As a child growing up in 1950s Hawaii, Reid Ozaki had no idea his playtime would heavily influence his 50-year career as a potter.
“Some of my earliest memories are of playing in the tree ferns near Hawaii Volcanoes National Park,” Ozaki told a gathering of potters in April. “The tide pools near Hilo were the beginning of my appreciation of the natural world,” he continued. “I remember scooping up little creatures and dropping them into glass jars.”
These memories — cooled lava, small shells, smooth vessels — imprinted on his pliable young brain and showed up decades later in his creative expression: organic forms, flower vases, clay pots glazed black as ash.
Greatly admired as an artist, teacher and community connector, Ozaki died suddenly in July, leaving a legacy of work seeded in his Hilo childhood, nurtured by his Japanese heritage and cultivated in the Pacific Northwest.
His long career included many solo shows and awards. His ceramics were collected by art institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And he spent nearly 25 years as a pottery instructor at Tacoma Community College.
Despite his hefty credentials, however, Ozaki wasn’t one to take himself too seriously. Case in point: his explanation for what convinced him to leave Hawaii for the Pacific Northwest.
“What drew me to Washington were the Olympia Beer commercials,” he confessed with a laugh during our interview in May. “You know: ‘It’s the water,’” he said, reciting the slogan. In the ads Ozaki saw “these beautiful landscapes, with grasses blowing in the wind” and thought, “Hey, that’s a nice place.”
A range of Reid Ozaki’s pottery in organic shapes and hues. (Still from ‘Art by Northwest’)
In 1969, he landed at the University of Puget Sound, where he earned a degree in biology — an interest Ozaki said was likely sparked by “something to do with the sea.” His Japanese grandfather, who emigrated to Hawaii in the 1890s, had a koi pond that the young Ozaki loved to observe; native Hawaiian plants were also a perpetual fascination. “My goal was to be a biologist,” he said.
But a single pottery class revealed his true passion. “The university had a very good ceramics program going,” Ozaki explained. He’d never tried making pottery before, but many of his friends were taking classes. “Eventually, my junior year, I got around to doing that too. And it just changed my life.”
In Ozaki’s mind, the story of how he came to pottery wasn’t that unusual. “If you ask potters, they will have similar stories about finding the material,” he said. “It’s just a physical reaction … it’s very captivating.” He stayed at UPS to complete his MFA in 1975, then embarked on his lengthy teaching career and studio practice.
Around 1990, Ozaki and his wife Emma sacrificed a sunny corner of their Tacoma backyard and built a small, windowed studio to hold all his ceramic essentials: heavy bags of clay, two pottery wheels, carving tools, glazing buckets and two kilns.
During my visit in May, the shelves were stacked with new pieces awaiting glazing, recently fired experiments still under consideration and archival works showcasing the shifts in Ozaki’s style over the years. When he took a seat at the wheel and began deftly shaping eight pounds of clay, it seemed like a direct illustration of his relationship with nature: his hands holding onto wet earth as it spun.
Sitting at his pottery wheel, Reid Ozaki deftly works eight pounds of clay into a platter. (Still from ‘Art by Northwest’)
A palpable connection with the outdoors permeates all of Ozaki’s work, from his early designs featuring ginkgo leaves, shells and grasses to recent glazes and shapes that look organic — wood-fired pieces that resemble narrow-waisted gourds, soda-fired vessels that crackle with an orange flame and stoneware like something you might stumble upon in a rocky cove.
Heritage also played a strong role in his work: It’s what sparked Ozaki’s interest in Japanese horticultural arts (his grandfather was self-taught in bonsai and gardening); ikebana (Ozaki made vessels designed specifically for this form of flower arranging); and the traditional tea ceremony (“Teapots are as close to sculpture as you can get,” he said, “and then you have to make sure it holds water”).
In recent work he was exploring shino, a Japanese glaze from the 16th century containing feldspar, which creates a milky finish. In cups and vessels, he contrasted these swaths of pearly gray against a matte black background (a “slip glaze”), which he chose specifically because “It’s very black, and a little rough … it looks very much like lava,” he said.
