It used to be a candy store, with rows of sugary confections lining the space. Now, the Loudon Road storefront holds large tables, shelves of drying bowls and vases, a whole section of pottery wheels and, of course, a kiln.
When Black Olive Pottery opened in Concord at the start of the fall, owner Jackie Ose had already spent most of her life dreaming of one day running her own business. The reality, however, has far exceeded anything she could have imagined.
“I love seeing people take one prompt and just go with it, like the creativity that I’m still continuously surprised by — I should stop being surprised at this point — but it’s super cool to see everyone put their little taste in it,” she said.
She initially fell into the pottery world during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was working remotely after an interstate move.
“It was a third space, and I really needed that,” she said.
The more she got into the craft, the more she wanted to share it with others. At the same time, growing disillusioned with her work in the nonprofit sphere, she decided to take the leap towards her longtime dream.
Ose, who lives in Hudson but is seeking to move to the Capital Region, picked Concord because of the dearth of pottery studios in the area. Black Olive — named after her Black Labrador, Olive, and also a shade of ceramic glaze — offers eight-week classes to help people master different skills and also teaches one-off workshops.
Once someone takes an introductory course or has preexisting comparable experience, they qualify to become a member. The program functions like a gym membership, with different levels and perks, but the beauty of belonging to the studio is the unfettered daily 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. access.
“I wanted to make a space where other people could get obsessed with pottery,” Ose said.
One of her first customers, Bailey Hansen, had been looking for a studio for months. She works as a substance use clinician and had been needing an outlet.
“It’s definitely big time stress relief, like if I’m feeling overwhelmed, I know that there’s something I can do that does not matter to anybody else — and I get cool bowls out of it,” Hansen said.
She ventures into the studio two or three times a week, often on her lunch break. The absence of any rules feels freeing when it comes to creating, Hansen said.
“I feel like people value more useful handmade things now than maybe they used to because it wasn’t that big of a deal,” she said. “But I think a lot of us are losing touch with how things are made. It’s like, ‘Wow this is really awesome. Someone spent time making this for me with intention behind. It wasn’t just pumped out of the factory.'”
Ose, for her part, revels in the way pottery can surprise people.
“It is also cool to see people do hand-building projects that they were like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you could do all this stuff with clay.’ So, the majority of the people that come in, [it’s the] first time they’ve ever touched clay, and so we’ll start from the beginning,” she said.
Even with only six months under her belt, Ose is already looking to the future and thinking about what she could do with more space.
“I mean, being on Main Street would be fabulous, right? Like having a member space here and a class space there,” she said.
Her staff has proven instrumental in the studio’s success so far. Ose handles the business side of things while everyone else takes care of the ceramics.
But once in a while, she gets a chance to teach a lesson or throw clay on the wheel again. And when she does, it reminds her of how it felt to start out.
“It taught me to be super patient, and I was not patient before. It was definitely a struggle. In the beginning, I was like, ‘Why isn’t this working?’ I wanted to be immediately good at it, and it forced me to slow down, get off my phone — like, you cannot scroll when you have hands full of clay,” she said with a laugh.