Bohn Buechner Whitaker

Pottery

I come from a family that loves stories and grew up surrounded by raucous tales told over the dinner table, some impressive, some zany, some stretching the bounds of believability. Stories are wonderful things. It is through narrative that the complexity of life is distilled into bite-sized morsels, allowing others to share and delight in the experience of one.

My Clay Story begins when, as a child, I took my first ceramic class at the Brooklyn Museum. Soon, I was saving babysitting money for a kick wheel and had set up a primitive studio in the basement. Moving to Boston to attend college, I found that cooperatives were abundant and joined Mudflat Studios. Gradually, I moved into becoming a full-time potter, making functional items based on animal themes, fairy tales, and stories of my own. I joined a smaller group, Feet of Clay Cooperative in Brookline, Massachusetts. Next came marriage and then children, a redirecting of my work into teaching which gradually led me to return to college for a degree in art education and then to becoming a middle school art teacher in Newton, Massachusetts. In June 2018 I retired from teaching and have been able to spend more time working in clay.

Over the years, I have had many different themes to my work.  Right now, I am making functional beasts, inspired by imaginary and real animals. I call this series: Let’s Put Animals to Work, the premise being that if we want to keep animals from going extinct, we have to make them part of the economy. I hope people will find these creatures both useful and entertaining to look at.