While his work reflects Japanese aesthetics, Ozaki emphasized that he was deeply influenced by his experience in the Pacific Northwest — both in terms of the local potters who taught him, and in the earthy glazes he used in homage to the “seasonality” of the Puget Sound region. He loved seeing how the changing seasons altered the look of his leafy yard, which he had planted with Japanese maple and ginkgo trees and special botanical specimens.
“In Hawaii, there are no real seasons,” he said. But he noted the winter storms that pummel the north shores of the islands with waves that steal sand and leave rocks to clack against each other. “You’d get these wonderful forms,” he recalled of the rocky coast. “Surf-worn stones.”
These were the impetus for a series of concave, asymmetrical forms, many of which contain their own removable pottery pebble — bringing to mind tide-pool explorations. When he picked one up to demonstrate, he smiled with the delight of a young boy playing at the ocean’s edge.
Reid Ozaki’s pottery includes soda-fired pieces with an orangey glaze and small forms with removable pebbles. (Still from ‘Art by Northwest’)
By settling in Tacoma, Ozaki was once again in proximity to a volcano. Mount Rainier looms prominently over the cityscape, just as snow-capped Mauna Kea does his birthplace of Hilo. In high school, he volunteered with the Sierra Club and helped blaze and repair trails on his home island, as well as on Molokai, Kauai and near the Haleakala crater on Maui.
Once rooted in the Northwest, he found another way to get in touch with the local volcano: volunteering at Mount Rainier National Park, where for years he worked with a naturalist in the greenhouse, seeding plants for revegetation projects.
“It fulfills something for me,” Ozaki told me. “It connects me with my past volunteer work in Hawaii, and with native vegetation. And also gets me out of the studio.”
Ozaki was regularly making work in his last year — experimenting with soda-firing techniques and shino glazing — but he said he was thinking more and more about the legacy of local clay, and how the long line of influential Northwest potters will be remembered.
He worried that an influx of new potters was leaning on a “retail approach,” based on “the Etsy influence,” mastering basic skills but making work without context.
With fellow Tacoma potter Kristina Batiste, Ozaki started the Tacoma Pottery Salon to build community and share the history of local ceramicists with up-and-coming clay makers. Forever a teacher, he hoped to impart what makes the pottery in this place distinct.
“Talks and salons have become a bigger part of how I see what I do,” Ozaki said. “I want to be a spokesperson for my craft.”
Working with an ancient and iridescent Japanese glaze called “shino,” Reid Ozaki sought a rough black background color that recalls lava. (Still from ‘Art by Northwest’)
At a spin-off salon on Whidbey Island in April, he shared images of work by potters who taught and influenced him: Toshiko Takaezu, Ken Stevens, David Schaener, Fred Olson, Richard Rowland, Robert Sperry, Patti Warashina. “The lineage is really interesting to me,” Ozaki said. “Who their teachers were, who their teachers’ teachers were. And how that all connects us together.”
He also mentioned one of his early mentors at UPS, F. Carlton Ball, who was known by a rousing motto, which Ozaki shared: “Throw ’em big, throw ’em tall, throw ’em just like F.C. Ball!”
“We started the Tacoma Pottery Salon because my peers are retiring or passing away,” Ozaki said. “I want newer people in the medium to know who they were and what they did.”
On the same day he passed away, Ozaki had posted a fond note on Facebook about Seabeck potter Ken Lundemo, who had died the day before. It was one of the many social media posts Ozaki made in support of and appreciation for Northwest potters.
Ten days before he died, Ozaki posted a photo of tiny plant starts — bright-green sedge shoots sprouting from black soil. He had been up at Mount Rainier again, transplanting seedlings for the Deadhorse Creek Trail restoration, his hands gently holding the earth.
Reid Ozaki in his backyard garden in May, 2024. (Still from ‘Art by Northwest’)