Pots are familiar forms, approachable and understood. They are opened, looked into, lifted and held and this is when their hidden virtues of suggestively vast interior, weight and gravity are revealed. I am intrigued by the questions that pots provoke: those of making, possibilities of use and by the endless manifest forms in which they appear throughout various cultures of the world. My work explores potential relationships between the drawing on the surface and the shape of the pot. Recent passions are how to evoke the gesture of a pot by merging the structure of a given three-dimensional form with a surface of composed drawing. The pot is the setting for the active and contemplative to work together.
Susan grew up in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Her ceramic study began at a community clay studio in Boulder, Colorado and matured through intensive summer workshops at Haystack Mountain School and Penland School. She received a BFA in painting from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in ceramics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she taught from 2008 through 2012. Since 2012, Susan has been teaching ceramics at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.