St. Lucia’s Volcanic South and a Potter’s Love Story

The Pitons are visible from almost everywhere in southern St. Lucia, which means you are almost never quite alone with your thoughts here. They interrupt the horizon with the bluntness of objects that have no interest in being subtle about their presence—two volcanic spires rising from the sea near Soufrière, Gros Piton at 2,619 feet and Petit Piton at 2,438, their flanks covered in forest that has somehow colonized nearly vertical rock, their summits usually in cloud. UNESCO designated them a World Heritage Site in 2004, which strikes most people who live in their shadow as belated recognition of something they have always known.

Augustin Mondesir’s pottery studio sits in a converted warehouse near Soufrière’s waterfront, about three kilometers from where the Pitons meet the sea. The building has thick stone walls that keep the interior cool even in the midday heat, and it smells of wet clay and wood smoke—the latter from the kiln he fires twice a week, using a combination of local hardwood and coconut shells that, he says, produce a particular quality of heat that commercial kilns cannot replicate.

He is fifty-one, a broad-shouldered man with clay-stained hands that he doesn’t bother to clean except before meals, and he has been working this studio for twenty-two years. He trained in ceramics at a technical institute in Castries, then spent four years in Barbados studying under a Barbadian master potter, then returned to Soufrière because, as he puts it, this is where the clay is.

He means this literally. The volcanic geology of southern St. Lucia produces a clay with specific mineral properties—a higher silica content than the clays found elsewhere on the island, a natural coloring that fires to a warm ochre—that Augustin sources from a deposit in the hills above Soufrière and considers essential to his work. He has experimented with commercial clays and finds them competent but characterless.

“The earth here has a history,” he says, kneading a block of local clay on his work table. “You can feel it in the material.”

The history he means is volcanic: the same geological forces that produced the Pitons also produced this clay, through centuries of mineral weathering and alluvial deposition. To work with it is, in some sense, to work with the aftermath of volcanic creation—to make something useful and beautiful from material that was itself produced by tremendous force.

His wife, Sophie, is a textile artist who grew up in the fishing village of Anse La Raye, midway up St. Lucia’s leeward coast. She works with natural dyes derived from plants sourced on the island—indigo, mahogany bark, the tannins of the manchineel fruit—and her work, like Augustin’s, is defined by an insistence on material specificity, on the particular qualities of things that come from this place rather than from a catalog.

They met at a St. Lucia craft fair in Castries in 1998, which is to say they met in the way that artisans in small communities often meet: at the intersection of their respective practices, each immediately recognizing in the other someone who was serious about making things. Sophie had brought a series of indigo-dyed wall hangings. Augustin had a collection of serving vessels in the local ochre clay. They spent twenty minutes examining each other’s work before they exchanged names.

“He picked up one of my hangings and held it in the light for a long time,” Sophie says, from her corner of the studio where she is stretching a piece of mordanted cotton. “He didn’t say it was beautiful. He asked what mordant I’d used for the blue. I thought, this is someone worth knowing.”

The studio they now share was Augustin’s originally—Sophie moved in when they married, taking the eastern corner for her dyeing and weaving work, gradually expanding until the space became genuinely collaborative, neither’s work quite containable in its designated area. Augustin’s pots often receive surface treatments using Sophie’s dye solutions. Sophie’s textiles are sometimes shaped around Augustin’s ceramic forms, the two media informing each other in ways that neither had expected when they began.

Outside the studio, Soufrière unfolds in the particular way of small Caribbean towns built around a colonial economic center that has since found other purposes: the waterfront is lively with market vendors and the small fishing boats that work the water beneath the Pitons, the market selling produce that comes down from the agricultural interior—the dasheen, the plantain, the fresh turmeric that grows abundantly in the volcanic soil of the hills. The town has seen considerable tourism development in recent decades, most of it anchored to the Pitons’ drawing power, and Augustin and Sophie have navigated this with the wariness of artisans who understand that tourism can support craft or consume it, depending on how carefully you protect the conditions of authentic making.

Their pottery is sold almost exclusively through a small gallery attached to the studio, and through a handful of discerning shops in Castries and Rodney Bay. Augustin has turned down wholesale orders from several resort gift shops because the volumes required would have changed what he made—more consistency, less variation, the gradual erosion of the material specificity that makes the work worth making.

“You can love your work,” he says, “or you can make a product. Sometimes these are the same thing. Often they are not.”

Late in the afternoon, as the Piton shadows lengthen across the waterfront and the light turns the color of the local clay, Augustin fires the kiln for the week’s production. Sophie sits nearby, documenting her mordanting trials in a notebook, occasionally reaching over to adjust the kiln’s draft without asking. It is the gesture of someone who knows another person’s work well enough to help without interfering.

The pots inside the kiln are being transformed by the combination of heat, mineral content, and time into something they were not when they went in—harder, more defined, made permanent by a process they cannot experience as anything other than heat. Outside, the Pitons are what they have always been: the result of geological forces so large they make human concerns seem provisional, and also, for the people who live in their shadow, simply the shape of home.

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