Episode 64 | Face Jugs, Monsters and the Art of Stacy Lambert

Kyle and Matt dive into the life, work, and wild imagination of North Carolina folk potter Stacy Lambert, using old photographs, stories, interview footage, and pieces from Matt’s collection to trace how Stacy developed a style completely his own.

Stacy Lambert Bio

Stacy was born in Randolph County in 1965, one of six children, and grew up around Seagrove. His parents worked in textiles rather than pottery, and his first artistic interest was drawing. After high school, he joined the Army, later returned to North Carolina, earned an associate degree in commercial art from Randolph Community College, and in 1993 began working with fifth-generation potter Sid Luck. Stacy started with more traditional forms, but drawing, figures, humor, and storytelling quickly became the center of his work.

Matt explains how his own Stacy Lambert collection started at the Catawba Valley Pottery Festival and eventually grew into hundreds of miniatures, face jugs, figures, and custom pieces. Kyle and Matt also look through photographs from Stacy’s early years, including work from the 1990s, pictures with other potters, and a high school newspaper clipping from 1982 with the headline, “He creates a world of fantasy with pencil and paper.”

The photographs lead into stories about Stacy’s Tattoo Man figures, James Earl Jones owning one, and what may be one of Stacy’s earliest face jugs. Kyle also previews footage from a video he and Sullivan filmed with Stacy in Asheboro, where Stacy explains why he moved away from traditional production pottery and toward work built around drawing, characters, and jokes.

The second half of the episode turns into a tour through Matt’s collection. They open a box of Stacy miniatures, compare standard face jugs with more elaborate applied pieces, and look at everything from lions and tigers to custom Predator and Alien jugs. Along the way, Matt calls Billy Ray Hussey, tells the story behind a corn-and-snake jug inspired by something happening in his own life, and discovers what appears to be an actual snakeskin sitting on the pottery.

The episode ends with a damaged Walter Fleming jug that Stacy turned into something completely new after its spout broke during firing. Matt calls it a “mystical collab,” and it sums up much of what makes Stacy’s work interesting: give him a traditional form, a broken pot, a movie character, a joke, or a story, and he finds a way to turn it into something unmistakably his own.

Chapters

00:00 | Stacy Lambert and Medusa

03:13 | How Matt Started Collecting Stacy

07:28 | Stacy Lambert Bio

11:15 | Early Photos from the 1990s