The image lives in my memory, from a poster on an art room wall or in a studio at my community college in Bellevue, Washington. There I studied with my early mentor, Ray Jensen, Pacific Northwest steel and bronze sculptor. The image on the poster was of a white stoneware bottle, simple, minimal—deeply carved by the potter into upright ridges and furrows circling the body. I must have gazed on that image repeatedly, for it has bubbled up now from my subconscious as being an influence for both my pottery and sculpture.

     

When I moved to Boston to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, I left behind a love for clay vessels and 7 years practice on the potters wheel. I took classes in life drawing and sculpting, welding, photography and art history, only once visiting the ceramics studio.

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For 20 years I pursued nature-under-the-microscope and figure inspired forms in my Rugg Road studio in Allston MA. A main thread in my studies developed into using thin, square rods of mild steel, welded to build forms the way one builds marks on paper; to define volume, to draw linear forms in space, to create an image.

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My art-making was interrupted in 2006. On Dec. 29th, at three in the morning I woke to shouts, feet pounding in the halls and flashing lights. A fire had broken out on an upper floor. With a cat under each arm I exited the building. In one night we all lost our homes and studios and gained a more personal sense of the individual losses and disruption brought in disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the year before.

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The following were years of disruption. In an effort to get back on track, all the while moving around for work, I lay the ground for a new venture. I resettled in Boston in 2010. “Grad School” was a start up vegan-with-organic cookie business. Perhaps doomed to failure, as my main interest was educating about the positive environmental impact of organic agriculture and vegan/vegetarian diets, I closed the business as 2014 opened.

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I took a pottery course as an antidote. It was something I knew how to do.

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As soon as I got my hands in the clay, I felt I had come home. As my first mugs came out of the kiln, I realized I was a potter. There is something so gratifying about making vessels for eating and drinking, for showing off some garden flowers or for any other reason. Soon after, Fire Garden Pottery was born.

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~Andrea Brown, potter