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Dust covers everything in the University of Vermont's clay studio — the floors, the stools, even the electrical wires that snake down from the ceiling to power the potter's wheels. But the layer of dust doesn't appear to bother the students who've pulled the low stools into a circle to listen to Stephen Carter as he lectures them about one of his favorite forms: the flanged plate.

Before Carter starts his practical demonstration, he needs to make sure the 14 students know the basics.

"What's the flange for?" Carter asks. "Support?" a student calls out. "Nope, it's a vestige," Carter responds, and his love of history coming through as he settles into the subject. "It used to be where you put the spoon and knife when you took it to the lord of your castle," he says. Almost as an aside, he adds, "If someone has been away from throwing for a while, he always comes back to one form. For me, it's flanged plates."

And then, white sneaker on the pedal, Carter revs the pottery wheel. Like magic, the clay shifts under his hands, moving through several forms until the plate appears. As his last piece of advice, he cautions them on wheel speed when they separate the plate from the wheel. "I have literally had plates fly right off," he says.

Coming back to form is at the heart of Carter's work as a ceramic artist. But rather than thrown work, Carter's work focuses on hand-built forms created by constructing 30 to 40 discrete pieces.

Leaving the students in the studio to try their hands at plates, Carter steps into his office. Racks of pottery stand against one wall, filled with both his pieces and his students', while a colleague's large pots fill one corner. He places three of his recent works — a teapot, an urn and a platter — aside a large decorative piece resting on a table covered with white paper, where he'll later photograph his finished pieces. The works glows with the reddish hue of terra cotta, with patterns, rich colors and golden and silver forms playing across their surfaces.

It's no coincidence that his work is reminiscent of the pattern juxtaposition used in quilts, where texture and form can create dizzying and elating combinations. Growing up, Carter often watched his female relatives quilting and appreciated the tradition of piecing together patterns to make a whole. He estimates that he has about 50 quilts from his mother, aunts and other relatives. "We got married, we got a quilt," he says.

His pots dance with symbols of life — impressions in the clay that resemble DNA strands, for instance. But "pot" is a broad term that ceramicists use for any creation. "I see my work as sculptural," Carter says. A good pot, he says, marries form and surface. "Form is the body and surface is the brain."

Pottery came to him almost by chance. Carter says he was like some of the students who enroll in his introduction to pottery class: he was looking for an easy A as a college senior. At the time, he had aspirations of becoming a Catholic priest. Because he had a fear of drawing, he chose pottery. "It seemed easy — Mr. Rogers did it," he laughs.

"I got sucked into it fairly quickly," he says. "It's sensual, it's meditative. It was something I could relate to."

Stephen Carter

Stephen Carter, ceramic artist and associate professor of art, in the studio with his students. (Photo: Sally McCay)

Soon he borrowed a wheel and installed it at the seminary where he lived so that he could throw pots anytime the desire hit him. His mother kept all of his early work, which he discarded after she passed away. "When I first made them, I loved them," he says. "I got rid of all evidence of my early pots," he laughs. Why? "They were heavy and clunky."

That love of one's own creation commonly afflicts his students. "They're too tied into it, and often it looks like a rock with a hole in it," he snorts.

That's why his approach includes lectures on aesthetics. He wants his students to get beyond the Kmart syndrome, or trying to replicate the mass-produced pottery they see at stores. "Clay has this problem. They see so much of it" that many want to reproduce what they see on store shelves.

Carter pulls out a student mug and points to the lip, which ends abruptly. "There's no ending here," he says. "It looks like they ran out of clay. If I have a beautiful rim and foot, I can do whatever I want here," he says, pointing to the belly of the mug.

Care with creating the foot and the lip of a pot is essential, the equivalent to the beginning and end of a story, he explains.

Clay offers the ability to leave one's stamp on a piece of art that can be both sculptural while hewing to the form of a vessel. "There can be a uniqueness that speaks to the hand of the maker," Carter says. It's a quality that's comes through with his vibrant work.

PUBLISHED

11-18-2009
Megan Sabina Hack