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This year, she interrupted her annual January to June ritual of dawn to dusk pottery making to attend a week of events surrounding her son’s graduation from Annapolis. With relatives coming to the academy from a distance, the family decided to extend their time together to include a week at Myrtle Beach. You will see this beach experience in new glazes she is creating that meld sand, sea and sky into a symphony of color. Roxana divides her booth displays at Shaker Woods into two kinds of pottery. On the one side, you’ll find practical kitchenware. Pie plates, muffin bakers and a bread baker bowl that makes it possible to raise and bake the dough in the same bowl. “I fire utilitarian things at more than 2000 degrees in one of the three kilns I keep going most of the time in my garage studio,” Roxana says. “I fire a lot of my decorative pottery in an outdoor raku oven.” She loves making raku-fired pieces but these do not hold water and they aren’t safe to use for eating and drinking. Raku is an ancient form of firing outdoors in a fire pit with conserved heat. “I’ve learned a great deal about raku through trial and error and the satisfaction of creating with this medium is immense.” She is currently embedding black and white horsehair into the clay she will fire by this method. When she removes the pot from the fire, she has a narrow window of time in the cooling process when she can polish the clay while it is as delicate as an eggshell. “The horsehair has burned away but it has left both a carbon trail and a smoke trail in the clay. As a physicist, this kind of creativity is an adventure.”
“My husband, Vincent, who has an administrative position with a large company, had no problem with me leaving my job.” Roxana says. “He did let me know from the beginning that he would help me at a few shows but didn’t want to spend all his weekends hauling pottery around the country to sell.” She lives close enough to Shaker Woods that she can stock her booth over a period of weeks before the show and her husband can limit his pottery experience to wearing a Shaker-style costume while he helps customers with their selections. “Every year I add new designs because I don’t like making hundreds of things the same. There will never be any mass production for me,” Roxana says. Last year, she made some oyster-shell angels with clay heads that sold out quickly. She tagged each with a poem. They were so popular that this year, she’s added a similar little angel to a wall plaque. Her beach experience in May is likely to inspire new combinations of hand molded clay and shells. “I mix my own glazes and the panorama of the elements at the shore gives me new ideas for colors within the beige and blue/green that I love. A painter blends colors to make various shades they want. A potter mixes glazes that change as they’re fired. I love the continual surprise of what heat does to a glaze.” In addition to her wheel-thrown pottery, Roxana hand forms some pieces by the slab method in which she rolls, cuts and stacks the clay as the foundation for forming shapes with her hands. She makes 100s of spoon rests by the slab method and recently added mini pots for toothpicks that she glazes with patterns similar to the spoon rests.
She will have a few crosses and wall scones that she hand forms from slabs of rolled clay. These have designs pressed into the clay using hand stamps she makes for this purpose. A double pot – the inside pot of terra cotta that doesn’t hold water and the outer pot of waterproof ceramic – is a perfect environment she creates for African violets. Prices range from the $6 spoon rest and many functional and artistic pots under $20 to a sunflower bowl on a pedestal priced at $95. Look for Roxana in booth 46 behind the Texas Taters food concession booth. © Copyright ShakerWoods.com |
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