America is having a love affair with mud — that is handcrafted pottery. Its visual and tactile appeal is feeding a hunger for the personal, the idiosyncratic as an antidote to our standardized, mega-corporate world. The possibilities and challenges of throwing pots on a wheel or hand-building with clay are also attracting a proliferation of potters, both professional and amateur. The Oranges and nearby towns are home to clay studios where one can admire, purchase or wrestle with the mud.
The Oranges are also home (alphabetically) to Tina Burk, Corrine Carr and Miriam Reimer, three masters of the craft who explore both the ancient and modern, the traditional and non-traditional possibilities of clay.
A Primer on Clay
They all know that mud is fickle.
“Pottery is an art of finding peace in the known and the unknown,” said potter and teacher Miriam Reimer. She and her fellow potters immersed me in tutorials on clay’s many challenges.
Here is a simplified Clay 101: Once wet clay is shaped into the desired form, it must dry completely. The dried clay piece is next fired in a hot kiln. Ideally the clay stabilizes into bisqueware, able to hold its form but still porous. A hardening glaze is applied and there is a second firing at even hotter temperatures, say 2,150 degrees. The glaze and the heat make the vessels functional to hold liquid and safe for food.
Choosing, mixing, applying and layering glazes allows for pottery’s visual and textural possibilities. “The potter chooses what best highlights the features of the vessel,” Burk said. When all goes as envisioned, the results fuse form, function, and art.
Here’s the problem: “At every stage there is a chance something can go wrong,” Burk said. “You can’t make a set of six mugs by just making six mugs.”
Reimer expanded the thought. “You bring to each piece all your experience and knowledge, but once the kiln closes for 24 or 36 hours, the outcome is out of your control,” Reimer said. “The art of pottery is the art of giving up what you can’t control.”
But to see, to hold, and use these three potters’ work is a joy that belies the craft’s many challenges.
Each potter is always exploring, breaking new personal ground. Each has carved out a distinctive niche.
“It’s a lot of fun. And sometimes people give me money and then I can have more fun,” Tina Burk said.
Tina Burk & Second Stage Creations
Tina Burk was always an accomplished student focused on her academic work. (Full disclosure, Tina was among my first students.) At Barnard College, a friend talked her into joining a non-credit pottery class. Burk loved it. Then came decades of raising children and a career in education. Children grown, Tina signed up for a clay course at the Summit Art Center. She walked into a class led by her decades earlier Barnard instructor.
With Second Stage Creations, Burk has never looked back. Burk, who recently enjoyed a solo exhibit at the Livingston Public Library, loves the challenges of both the wheel and handbuilt pottery. She constantly experiments with form, glaze, or surface texture. She asks herself, “Where will new ideas take me? How might I further exaggerate this shape? How will different surface textures or designs complement the form of a pot?”
Burk’s platters, bowls, vases, urns and more are fluid poetry. Heirlooms in the making, she lyrically evokes natural forms as with a blue drop of water curving down from the edge of an exquisite white vase.
Her commissioned piece for an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright is a marvelous homage to Wright’s stained-glass designs. Her artistic urns — often for beloved pets — honor the cycle of life and death. “Angel Wings” is timeless, ethereal. Burk’s high-gloss ceramic urn (pictured above) in haunting blue glazes and crowned with an eternal flame invites meditation.
I asked Burk about those delicate sculptural finials. “I start with a thin slab and with very wet hands gently pull the clay into the form I envision,” Burk said. “You need pull, wait for it to dry, pull some more and repeat. It requires a lot of patience.”
Lately Burk has been adapting Nerikomi, the art of inlaid colored clay in her own ways. “I want to give the sense of impressionist brush strokes,” Burk said. For about 12 years, she has been firing in Raku, an ancient Japanese technique where the glazes produce jewel-like colors or a beautiful metallic luster with haunting results.
“The art of pottery is the art of giving up what you can’t control,” Miriam Reimer said.
Miriam Reimer & Glaze On Studio
Miriam Reimer works out of her basement Glaze On Studio. (Her husband, middle-school children and father-in-law are upstairs.) After about a decade of writing financial journalism for prestigious outlets including Forbes Magazine, Reimer, who comes from a family of artists and musicians, returned to her early love for clay. Now it is her full-time work.
“Miriam is a master of the wheel,” said Tina Burk of Reimer, her fellow instructor at Mud Clay Studios where Reimer’s in-demand wheel classes translate to 25 hours of teaching per week. Reimer creates a cornucopia of pottery forms including lidded pots, pitchers, yarn bowls, sake sets and many others.
Working in high-quality stoneware clay, Reimer’s most popular sellers are her beautifully proportioned and expertly crafted dinnerware, be it in full sets (sigh) or an individual berry bowl or serving platter.
