The bowl that started it all. In the summer of 2024, my friend kindly invited Parker and me to spend time with her and her sister at their beach house. It is the site of many of their family get togethers, something I learned when I found the large collection of serving bowls in the kitchen while we were cooking dinner. I love entertaining, nothing makes me happier than feeding a house full of people so I vowed to make them a large serving bowl as a thank you gift. I wanted it to be deeply and richly marbled on the inside to resemble the ocean and simple on the outside, so the colors would reveal themselves as their guests served themselves from the bowl. It took over a year of experimentation to figure out how to achieve the marbling effect I had in my head. While I was working on this, I developed two other colorways, Autumn and Beach Glass.
A bauble started it all. Before I learned to make pottery, I was at the Sheep & Wool Festival with a potter friend and saw a round bauble with distinct black marks on it. I held it up and asked her, “how did they do this?” and she told me it was horsehair raku. I knew immediately that if I learned to do ceramics, I wanted to do horsehair raku. When I moved upstate, I asked Ben at Baileys about raku kilns and he turned me onto Linda Oesterritter’s book Mastering Kilns & Firing. A metal trash can later, I had a kiln and the freedom to fire in my backyard.