A potter and ceramics instructor living her hometown of Portland, Oregon. She currently teach all levels of wheel and hand building at a few studios in Portland.

Sara earned a BFA in ceramics from University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2018. In Fairbanks, the unique “potluck culture” that so celebrated the abundance of the Alaskan landscape and community kept her chasing ideas of generosity and service in my “Make Home” thesis pieces. Summer opportunities to teach ceramics to youths while in the BFA program nurtured an ethic of playfulness in my work. To this day, her work is still very much about sharing the harvest around and within.  

She strives to imbue her work with humor, curiosity, and observation, and hope to reach out to users through the fingerprints, scrapes, and smears that mark her process.

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Erick Martinez is a figurative sculptor fascinated by the human figure and the complexity of emotions. He began his art journey in 2019 after moving to The United States from Bogotá, Colombia. Life experiences inspire his artwork. His
sculptures seek to transmit that all emotions have a purpose, even those labeled as negative.

His sculptures have been exhibited in galleries in Oregon and Washington State. He currently lives in Portland, OR, where he is pursuing a degree in human services and addiction counseling.

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Darah was born in 1979 in the Midwest and was a maker from a very young age. am currently a studio potter living in Portland. I spent a large majority of my youth with her grandmother who taught me everything from needle point to tanning hides. I worked with clay in my teenage years and into my early twenties.

After a hiatus, I once again have been working with clay since 2012 and have been teaching since 2016. I am very unconventionally taught. I have refined my skills amongst and with the rich Minnesota and Wisconsin ceramics community. As an explorer and curious human, I glean inspiration from everyday life, to marry contemporary form and function, to create pots free of pretense, conformity or contentment. I love to enrich them with an atmospheric unpredictable firing. I strive for inviting and thoughtful pots for all to touch and enjoy.

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Mya Cluff is a studio artist living and working in Belgrade, Montana. Born and raised in Oregon, she moved to Montana in 2017 after graduating from the Oregon College of Art and Craft where she received a BFA in Craft with an emphasis in Ceramics. The birth of Mya’s firstborn daughter in the middle of her BFA was the catalyst of her investigation of the maternal through her art practice. Mya is intrigued with the psychological, political and interpersonal ramifications of motherhood, and uses her own experience as inspiration, as well as the stories of her peers, written accounts of motherhood, and maternal feminist theory to inform her work. Mya strives to give visual form to the intimacy and complexity of motherhood that is often lost through essentializing archetypes.

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I have spent my life on the coast, and all my artwork has its roots in my love of the sea. I am a mixed- race Chinese-American artist based in Forest Grove, Oregon, with history and family on Kauai and Downeast Maine. I explore these identities by centering reclaimed materials and their histories in an immersive process of transformation. I have been a professional artist since 2002, with a focus on environmental stewardship and community engagement. My work ranges from interactive installations and mixed-media sculpture to landscape painting and functional ceramics.

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Courtney Maulding is a ceramic artist who loves to combine her ceramics and photographs to create an alternative media melding. She is specifically drawn to the cyanotype, a blue print process that requires sunlight or UV rays. Courtney discovered this process as an undergrad and received a BFA in art and design at University of Houston - Clearlake in 2021. Courtney has exhibited at the UHCL art gallery in 2023 and at the Glassell Museum of Fine arts this year. She is currently a clay educator at HTX Clay, a ceramic instructor at the Glassell Junior School, and a studio assistant in ceramics at University of Houston - Clearlake.

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Fiona Shaughnessy is a ceramicist and oil painter from rural California. She uses her identity to explore themes of anthropocentrism, nostalgia, femininity, and mortality. Having attended live figure drawing sessions since she was twelve, the figure is prominent in her sculptures as a vessel of empathy to the viewer. Since her father’s passing in 2024, she has been making a body of work focused on the vulnerability of the human body to disease and the human tendency to think of ourselves as infinite. Ceramic, like the body, is fragile yet resilient, but Shaughnessy rejects fragility through her sculpture’s  assertive size and confidence, balanced with the  simultaneous sensitivity reflected by their poses. Her work grounds the body in pain, and uplifts the body in health. 

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Judith Yeo is a functional ceramic artist exploring ideas of how love can be imbued in the creation process through effort, time, and care. She hopes that love may carry on through pieces held and being part of everyday life. For that reason, she makes objects that might touch someone’s lips and hands as well as be part of their gatherings and at other times, be companions in moments of solitude. She is drawn to the hands-on nature of the craft and the physicality of finished work - a concept that was foreign to her after years in her prior career in software engineering.

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Jennifer Joy is an artist, educator and mother living in the PNW.  Though her primary creative material is clay, Jennifer enjoys working with various materials and processes and experimenting ways to incorporate them into her ceramics practice.  She is particularly fond of printmaking techniques, her use of stencils and layering is born out of that interest as well her tendency towards the tedious in her creative practice.  Jennifer is inspired by childhood memories of playing outside and gardening alongside her mother, and how those memories are re-lived and re-imagined in her own experience as a mother. Jennifer tends toward the light hearted and airy in both imagery and color.  She finds our human tendency to create and cultivate a fascinating subject matter. A tangible way we ground ourselves to the earth, to one another, and seek out joy in a world that does not always give generously of such things.

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