Category Archives: Encounters

17 Apr 12

NCECA 2012: report from the gadget room

Earlier this month I spent three days at the annual NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) conference in Seattle, where I volunteered at the Potters for Peace table. We were set up in the Exhibitors’ Hall, which means I was surrounded by displays of equipment, tools, stamps, moulds, brushes, glazes, underglazes, books, [...]
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7 Jan 12

Elizabeth Harris Nichols: from anteater to salmon eater

The sculpture on the left is the first thing I saw at the studio yesterday and I kidded Elizabeth, its maker, about sculpting anteaters now (anteaters are funny, right?). Over the course of the afternoon, Elizabeth turned the anteater into a bear eating a salmon and, at the same time, she threw a series of [...]
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16 Mar 11

Slabs, textures, buttons: I saw it on my TV!

My daughter-in-law loves the bluish mug on the right and I know this because she wrote me a note saying that if she had made a mug like this she would write a blog post about it, so that’s what I’m doing. This is a new design for me (I usually throw my mugs) and [...]
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20 Nov 10

Found pot

Yesterday a fellow potter Elizabeth Harris Nichols found this small bowl (shown here beside a wine bottle cork) on the beach at Cates Park and brought it into our communal studio. The bowl was cold and damp and, when Elizabeth found it, was full of worms and beach debris. The red-brown clay it was made [...]
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