I have a BFA in ceramics from School of the Arts in Philadelphia and have been making pottery for 40 years. I make my own clay and glazes from raw materials.

I discovered Barry Guppy’s evening pottery classes in 1999 when I flicked through a ‘Time Out—London’ magazine that someone had left on my train. I attended his classes on a Thursday after I finished my day working at the Arts Council of England. Soon I began turning up for a clay session on a Saturday too. Guppy had studied under Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. He then taught beside them at Camberwell College of Arts. I attended Guppy’s workshop classes for two years, then moved to Maine in the US, bought a potter’s wheel and a kiln and set up a studio of my own in Blanchard Township. I began selling my work in 2001 when I helped set up a local Arts and Crafts co-operative called Lake Hebron Artisans in Monson, Maine. There I curated small exhibitions and installations often including my own work. My work has also been exhibited at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA), the Center for Maine Craft, Maine Craft Portland, Aarhus Gallery in Belfast, at the University of Maine Museum of Art (UMMA) and Susan Maasch’s Fine Arts Gallery in Portland. I sell my work nationally.

I came to Portland, Maine twenty-five years ago as a transfer student to Maine College of Art and graduated in 1999 with a BFA in ceramics. While still a student at MECA, I knew I wanted to integrate art into my community. For seventeen years I taught high school and then also middle school art and ceramics in Maine. While teaching and starting a family, I kept an interrupted studio practice. I studied at Watershed Center for Ceramics and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. In the fall of 2019 what began as a semester sabbatical from teaching to work in my ceramics studio, quickly became my new venture and career. I found in my pivot out of the classroom, a quiet space for reflection and making that had been patiently waiting its turn.

Now, just over a year into branding as SOFTSET ceramics, the work is reaching from California to Ohio to D.C., catching field trips with food stylists and photographers. As I reach new customers, I continue to find the meaning in my work comes from forming connections.

Drawing inspiration from architecture and urban landscape, as well as design traditions that air towards simplicity, I use soft slabs to construct my work in clay. My process includes printing repurposed found objects into flat clay slabs. When attaching the slabs to create upright forms, I encourage gestures that allude to my material process and the content reflected in the work. I think about the arrangement of the marks as anthropomorphic stories, connected to the body and surface of a piece. At times a piece or the process of making a piece inspires another layer of reflection through poetry.