shankin pottery

2019- 2021: Charlotte MidDleton

Arrived November for a 2 year apprenticeship.

While growing up in an old farmhouse in rural Maine, I came to believe in the process of creating preciousness from materials surrounding me. I am currently exploring clay as the substance that both contains and reveals our human history. The elemental qualities of the clay allow me to connect to my past while creating functional pottery for the celebratory, banal, or triumphant hours that design our days.

My intention while making is to pay homage to the symbols and visual iconography from my existence as a girl becoming a woman. Water lilies, labyrinths, and wilting roses are the visual cues I employ to invite both user and viewer to consider resilience, vitality, and loss. As I grapple with the metamorphosis from girlhood to womanhood forms shift from delicate and shy to rooted and buoyant. 

In my work the tension between soft and strong, touch and trust, and the user and the maker are the complex dualities that embody both form and femininity. Serving, sharing, and gathering are the rituals I consider as the forms reveal themselves.

Visit Charlotte’s Web Site: charlottelmiddleton.com

2015-2017: AYLA MULLEN

A native of Washington State and a graduate of Marlboro College, I have been farmer, political theorist, aspiring writer, and bird research technician before coming to clay. This apprenticeship has been a wonderful adventure, leading me across the country to a new community, a new ecosystem, and an amazing opportunity to explore my relationship to pottery. These two yeas have involved thinking deeply about both the how and the why of my studio practice, and I couldn't ask for a more supportive and inspiring environment in which to do that. 

I see pots as vessels for storytelling; they can invoke thoughts, memories, and emotions which enliven a moment or an entire day. Clay is my canvas and my vocabulary. In the studio, I explore narrating the plants and landscapes around me as I perceive them, embodied in line and form and image. What stories do I tell with intention and exactness, and what comes through by accident? What is the formal vocabulary of emotion, and how can I convey the poetry of the natural world within the limits of a vessel?  My hope is that these stories, carved in clay, will expand and individualize, taking on a life of their own like the best folktales, through the accrued layers of meaning which use and touch bring to everything familiar.