"I'd been attending the tour since it started in 1992," he said. "I really wanted to move to Chatham County because I thought the tour was so cool. When I was looking for land, I wasn't really considering Orange County or Durham County, because I wanted to be on the Chatham tour."

Now that the Pittsboro potter is one of the 52 artists on the two-weekend tour, he can't visit any other studios.

"My wife usually goes, so she's my proxy," said Dotson, who joined the annual event in 2003.

Nice balance: Encouraged by his mother, a painter, Dotson dabbled in pottery and all types of art in school. But it wasn't until he was working as a computer scientist at SAS (where he remains employed) that he really fell for clay. "I moved to North Carolina in 1989 for work, and in 1991 I took a pottery class at the Duke Craft Center because I wanted something to balance out the computer work. I took one class and was immediately fascinated and drawn to it. I've had my hands in clay ever since."

Bomb dropped: Dotson took to the medium quickly and signed up for classes all over the Triangle. "I'm pretty good with my hands in general," he said. "At that point, I was kind of doing what my teachers were doing. I didn't really start to develop a style." His turning point came in 1994, when he enrolled in a three-week course in wood firing at Penland School of Crafts in Western North Carolina. "That was such an art bomb for me. It changed everything."

West meets East: At Penland, he learned not only about the effects of wood firing, but also about Mingei (pronounced MING-ay), the Japanese folk art movement. "It influenced a lot of potters," Dotson said. "It was pottery produced by hand, reflective of the place where the pots were made, with simple humility. Functionality and price were critical; the object was to get pots in people's hands." He's particularly drawn to Mingei's simplicity. "Some of the specifics of what I respond to are a celebration in irregularity, to reflect the process. So you can see throwing marks, cutting marks, effects from the firing. It's a reflection of how it was made and where it was from."

Earth, wind, fire: After Penland, Dotson started doing his own wood firing at Cedar Creek Gallery and rented kiln space at the now-defunct Duke center. "That set me up to be able to do more work," said Dotson, who started selling pots at local shows. "During the firing, you get a flow of stuff through the air -- wood ash, salt, glazing, all the gases flowing through the stack of pots and out the chimney. So you can see the effects of firing when the pots come out."

Baking soda: Another Penland course, this one for two months in 1999, changed his life again. "That was very exciting, another advancement," he said. "I got to fire the wood kiln but also gas kilns doing stuff with soda, sodium carbonate. It's similar to wood in that where you put the pots will affect how they look when they come out, and also sodium affects color and surface and such. I came back and knew I needed to make my own studio."

Opening shop: Dotson already had the land -- a couple years earlier he and his brother had bought 40 acres in Chatham County. "I knew I intended to build a studio at some point. I came back and started designing my studio and the kiln." A grant from the Durham Arts Council in 2000 helped move the project forward. He also started teaching at the Duke center, which brought another change. One of his pottery students, Maura Dillon, became his wife. A few years ago they had a house built on the property.

In the details: Because wood firing is so labor intensive, Dotson opted for a gas kiln. "I wanted to be able to work more independently and more frequently, and I knew I could get good results from salt or soda. I can do about 200 pots in 16 to 18 hours, so it's me about a month to fill it. That's a good turnaround time." Dotson enjoys seeing evidence of his process in the work. "Some of the things I like about my pots now are the way I cut feet on the bowl, I try to leave marks that are fresh, that have a certain wideness to them that I like. I know when they're firing that the cut marks will respond to soda in a certain way. The rim of a bowl, the edge of the cut mark, they'll get a little different color, the soda might gather on it a certain way. I'm looking for those details."

Shop time: Along with this month's studio sale, Dotson has his own sale yearly and holds a third with potter friends Ronan Peterson and Kelly O'Briant. "It's a lot of work to get ready for a studio sale but I've always really enjoyed doing it," he said. "I set all the lights up and it's a lot of fun to stage all the pots and get a chance to look at my work in ways I don't usually get to. It's fun to put them in their best light." People enjoy making the trek to the country, he said. "We're out in the woods, between Pittsboro and Chapel Hill. It's a real beautiful place. There's a mile-long gravel road to get to the studio. It feels like you're going some place a little different."