The Clay Studio : Shop

Working in clay, I am drawn to making pieces that are quietly unexpected, that catch the eye because they contain a contrast or a visual contradiction. I am interested in the place where a tightly thrown, symmetrical, refined shape, meets a more fluid, even chaotic form of decoration. This interest arises in part from a love for the process of making wheel-thrown ceramics. A pottery wheel is a machine, meant to help the potter make perfectly symmetrical forms. But it’s not a factory machine meant for mass production; there are human hands behind every wheel-thrown piece, and we humans are individual, imperfect, and contradictory. When I decorate a precisely-thrown bowl by impulsively running my fingers through a frosting of thick slip, I’m giving a machine-made object a bit of human life. I see an interesting contrast between the malleable quality of the wet clay, and the hard, static solidity of the finished piece. Carving, bending, or dripping the wet clay ensures that the user of the final fired object cannot ignore the material from which it was made. When the finished pot refers back to the soft clay from which it grew, it has the appearance of being two things simultaneously: soft and hard, kinetic and static. I make functional pottery because it is simultaneously needed and wanted, both utilitarian and artistic. When I use porcelain for this process, I am setting the clay free from a long history of being told what it should be or what it should represent. While the porcelain clay body is itself smooth, bright, fine, and pure, its dramatic altering and decoration contradicts the clay’s refinement. My porcelain objects say no to the common expectation that porcelain ware be delicate, perfect, polite, and refined. They find themselves through breaking the rules of their family history.

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Shari Jacobs

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Shari Jacobs

Did you Know?

Can We Help?

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