in the fourth grade. By the time he entered high school it was all that he wanted to do.Matisse was hesitant to fully embrace his calling because he didnt want to be compared to anyone else. When I graduated, I made one more concerted effort to leave behind the family legacy, and didnt sign up for any art classes at college, he says. A month or two in and I was totally miserable and talked my way into the ceramics program. A year and a half later he left higher education behind to pursue traditional apprenticeship and was mentored by two potters, Matt Jones and Mark Hewitt.In 2009, Matisse purchased an old tobacco farm in the mountains of North Carolina and founded East Fork. He built a wood-burning kiln that was 36 feet long and also established a series of rudimentary workshops which served as the original site of the fledgling business. He now works alongside his wife Connie Rose Coady-Matisse, and today the company is one of the largest dinnerware manufacturers in the United States.Alex Matisse \\\ Photo: Tim RobisonEven when Matisse is not producing pottery with clays from the American Southeast, he finds it difficult to switch from work to personal mode. When he does find some spare time in a packed schedule hell often hop on his bike and ride deep into the woods to reset.As a creative, Matisse has plenty of things to jot down, not always an easy feat when hes on the go or in an unexpected place. My ideas usually come at inopportune times, like when I am driving to work in the dark on my long commute, he adds. I have a hard time keeping track of a physical notebook so I usually have three or four half-filled ones going at a time.Today, Alex Matisse joins us for Friday Five!Photo: Courtesy of East Fork1. A Wooden LadleThis was made by a guy named Jake who lived in an airstream on the property that East Fork was started on. Jake was there to help a friend of mine named Raivo build this beautiful timberframed kiln shed that would shelter a large wood-burning kiln. It came out of a hunk of cherry from a tree we cut down in the middle of an old tobacco field. Jake sent me the spoon maybe a year after he moved back to Maine. The level of detail and precision has always floored me. Its one of the few functional objects I have that I am too scared to use because I love it so much. I generally frown upon not using things that are designed to be used.Photo: Courtesy of Matisse Family2. Franois-Xavier Lalanne hippo tubMy grandmother Teeny lived in a beautiful country house in a small village south of Paris. She was married to Pierre Matisse and then Marcel Duchamp before he died so naturally there was art everywhere. My absolute favorite piece of capital A art was the Lalanne Hippo tub. It functioned beautifully and my brother and I would always insist that they close up the sides and we would slosh around in the echoey blackness.Photo: Tim Robison3. Our little cabin in the woodsWhen we wanted to get out of Asheville but not travel far we would rent this little cabin that our friends Helen and Josh (of Fuzzco) renovated. We happened to have it rented the weekend that everything shut down in the spring of 2020. We never left and bought it a year later. Its very small, doesnt have closets or a washing machine (we did finally install one in a cinderblock outbuilding a short walk from the cabin) and usually has a family of flying squirrels who live in the eves, and I drive 45 minutes to work each way every day but I love it. It sits perched on a spit of land that is surrounded by steep woods and you look out into the canopy from almost every room. The cabin holds our family close, not letting us drift away like you can in a large house. Our girls have grown up tromping in the river and exploring the woods, and it was a cocoon that held Connie and I tight through some of the hardest moments of our marriage. It has a wood-fired hot tub and a wood stove and a ton of beautiful native landscaping I installed during Covid, so I keep the fires tended and plants watered and Connie keeps us fed, and when friends come to visit the rest of the world falls away in this little oasis.Photo: Alex Matisse4. My father, Paul MatisseMy father built his life around making beautiful things. He would never call himself just an artist always an artist/inventor. The things he made are beautiful and accessible and often interactive. He has an engineers mind and is prone to over complicate, but the finished thing always brings joy to whoever interacts with it. Most of his life was spent making musical sculptures installed everywhere from a sculpture park in Aix-en-Provence to the Boston T to an old grain silo on the property of a close friend, artist Otto Peine. We grew up in a large converted baptist church in a small town outside of Boston. In the house he would design solutions for everything, like a mechanism that opened both sides of a cabinet door when you pull on just one side, everything designed and machined in the machine shop on the ground floor. There was no chimney or fireplace in the church when we were young and he solved that problem by hanging our stockings under the clapper of the massive iron bell that hangs in the belfry, it rings on the hour every hour and is still wound by hand twice a week.Photo: Mike Belleme5. The first wood kiln at East ForkFrom 2010 to 2015 all the pots I made were fired in a large wood burning kiln I designed and built myself (with the help of some good friends of course). It was about the length of a school bus and could hold about 1000 pots of various sizes from 4-foot-tall decorative vessels to the smallest bowl just 3 inches across. The kiln was a mash up of large kilns you would find in different parts of the world, from the groundhog kilns of North Carolina to big kilns designed to fire water jars in Burma. The curve of the sides was drawn from the silhouette of a candle flame. It was a beautiful space to be in, which was nice because every time we loaded the kiln it would take about 3 or 4 days of sitting in it loading the pottery. What I loved about making pottery back then was how you could build just about every part of the technical process, not to mention make your own clay and glazes from materials you pulled out of the ground yourself. We sold that property when we moved East Fork in to Asheville to help fund the growth. The kiln was taken down and the bricks recycled, turned into three or four smaller kilns, including one on Marthas Vineyard. One day I hope I get to build another workshop like that, and fire a big wood burning kiln again.Works by Alex Matisse and East Fork:East Fork pottery photos courtesy of East Fork.