Building a Home from Clay
Freedom, it turns out, comes with its own complications. While my youngest son and I had successfully escaped to Oregon, the practical realities of starting over meant that when the university kept extending my remote-work agreement and asking me to stay on, I found myself in the strange position of having my body in one state and my professional obligations in another. My heart wasn't in the work anymore—how could it be, when every Zoom meeting was a reminder of the life I was trying to leave behind?—but a steady paycheck while rebuilding everything from scratch was undeniably alluring.
Oregon had given us emotional freedom, but it had also made starkly clear how much we had lost in the process of gaining our independence. Divorce, especially the kind that drags on for years while one party refuses to contribute to basic expenses, has a way of stripping away not just relationships but possessions. We arrived in Bend with our clothes, some books, a few treasured art pieces, and an almost comical shortage of basic household items.
This practical need sparked another evolution in my ceramic work. Where previous phases had been driven by emotional processing or artistic exploration, this new direction was refreshingly straightforward: I needed to make the dishes, bowls, mugs, and serving pieces that would transform our new house into an actual home. After years of creating art that spoke to my inner world, I was making pottery that would hold our daily life.
There's something profoundly grounding about eating from a bowl you made with your own hands, about drinking morning coffee from a mug that carries the subtle marks of your fingers. Each functional piece I created became a small act of reclamation—proof that we could build a beautiful life from the ground up, that we didn't need anyone else's permission or contribution to surround ourselves with objects that brought joy to everyday moments.
The work was different from anything I had done before. Where my earlier pieces had been about processing trauma or manifesting dreams, these housewares were about celebrating the ordinary miracle of daily life. A simple dinner plate became a canvas for subtle glazing that would make even the most basic meal feel special. A set of bowls nested together like a family, each one slightly different but clearly belonging to the same loving household.
Without a permanent studio space in Bend, I found myself enrolled in ceramics classes at the nearby community college. It was a humbling return to student status after years of independent practice, but it was also exactly what I needed. The community college studio was what I generously called "active"—a space where beginning students learned through experimentation, where accidents were frequent, and where survival of ceramic pieces required both luck and constant vigilance.
The environment was chaotic in the best possible way. Students worked on wildly different projects with varying levels of skill and commitment. Greenware lived dangerously close to elbows and backpacks. Kiln loads were unpredictable adventures where you never knew if your carefully crafted pieces would emerge transformed or transformed into expensive lessons about clay chemistry and thermal shock.
Not many pieces survived that active studio environment, and honestly, that was probably for the best. The community college studio served as a kind of natural selection process for my work—only the pieces that were truly strong, truly necessary, truly meant to be part of our Oregon life made it through the gauntlet of communal clay space chaos.
The casualties weren't tragedies but learning experiences. A mug that didn't survive a crowded bisque firing taught me about wall thickness and thermal stress. A platter that emerged cracked from the glaze kiln reminded me that sometimes trying to rush the drying process leads to predictable heartbreak. Each loss was a small tuition payment in the ongoing education of rebuilding my practice in a new place.
The pieces that did survive felt especially precious—battle-tested housewares that had proven their worthiness through trial by community college kiln. These became the foundation pieces of our Oregon kitchen, the plates and bowls and cups that would witness countless family meals in our new life.
The unexpected gift of the community college studio wasn't just access to kilns and wheels, but the friendships that formed around shared struggles with stubborn clay and unpredictable firing schedules. There's something about working with your hands alongside others that cuts through typical social barriers. Age, profession, background—none of that mattered when we were all equally mystified by why one person's glaze turned out perfectly while an identical piece emerged looking like a science experiment gone wrong.
These friendships, forged in clay dust and kiln anxiety, have endured long past those early Oregon days. The bonds formed while helping each other salvage pieces from kiln disasters, sharing tools and glazes and hard-won technical knowledge, celebrating unexpected successes and commiserating over inexplicable failures—these connections proved more durable than many of the pots we made together.
All this hands-on creation was happening against the backdrop of virtual meetings and digital deadlines that felt increasingly surreal. I would spend mornings in Zoom calls discussing university policies and academic strategies, then drive to the community college to wedge clay and throw bowls. The contrast between my physical presence in Oregon and my professional obligations in California created a kind of productive cognitive dissonance—my body was learning to make a home while my brain was still tethered to institutional responsibilities I had outgrown.
The steady paycheck allowed me to take risks with the ceramic work, to experiment with functional forms without the pressure of immediate commercial success. In a strange way, the financial security of remote employment gave me the freedom to rediscover the pure joy of making objects that would improve daily life rather than impress gallery visitors.
Each functional piece I completed felt like another brick in the foundation of our new life. A set of pasta bowls meant we could invite friends over for dinner. A collection of mugs suggested we might stay long enough to develop preferences and habits. A large serving platter implied faith in future celebrations, in occasions worth marking with handmade beauty.
The housewares phase of my work wasn't just about replacing what we had lost—it was about consciously choosing what kind of domestic life we wanted to create. Every plate, every bowl, every cup was an opportunity to embed our values into our daily routine, to surround ourselves with objects that reflected our commitment to authenticity, creativity, and the belief that even the most ordinary moments deserved to be held by something beautiful.
The community college studio, chaotic and unpredictable as it was, became the launching pad for this new phase of intentional homemaking. The friends I made there understood that sometimes the most important art you can create is the kind that holds soup and coffee and the quiet satisfaction of building a life worth living, one piece at a time.
