About Melissa
Melissa finds frequent inspiration in the landscape and sounds of an ever-changing Austin and as a mom of two. She focuses particularly on decorated porcelain objects for everyday use in the home. From a renovated antique shed at the rear of her property in East Austin and work at East Side Pot Shop, Melissa seeks to use clay to capture the fleeting everyday moments of family and nature that surround her.
Creating functional pottery is Melissa’s dream deferred. As kid growing up in Eugene, Oregon, she dreamed one day she would “grow up to be a potter who lives in the woods.” Thirty years later, after a career in teaching and talent development, Melissa has once again returned to this creative aspiration.
Artist Statement
I am enamored of the way ceramics forces me to operate in the present moment and with regard to the future simultaneously. The messages I add to my pottery come from my constant efforts to embrace this.
Each of the phases of the clay--wet to leather hard, bone dry, bisqued, and glaze fired— requires a careful treatment matched to its state. Opportunities and disappointments are plentiful at each stage. I love that pottery demands of me an ever-vigilant effort to meet these moments with present-mindedness. And at the end, the final product is an object of such permanence that our earliest remnants of human civilizations are pieces of the pottery our human ancestors used in their kitchens.
This process runs in parallel to my experience as a mom. The small moments that make up each day with my young children are temporary and transitional, just as the phases of clay. I love to use the medium of ceramics to transfer the brief and seemingly forgettable moments of motherhood and life into tangible, useable everyday items.