North Carolina has a lot of clay, and it's where Japanese ceramic artists Hitomi and Takuro Shibata are based. Together they run Studio Touya, producing pieces using wild clays and wood firing techniques.

They've built several kilns for their work, but the most impressive is their Anagama kiln, a 5th-century Japanese design for a "climbing" kiln. (Anagama kilns were modeled after China's Dragon Kilns.)

This type of long, angled kiln subjects the pieces to a large amount of ash that flows towards the flue, forming a natural glaze on the pieces that varies according to their location in the chamber. The inherent unpredictability of this process produces random, artistically desirable results.

The Shibatas built their Anagama in 2009-2010. "We both were active potters in Shigaraki, Japan, and had many chances to help firing many different wood-fired kilns in the US and Japan," they write. "Through those experiences, we decided to build this kiln as our dream wood kiln for years."

"It looks like a very typical Anagama, but it has some new ideas from American wood kilns, for example we made 4 side stoke holes (normally no stoke holes for Anagama in Shigaraki), and we added a big salt chamber that we can put a lot of pots in and get different results from the Anagama chamber. Also we made the second chamber's firebox big enough to be able to fire by itself. So we can fire just the second chamber to make functional tableware pieces."

"My artistic journey revolves around the use of wild clay, untouched and unrefined, drawn straight from the earth," writes Takuro. "In tandem, I consciously opt for a wood-firing process, thoughtfully utilizing reclaimed wood from local sawmills and branches and dead trees from our land to fuel our wood kiln. This method is inherently unpredictable, mirroring the capriciousness of nature itself. I wholeheartedly embrace this unpredictability as an integral facet of the natural world I seek to capture, and I find immense joy in it."