Join the Berkshire Art Center as we celebrate Paula Shalan’s students from the Berkshires and beyond in their ceramic making! The pieces shown are a culmination of online and in-person experiences over the past two years and more. The focus of the work began over zoom during the time of social isolation from COVID. The students have developed their own artistic visions through writing artist statements and bios and learning about product photography, social media promotion, and pricing. Come to their Opening Reception on Saturday, July 9, 4-6pm in our Stairwell Gallery. Light refreshments will be served.

About Paula Shalan

With acute attention to detail and in careful conversation with the clay, I hand craft smoke-fired vessels and seedpods as an antidote for our fast-paced technological lives. My aim is to distill my sensory experience and highlight the astounding beauty and quiet wisdom of our forests. I hope my work brings others a sense of calm and a bit of wonder.

My work has received awards of distinction from The Smithsonian Craft Show and The Society of Arts and Crafts and has been featured in national and international craft and home magazines, including Ceramic Monthly.

Participating Students

Emily Vorspan

I began working with clay some ten years ago and still feel compelled to build forms that grow upward.

Holding imagery of tree trunks and human figures in mind while I work, I enjoy the slow process of coiling.

I inlay clay into the forms to bring color, texture and patterns to the surface.

These pieces were fired to cone 10/11 in gas reduction.

Ruth Ehrenkrantz

I make my own brass ribs to explore different curvature profiles. My forms are weighted at the bottom, middle, or top; each piece finding a way to hold its center. In the past year I have found and become obsessed with the ageless black and white patterning of naked raku. I find the effect graphic and arrestingly beautiful: inky fractured drama embedded in the clay. This atmospheric firing is a collaborative dance with chance; I can control many aspects of the firing process, but never know what the end result will be. Each piece is one of a kind.

The urns are finished with stacked beach pebbles. I have admired stacked rocks in nature. Fortuitously found when one is unsure of the way to go, stacked rocks mark a path in an unfamiliar landscape.

Kelly Kaiser

I can’t remember a time in my life without music. When I first learned to play violin it was the closest thing to magic I had ever experienced.

Unlike my musical training that was purely classical, my desire to improvise, which I could never achieve with music, can now be realized through clay.

Clay, to me, is like a pile of notes waiting to be arranged. There are limitless possibilities just like genres in music.The difference is, music is ephemeral whereas ceramics are tangible and lasting.

I use clay to make art to fill in the words I cannot easily say and to open up a path to somewhere I cannot yet see.

This silent process of improvisation is allowing me to “unforget” the magic and wonder of my childhood.

Judy Felsten

The pacing and serendipity of handbuilding suit me. Learning to gently stretch and constrict slab forms into more organic shapes has led me in new directions. Working on the kitchen table during the pandemic kept work-in-progress in sight, which has improved my timing and thus my understanding of clay.

The subtle individuality of naturally repeating forms fascinates me. My work tries to represent this coexisting uniqueness and belonging, first through form and then through surface design. The gestural drawing that created the motif on the wide pot is fun to do and produces a different pattern every time.

Kerry Hamilton

I am attracted to clay for the sheer joy of sinking my hands into it. The act of building creates a sense of peace for me that is akin to walking in the woods, listening to great music, sharing deeply with a friend. Working with clay is an act that lifts my spirits.

I am drawn to create simple, functional pieces that create a sense of grounded-ness -- of presence and stability -- and, paradoxically, a flow, and a leaning forward -- an expectancy and an excitement for what is about to happen.

Hand building with clay is a practice in patience. As clay artists we control only so much, and then we gift our pieces over to the fire and wait for what emerges. As the kiln adds its own expression to the piece, the outcome is often surprising, occasionally miraculous, sometimes disappointing, and always a learning experience.

For me, it is a lesson in how to live life, with both intention and expectation, grounded in the practice of being in the present and also leaning in just a bit to see what is beginning to unfold now, and then now.

Brin Quell

These rough and tumble vessels which I often refer to as my “beings” derive in part from visions I had while doing massage therapy sessions with clients over

several decades and then long-distance healing at the height of the pandemic. They are not literal interpretations of what I saw in my mind, but rather a way to suggest the

presence in our lives of forces beyond ourselves. Helpers of all kinds. The smoke-firing process gives the pieces that rugged, old and unadorned quality that we

sometimes attribute to primitive art. So, are they guides? Friends? You decide. They have eyes on us, that’s all I know for sure.

Ingrid Raab

My ceramic education began with traditional pottery run by fifth-generation potters in the German village Marjoss near my hometown Schlüchtern. There I explored wheel throwing and wood firing, and developed a deeper understanding of traditional functional forms. I went on to establish my own studio in West Berlin followed by many years of clay work in Eugene and Boston.

I now focus on hand-building techniques as they allow me to experiment with new and challenging shapes. As a psychologist, I explore internal emotional balance and the awareness of thoughts and feelings with my patients. As a ceramicist, I explore balance, containment, and new perspectives. My shapes are reminiscent of familiar, often ancient functional forms. I interpret these shapes by interchanging contemporary textures, shapes, and materials with traditional ones, hoping to connect feelings and thoughts in new ways

Nina Ryan

Where wind, tide and waves shape an island in the sea I make coils of clay, thumbprint upon thumbprint, scraping, pounding, patterning out form from forces within me.

Beneath a rim of shards, an imperial  presence, shocking, emerges.   A footed globe made for emperor, empress, to be a guardian of my power.  

Michael Riordan

I want my work to look natural. Nature always surprises with it irregularities, imperfections and variations.

Nadine Atalla

During Covid, I took hand-building classes online. After many years of throwing functional pots on the wheel, I ventured into this unknown sculptural side of making. This opened another unexpected gift for me, the ability to create from a totally blank canvas, a way to incorporate more emotion and feeling into the ceramic process. I wasn’t making a mug or a plate, there was no skeletal structure. Pinching and coiling were new to me. I dove in and found how enjoyable and fun it was, as well as how difficult it was to create a pleasing piece.

Carol Riordan

“ My subject matter is shape.

I see it in black and white.

And smokey grey. ”

Nancy Disabato

“It is a beauty of things unconventional”

Principal - Wabi-Sabi

My journey into studio art began more than 40 years ago at Ohio Wesleyan University, with concentrations in textiles, collage, and printmaking. But I have always been drawn to working in volume with my hands and to the feel of clay. I began pursuing that passion four years ago after relocating to downtown Chicago.

The pieces that I have selected for this show have all been assembled from terra cotta. I have chosen this clay for its primitive look and feel. I often begin with slabs and templates draped over molds, with the appendages formed using hand drawn templates and tubes. With the various components in front of me, the fun begins. I ask myself, “Should this piece be balanced?” “Do I want it to be symmetrical or asymmetrical?” “Is my goal to convey power or playfulness?”

Once the piece is assembled, I set it aside for a day or two, then I return and reevaluate the work and add all the finishing touches. Serendipity always lurks around the corner; for example, the small pieces you see at the top of the terra cotta were “leftovers” sitting on my worktable. I loved the shapes and decided to add playfulness to an otherwise imposing structure. Often the finished sculpture informs the final surface treatment. Sometimes the terra cotta surface stands on its own, with a simple gloss, other times slips and sgraffito are added at the leather hard stage to be finished with a rubbing of underglaze. It is the beauty of the unconventional that inspires me.