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My Ceramics

In the studio I like to do	Throwing on the Wheel
Pottery Wheel	Speedball Clay Boss Potter’s Wheel
Clay body	Stoneware
Clay Brand	Continental and Minnesota Clay Company
Kiln Type	Electric Kiln
Kiln Atmosphere	Oxidation Atmosphere
Temperature	Cone 6
Glaze	Amaco’s Potter’s Choice and Celedon Mayco Minnesota Clay Company dipping glazes
You can buy my work from	My website! I have things at local coffee shops and such. You can also find my pieces for sale on my Instagram and Facebook – purchasing there still directs the sale through my website 🙂

About Me

Introduction	My name is Read, I am from Rochester, Minnesota, and I am mainly a wheel thrower. I currently make more functional pieces and often find myself not leaving the natural – my pieces are clean smooth shapes and, when altered, don’t stray too far from still appearing to be ceramic. Similarly my glazes are more earthy colors. I love to make large bowls – serving dish/fruit bowl size. I also love making tree mugs – wood bark textured mugs that are perfect for the cabin! I never got a degree in ceramics and so I am interested in exploring the art and continuously learning as I go!
What I Love about Ceramics	What I love about ceramics is the challenge, the peace, and the acceptance that it teaches. I am not a type A person but I do find myself working hard to do something right. In pottery it is the same. I work hard to keep my pieces centered. To have the foot equally as centered. When I want something symmetrical, I work to make it perfect. These challenges push me and make me grow with every single pot. And yet, in this focus, I find such calm. It is so freeing and creative. The options are endless, you just have to be okay with them. And that leads to the acceptance, the “let it go” that ceramics teaches. From the wobbles you can’t avoid to the glazes you can never 100% rely on, every step of ceramics asks you to accept the unreliability of the process, and that is a learning mountain, but once you can get even just a grasp on that, the process becomes more freeing, and taught me a lot.
How I started with ceramics	Here is a link to a blog post I wrote explaining my story and how I got to where I am today!
What inspires me	I have a hard time using emotion and such to inspire my art. I think the closest thing I hold for inspiration is nature. My tree mugs really are my favorite. They’re my crowning achievement so far and the piece I pull out to show people when they ask to see something I’ve made. Those are truly achieving my chase to create a tree by hand, something I’d attempted in sketches many many times starting in middle school. And I think these mugs achieve that texture of bark to the degree that I breath a sigh of pride. Outside of those, I am not often working with an inspiration beyond what I am interested in attempting whether that interest comes from something I saw another potter make or something I thought of and want to attempt to create what I’ve imagined.
What I'm working on at the moment	Pottery-wise, working on building inventory and having pieces that reflect my pottery of today (some of my inventory is from high school and they are good, I wouldn’t be selling them if they weren’t, but they don’t match my style I have today). More broadly, I am currently building my business and laying the foundation for the future. I graduated college, then completed my first year of teaching, and now I am in life, so my goal of doing pottery as a side gig is now fully an option. Therefore I spent the summer building a website, registering with the state, making business cards, building inventory, and getting my name out a little more. With all of that, I just want to have something that can slowly grow into whatever I want whenever I’m ready.