New Studio, New Beginnings

Hi friend — I have news.

After eleven years of making pottery in a spare-room closet, Muddy Heart has a real studio. It is finished, and I have officially moved in.

I want to give you a sense of what that means. Not a metaphorical closet. An actual one. I worked there for three years, carrying heavy boxes of clay up to the second floor of our house every single day.

Meli seated on the wooden staircase, one hand resting on a large handmade ceramic vessel standing on the step beside her. — the stairs again — eleven years of carrying clay up them, and one of the vessels they made possible.

And now there's room. Room to stretch out, to organize my materials properly, to have more shelf space than I know what to do with. I keep walking in and not quite believing it.

If you have ever wondered why a handmade ceramics studio needs so much space for so few objects, this is the honest answer: pots spend most of their lives waiting. A piece has to dry slowly and evenly or it will crack, and a closet floor is close to the worst place on earth for that — one warm draught from a doorway and a rim goes oval overnight. Between shaping, trimming, drying, bisque firing and glazing, a single mug needs somewhere undisturbed to sit for weeks. What I was actually short of all those years was not talent or time. It was surface.

Four handmade white ceramic bowls in graduating sizes lined up in a row on white linen. — four bowls, four sizes — the kind of lineup there was never room to leave out before.

Rows of hand-formed clay ring handles drying on a wooden board beside a carving tool on the studio worktable. — and room to leave work out mid-process, instead of clearing a closet floor every night.

Which is the one thing I would pass on to anyone making anything at home, in any medium: the change that matters is rarely more square footage. It is having somewhere you are allowed to leave a thing unfinished. A table you don't have to clear. A shelf that stays a shelf. Almost every project I abandoned in those closet years, I abandoned at the tidying-up stage — and I did not understand that until I stopped having to tidy up.

None of it would exist without my husband, who has labored so hard to make this real — for me, and for Muddy Heart.

This is what slow-made actually looks like from the inside. Not a launch. Eleven years, and a closet, and a lot of stairs.

Two hands cradling a rough wild-clay handmade ceramic jar holding a single dried seed head, against a white brick wall. — wild clay, fired and finally in the hand — the part of the work that never gets old.

Beeswax taper candles in handmade ceramic candlesticks beside a textured ceramic vase of dried branches on a white open shelf. — the shapes eleven years turn into — all from one small studio in Cary.

A kiln firing runs most of a day and then takes about as long again to cool, and you cannot rush the opening — lift the lid too early and the sudden cold air will crack a glaze straight down the side of a pot. So there is a morning, every week or so, that is just waiting. In the closet years I resented that morning. In the new studio I have started to like it. The work is already done; there is nothing to do but let it finish itself.

Thank you for being part of it.

If you'd like to see the day-to-day — the works in progress, the kiln openings, the mess — come find me on Instagram @muddyheart.

A few things mentioned: the latest designs, made in the new studio.

Xox,
Meli

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