I was never interested in creating art when growing up in New Jersey. That all changed after college when I took an adult education class and discovered wheel throwing. I continued creating pots when I moved to England and several years later after a move to Boston for graduate school. Then I took a 30-year break from pottery to raise my son and run a media production business. Several years ago I took a class with Susan Brum at Potters Place and remembered what I loved about this medium. I haven’t looked back.

My career focused on medical communications, so I spent my professional life trying to make complicated things easy to understand. Pottery is strangely similar in that you create something beautiful from nothing - in this case a lump of clay.

For me, working with clay also brings out the inner child (playing in the mud) and combines it with adult consciousness of beautiful shapes and functional forms.

I love wheel throwing. In particular, I love the symmetry of the forms created on the wheel. I like to use wheel techniques to produce functional art – sometimes altering shapes to fit the function.

I particularly enjoy conquering a new skill and making a beautiful functional piece. Recently I’ve been focusing on two new areas for me – throwing with colored clay and throwing tall – both of which present interesting challenges.

Finding success with these techniques has been both challenging and rewarding.

Practice makes perfect (at least it gets you closer to perfect).

It’s especially difficult for me to make matching pieces on the wheel. I recently made a set of dinner dishes for my son and creating the set of cereal/soup bowls that look alike was a real challenge. I overcame this through repetition of the same shapes over several sessions on the wheel. By the end of the project the bowls were as close to matching as anything I’ve ever created!

Beautiful. Functional. Art.

… I’m a scuba diver. Like pottery, scuba diving requires completely losing yourself in the activity. And there’s nothing more beautiful than the underwater world.

My piggy and elephant banks make me happy because I generally create them for children that I know. They combine my love of wheel-throwing for the body and force me to go a bit outside my comfort zone as I alter the forms to turn them into functional banks.