#Lets create pottery email 31 full

I did over 600 or 700 pieces when I finished the hike. That’s the same as awe –the trail does that. So not having too many choices is nice, working the body hard, in a natural sense. Everything has to be done now or yesterday. “I don’t think we live the lives we’re supposed to as humans. When I need quiet in the head I go out in the woods, I have to.” She says hiking for her, especially long-distance backpacking, really is the best medicine. Then she looks up at me with her bright blue eyes and says, “quiet. Here, she pauses, still working with the clay. I get awe from nature, hiking, a weekend on the shore.” Here’s what she tells me when I ask about it: When I read this I knew I needed to hear more about this idea of awe. She blogs about her creative process on her web site, and writes, “For me the best results come with routine, practice and facts, some excitement, and a large quantity of awe.” I’ve always liked repetition, thus the hiking.”Īmy not only hiked the entire Pacific Crest Trail last year, which is where I met her, but has also completed a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. “I just like touching the clay, the wetness of it, the feel of it on the wheel, the silence in my head, and repetition.

But she adds that creating pottery is “more for meditation than anything for me.” “I’m definitely inspired by my love for being outside, and it mimics my painting and drawing,” she says. Creativity informed by Nature, Fueled by AweĪmy credits her art teachers in college with helping her think through the whys of her work, which she considers functional with artistic tendencies, inspired by the organic, and nature. Before that, she spent six years as a high school teacher, and while studying field biology, spend four summers banding birds on the Virginia coast. She amassed a large customer-base and following, enough so that her pottery eventually became her primary means of income, supplemented with the occasional bartending gig. She bought a real wheel in college, and eventually bought her own kiln.Īmy says she really started producing in 2000, and began selling her work in 2006, mainly to local markets in Virginia, where she is from. She got a tiny pottery wheel from the Sears catalogue for Christmas that year, and she’s maintained her interest ever since. Her mother took Amy to his pottery studio for her eighth birthday and that cemented it. “He had this real odd pencil holder and I asked him about it. He was also the first male teacher she’d ever had. But my art teacher, Clay Walthall, was super exotic,” she says, describing him as tall, dark, and dressed in white painters clothing. She remembers the first piece of pottery she’d ever seen. She studied art in college, printmaking, since her school didn’t have pottery, but pieced together as many pottery classes as she could from a local community college.Īmy became interested in pottery long before that. She approaches her craft with an artist’s perspective though, working in series. The design might be influenced by nature, but the functionality is always first for me,” she says. “I like to make things that are very functional, maybe unusual. The pizza stone is a new piece she’s been working on.

She showed me the raspberries on the sides of her palms, and explained that this was a new clay for her that contained a large amount of grog, or gravel, which has the effect of a rug burn when she works with it a lot. My baking pans brown things really well,” Amy says, as she uses a tool to scrape away at the rough edges of the gray pizza stone while it spins slowly on her wheel. “I usually end up making things I want, like a colander, or baking pan.

#Lets create pottery email 31 full

Clay remnants coiled in a re-purposed tofu container, a jar full of shaping tools, and a cup of muddy water sit between us, all covered in a thin layer of dried clay. The wheel she sits at now has a lower horse power and is better for dry work, like trimming the pizza stone. I sit down in front of her at the other wheel she uses for wet clay throwing. She’d been working on rounding out a pizza stone before I arrived and continued to sculpt it as we talked, sitting at her wheel in a black skirt and leggings covered in pale pink streaks of dried clay. I had a conversation with potter, Amy Hepner in her garage-based pottery studio on a recent rainy Saturday in Eugene. Click subscribe in the Menu to read more. The Passion Profiles are explorations of passionate people and the work they love.