Reimer enjoys an enviable eye for color but finds her bestsellers are in muted tones. “If I bring plates or mugs in toasted white matte on speckled clay to a vendor or crafts event, every piece will sell,” Reimers said. That dinnerware slips effortlessly into a range of decors, from contemporary to period. Eating off of those plates would feel like coming home after a hard journey.
An iron luster catch-all plate with a soul satisfying mix of metallic and earth tones in a spiral whirl caught my eye. You just may delight in her whimsical, nature-based printed dishes or carved vases.
All these artists work on commissions and enjoy fulfilling the visions and hopes expressed by intended custodians of their work. Reimer found just the right shapes and glazes for a couple whose wedding registry requested her dinnerware and serving pieces. (See the results in toasted white, cornsilk, royal blue and matte black on her website.)
Of late, Reimer’s heart has been harkening to the American Southwest and desert landscapes where she cleaved to the open skies, the mountains, the tones of sand and rocks and the green-gift of sparse desert vegetation. “I have been experimenting a long time to evoke that landscape in my pottery,” Reimer said.
Working with layered combinations of glazes are the vases (pictured above) — melodies of indigo, blue, earth tones with that suspicion of green.
Pluck a star out of her indigo and feel the warmth of her earth tones.
“I achieve dark and light values by varying the thickness and spacing of the lines,” Carr said.
Corrine Carr & Illustrated Pottery
Corrine Carr, the youngest of the three, has a third-floor studio in East Orange’s Manufacturers Village with three wheels set up for by-appointment instruction and, well, play. “Often couples come and create a work meaningful to them,” Carr said, who plays coach and cheerleader.
Carr brings her deep experience and formidable skills as a professional graphic designer and illustrator to her functional clay work. She also brings a certain irreverence towards pottery traditions. “I didn’t explore pottery until 2019,” Carr — then in her late 20s — said. Initially studying and working in group studio settings, she found herself breaking from the methods and goals of her fellow potters.
A deft draftsman, she experimented in transferring her drawing and design chops to clay.
Initially she drew one-of-a-kind designs directly onto the pottery. “My illustrations are line driven. I achieve dark and light values by varying the thickness and spacing of the lines,” Carr said.
As demand for her work grew, people requested sets of plates or mugs. Carr’s challenge became reliably replicating her designs.
Her unconventional solution was silk screen. “I create a silk screen and wrap it around the form. Next, I use my fingers to press the underglaze onto the bisque. Then I remove the screen and reveal the printed design — I rip it off like taking off a band-aid,” Carr said. The results known as Corrinne Carr Illustrated Pottery are functional bowls (for both humans and four-legged pals), mugs, vases, and planters et al that she throws in simple forms using straightforward glazes.
All are delights of rhythm, line, observation, visual imagination with an underlying wit.
Sometimes Carr looks to popular culture for inspiration, especially Batman. “I made a series of The Joker mugs for my brother,” Carr said. In crisp black lines on white glaze with red glaze inside, those diabolic, smirking visages would waken anyone along with the morning cup of Joe.
Mostly, Carr looks to flora and fauna for inspiration. Carr’s single blooms evoke botanical prints. Her clusters of flowers —be they naturalistic or abstract — swirl around her forms (sometimes migrating down the handles on her mugs) in satisfying patterns. Note her seashells and tropical fish. “My mom scoffed at fish on a mug, but everyone loves them for New Jersey shore houses,” Carr said.
I love her somewhat anthropomorphic hummingbirds looking a bit miffed about their potential meal, (pictured above), these in a set of four mugs.
Why Buy Handmade:
Anyone can purchase machine-made dinnerware or a vase or say, a pet bowl for that that paw waking you on a cold weekend morning. That’s fine, and it might be more affordable.
But it’s not the same.
“Handmade pottery feels better, looks better and holds the heat of your coffee better,” Reimer said. And, it has the spirit of the maker.
As noted, all these artists love commissions, sell online and set up in vender and crafts sales and festivals area-wide. All have holiday sales events coming up, listed below. See and hold for yourself.
UPCOMING SHOWS & SALES
Corrine Carr:
Sunday December 3rd and 17th 10AM-3PM
Holiday Shopping @ Corrine’s studio December 3rd and 17th 10am-3pm
66 Franklin St. East Orange, NJ – Studio 3H Building 2 Zone 2, 3rd Floor, no elevator
Thursday December 7th 5-9PM
Free First Thursdays: Winter Art Market
Montclair Art Museum, 3 South Mountain Ave. Montclair, NJ
Tina Burk and Miriam Reimer:
Sunday, December 10, 2023 11AM-3PM
Reeves-Reed Arboretum
165 Hobart Avenue, Summit, NJ
Dec 15 4PM-7PM with a small reception
Dec 16 and 17 11AM-5PM
The Pop-Up Pot Shop
Museum of Early Trades and Crafts (Annex)
9 Main St, Madison, NJ
