Astoria and the College are located near the mouth of the Columbia River, close to where it enters the Pacific Ocean---a creative liminal space that evokes a sense of thousands of years of Northwest trade and commerce, and it continues to connect us to the “bigger” world community. Our watery and windy home on the river stimulates a profound sense of place, its human history and migration, and its natural elements and forces.

From this “edge” one can view, on a clear day, upriver and imagine the volcano 180 miles east called Mt. Saint Helens that “blew” in 1980 and turn 180 degrees to a westward view of the Columbia River meeting the Pacific Ocean.  It’s a place where we can reach down to the water’s edge and pick up a piece of wood, maybe a beaver-chewed tree limb or a piece of rock, like a small piece of pumice that floated downriver - now becoming an emotional artifact, igneous in nature, that can be used in a utilitarian way as a glaze material that can be fired in the anagama where it mixes with “fly ash”.  My students and I are fortunate to live in this very energizing place that puts us smack in the middle of magical transformation – an engaging and spontaneous world.  We want to deeply connect to this world and to be a part of a community that helps each other understand our “collective memory”.  We want to work toward sustainability.  In the arts I personally work toward the idea of custodial aesthetics, which uses the enduring collective wisdom of the past and a spectrum of thoughtful voices to help us go into the future with a sense of wonder and infinite possibilities. 

~Richard Rowland, Ceramics Instructor