Josh Manning & Aslan “Ozzy” Freidline 

Virginia Salt Glaze Pottery

On a balmy late spring day up the Shenandoah Valley, Josh Manning of Copper Hill and Aslan Freidline of Roanoke hesitate briefly at the edge of a creek bank to peer around and through knee-high plants. It’s spring and venomous water moccasins like to lurk in the muddy, tall sedges that flank the creek. Like a Siren, the lure of good wild clay calls them, and they make a plan.  

Spade in hand, Josh, a Virginia Folklife 2026 mentor artist, steps down into the creek bed and begins clearing away a spot of the bank’s topsoil. Aslan, who goes by Ozzy, is his apprentice in making pottery in the Virginia salt glaze tradition. She arranges five-gallon buckets in a line to catch the heavy shovels of gray earth Josh flings her way.  

Testing the harvest, Ozzy’s eyes gleam. She rolls a handful of the silvery, gray dirt in her palm. “It’s got plasticity!” she beams. Josh smiles in return. They squeeze the clay to check its density before dropping more clumps into the buckets. 

In just a few moments, they’ve gathered three buckets, or approximately 150 pounds of Shenandoah Valley gray clay. Josh hoists himself back up to the grassy bank.  

They’ll bring this clay back to Josh’s studio, Parlour Pottery, in Copper Hill, to press through window screens and additional fine mesh to remove sand. This cleaning preps the clay for future creations.  

“It takes about a pound of clay to create a single mug,” Josh says. For him, this meticulous process is his life’s work. 

Raised in Floyd County, Josh discovered pottery in grade school. “I think I went on two or three field trips to visit area potters as a kid,” he recalls. “That was a luxury I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. It fundamentally guided me through years when I didn’t have much interest in school. Once I started working with clay, I decided, Yeah, this is something I can latch onto.” That spark led him to study art and ceramics at Virginia Tech under David Crane, and later, graduate school with Bob Anderson at West Virginia University. Today, he passes those decades of knowledge down to his apprentice. 

Ozzy’s path to the wheel began in high school, when she participated in an archaeology field school with American Foreign Academic Research (AFAR) and excavated Maya pottery in Belize. She later drew on that experience for one of her first assignments in Josh’s ceramics class at Hollins, recreating a historical pot.

“I touched clay for the first time, and it just clicked,” Ozzy says. “Josh told me, ‘Well, you’ve caught the bug,’ and encouraged me to keep going.” Around the same time, she was living on 17 acres of land and building a home.  

“Every time we dug into the ground, there was clay. Seeing that — and realizing that people have been making functional things from this exact earth for centuries and millennia — it felt like a natural connection,” Ozzy says. 

During their apprenticeship, the pair focused on the  salt-glaze method, a technique brought to Virginia  by 18th-century German immigrants. The first commercial pottery in the American colonies was established in Yorktown by William Rogers (the “Poor Potter”) in roughly 1720. 

 Early potters preferred salt glaze because it is entirely lead-free, making it safer to produce and use. It was also incredibly economical. 

“You just need viable clay and salt to throw into the kiln,” Josh explains. “That combination creates a glaze unto itself when the salt interacts with the clay.” The resulting aesthetic is iconic to early American pottery: a textured surface resembling an orange peel, decorated in strokes of cobalt blue, and washed in shades of  salt gray born from the heat of the firing. 

Their partnership goes beyond the studio wheel; they are also actively mapping the diverse native clays found across the Commonwealth, with plans to build an interactive Google Earth map of historic deposits.

Josh says, “Virginia clay, it’s diverse. There’s a lot of different geological formations that have created unique clays. I find that fascinating, that you know we live in a world where materials are mined on an industrial scale and oftentimes, they are refined to such a point to where the material loses its soul. Local materials tend to retain some of that, they’re, you know, albeit a little bit quirky, but they have character in that.”

Josh’s studio, Parlour Pottery, in Copper Hill. Photo by Katy Clune/Virginia Humanities

For Ozzy, digging into these records feels like a form of time travel.  

“We’re going back into history,” explained Ozzy.“It’s a connection to those potters of before, to the people who used their pieces, and to the collectors today. I’m fortunate to be able to create and to have the ability,space, and the time. It’s less than I would like, but it’s not zero, and so being able to do that in 2026 is a privilege that I don’t take for granted at all.” 

This historical context bridges beautifully into what Josh calls the era of the “Farmer-Potter” — a time when rural craftspeople worked strictly with the materials at hand, balancing their creativity with the seasons. 

He explains, “the Farmer Potter era means people who worked with the materials that were at hand. You know, everybody in a rural setting was a farmer. And making pottery requires fair weather… A negative draw is making pots in the wintertime and having to worry about them freezing. Potters would only work certain months out of the year, not until you get into the Industrial Revolution, do you really get, I guess, a 12-month cycle where a potter is working full time.” 

Ozzy finds a kindred spirit in those historic artisans. “I am similar to a farmer-potter,” she says. “I have other jobs outside of the creative field to support what I enjoy doing, so that I can keep doing it.” 

Ultimately, that balance between labor and lifestyle feeds into the deep human connection that keeps both artists anchored to the craft. For Ozzy, the reward is deeply personal. 

“My mother sends me a photo every single morning of her coffee in a mug I made, telling me how great it is,” she confesses. “Or someone I gifted a piece will say, ‘I still have your vase, and seeing it every day makes me smile.’ That is the greatest joy for me. It’s a way of saying, Oh, you thought about me—and it’s because I thought about you.” 

Josh agrees, seeing their ancient craft as a vital antidote to a modern, digitized world. 

“A handmade pot can be a very humble thing,” he says. “It is just earth shaped into form to hold or serve. There’s something that is just evocative about a handmade mug, or anything that is designed to serve and made with purpose. You know, certainly now we live in a world where there’s less and less of the touch of a human, I think it’s a nice way to be grounded.”