Studio Pottery and Tile with Marbled Surfaces from Wisconsin, USA
Shop for Kathy Maves Pottery on Amazon. Click here, or chose the Shop on Amazon tab above.
Thanks for checking out my new Amazon shop in Amazon’s new Handmade category. If you have bought marbled pottery from me in the past, could you leave a positive review on a product listing? Thanks so much!
Sivertson Gallery in Grand Marais, MN now sells my marbled pottery. This long-standing gallery is one of the must-see places on North shore.
Welcome to my handmade studio pottery! My uniquely decorated earthenware pottery adapts marbling, an ancient book arts transfer technique, for the ceramic media. Every piece is designed and made by me from start to finish.
New to the website, you can now follow my recent Instagram Feed by clicking on the Instagram link in the header above. On the Instagram page you can see images of recent work and follow us on Instagram.
See new work at an art show!
November 11 and 12, 2017 Winter Art Fair Off the Square in Madison, WI.
April 19-22, 2018 American Crafts Council, St. Paul, MN.
Visit the Upcoming Events page for a more complete list.
My current body of work is functional earthenware pottery decorated with marbling. This sort of marbling is a monoprint, which means that each image is unique. It is a transfer of an image, but there are no duplicates. Marbling is an ancient book arts printing technique with a rich history of traditional patterns and an active body of interpretations in the contemporary book arts field.
For me, it is a small piece of nature; always calming, complex, and intriguing.
Its translation into ceramics makes permanent this uniquely fluid mark because it is not made with paint, but all ceramic materials. The result is immediately recognizable as marbling to a book binder. From the ceramics perspective, the materials used are typical of functional earthenware pottery; a red clay with a white slip topped by an underglaze decoration and a final layer of a clear gloss glaze.
I developed this adaptation into the ceramics media as part of my research for an MFA in ceramics. In the years following, I have refined both the pottery shapes and the technique of printing from a flat fluid surface onto a 3-D form.
After the March 2017 relocation of the studio, the pace and volume of pots coming from the studio grew exponentially. The great workhorse of my pottery life, a now-aging Skutt KM-1027, received a much needed overhaul of electrical components. Near daily firings have tested the new parts and the now-repaired electrical system that supplies it. New to the studio, I recently purchased a used electric slab roller. Work towards retrofitting of a fiber gas car kiln ended at hard frost with the completion of frost footers for the chimney and installation of gas lines.
As yet, I am not selling work directly from the studio. Bi-annual studio open houses will begin in 2018. Also, because of greater than anticipated demand for work, my online Etsy shop is currently empty. The best place to find my work is at an art show, or one of the galleries listed on the galleries page. Having completed major upgrades to the foundations, landscaping, outbuildings, and heating, electrical, and plumbing systems, I look forward to opening my workshop once again in the Spring of 2018.
After a busy month of moving, the studio is once again a fully equipped and running workspace. The best part of all: I will share my marbled earthenware pottery at art shows in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota over the next year. The upcoming events and locations page has continually updated information. I look forward to sharing this work, seeing the work of other artists, and talking to people who look at and value art in new and interesting ways.
Hi All,
If you are in the Eau Claire Area over this winter, you’ll be able to find my new work at a few different events and galleries.
This Friday, November 18th from 5pm-9:30pm, I will be at an opening at Caradori Pottery with new work, along with a number of great local artists. This gallery has been carrying my new marbled earthenware pottery and tile. http://caradori-pottery.com/
Also opening November 18th, the Janet Carson Gallery at the Eau Claire Regional Art Center will be having its annual holiday sale. I will have a number of large platters, tiles, and mugs for sale throughout the show, which runs to Dec. 23, 2016. http://www.eauclairearts.com/event.phtml/FCB0E4B7/holiday_art_fair
On Saturday, November 26th (the Saturday after Thanksgiving) 10am-4pm I will be showing a large group of new and never before exhibited work at the Artisan Forge’s Small Business Saturday event. This collaborative workspace is a new and precious gem in the art and culture scene of the area. It is worth the trip just to see the place, 1106 Mondovi Rd. Eau Claire, WI 54701. http://www.artisanforgestudios.com/
Thanks for looking at this new work in person. It is a very exciting time for me to be making this very new, very experimental work that is somehow, surprisingly, still traditional pottery and tile.
Check out my new mug style! New form, new foot, new handle. I can’t wait to start marbling on the surfaces of these new forms. I am also happily adding stilts to my kiln shed. The earthenware feels so glossy and smooth on the foot ring with a thin layer of clear glaze covering it all. The Elk Mound, Wisconsin studio is all set up and ready for a toasty winter of terra cotta, color, and fun. I’ll be sharing these new finished mugs with galleries and posting them in my Etsy shop throughout September.
Today, a few photos of clay. In grad school we ask a lot of questions, especially “why” questions. We are challenged to find ever stronger, more defensible reasons for what we do and why. There are many great reasons, many streams of worthy inquiry. Almost all of them include this; we simply love to make art: we love the material.
This week I thought about printing a lot. I had the opportunity to see a demonstration of the 3-D printer Morris library recently acquired. I spoke with the people that are working on the project. It was illuminating. On the same day, I spent time hand-setting type for my job in the Preservation Department in Morris Library.
When Guttenberg first convinced goldsmiths to take up the onerous task of making little cast, perfectly-formed letters, they did not start with just the 26 letters of the alphabet in upper and lower case and a few punctuation marks. They very closely copied the style of calligraphy, with hundreds of shapes and forms of letters. These early books were meant to look and feel like a hand-made manuscript. And they very nearly did. They achieved a level of artistry that analyzed calligraphic styles from a totally new mindset. Some thinkers believe that it took more than a century for the impact and potential of this piece of technology to be fully understood.
I think that we could easily make the case that my university, the middle class, abundance of material resources, plentiful food and clean water, and much more, all stem from this one piece of technology and its profound ability to transfer knowledge.
I have seen people comparing the invention of computers and PCs to the invention of the printing press. I believe that the impact of this piece of technology will take a century or more to understand. I remember when computers used tape decks to manage minuscule amounts of data. This week I saw a computer, using Linux-based, community-built software print out a plastic 3-D object. One of these printers has been famously used to make a home-made prosthetic for a growing boy, by his dad. Then he posted the directions on the Internet, and they are freely available.
I am a potter, besides being a parent, a grad student, and a number of other things. I believe that the handmade pot is much more than an object made to house nostalgia and Utopianism. The ideals of social justice that influential thinkers have tried to attach to craft work are noble. They just don’t attach very well.
We have a printing press in the library because it does something that no other currently, economically-available tool can do. It permanently adheres a custom durable title to bookcloth in a one-off process uniquely required for repair.
The hand-made craft object is the same. It does not need watertight dogma to justify itself. When I look at it, feel it, use it, I know that it can do things that no mass-produced object can do. It can express freedom and looseness, accident and choice, beauty and agility of mind in a very concrete way that no other type of object could.
It is not the perfect tool for every job, but there are things about this tool that cannot be replaced, ever, by anything else.
Still, I have some ideas for some tessellated geometric sculptures that I would love to make up designs for and 3-D print someday.The kite designs were fabulous. Paper clay may have been a better choice for my attempt.
My media choice, pottery, is limited, like all choices. I see its place in a new way when it is put in the context of a world with cheaply available 3-D printers. The meanings of tools and objects shift in a changing context. And I like that change. I like modern life, without which I could not have the job of my choice, drink clean water, eat as much, own property, move freely. The list goes on and on.
This is the last weekend before the spring semester starts. I spent the morning adding dates to the syllabus for the beginning clay class that I will be teaching and creating a Gmail calendar for the course. This afternoon I trimmed a little over half the pots I had thrown yesterday. I ought to have trimmed them in the morning and worked on the syllabus in the afternoon: the pots were almost too dry. I slipped everything that was trimmed with a thin layer of white slip and finished the decoration on eight out of a group of about fifteen trimmed pots. I wrapped them up carefully in plastic sheeting. It will likely be Tuesday afternoon before I can return to finish the wet work on the remaining pieces.