Teri Fahrendorf

Rain Dragon Studio

Teri Fahrendorf is a Portland, Oregon-based ceramic sculptor from rural Wisconsin. Teri began to shift toward her current career in 2019, after working as a craft beer brewmaster for 30 years. She founded her one-woman art business, Rain Dragon Studio, during the pandemic in 2021, and went full time in 2022. Teri’s sculpture work has juried into galleries and shows in Oregon and Washington since 2021, including Portland Open Studios, Guardino Gallery (Portland, Oregon), Art at the Cave (Vancouver, Washington), Newport Visual Art Center (Newport, Oregon), and the Vancouver Art & Music Festival where she won 2nd Place in the inaugural Regional 3D Competition. Teri is a member of four guilds: Oregon Potters Association, Pacific Northwest Sculptors, Local Clay/ClayFest (Eugene, Oregon) and Clayfolk (Medford, Oregon). She has exhibited at many shows with these guilds. You can catch Teri as a Demonstration Artist at several art festivals around Oregon & SW Washington each year.  Teri has a B.B.A. in Management Information Systems from the University of Wisconsin and worked five years in I.T. near San Francisco. After attending the esteemed Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology in Chicago where she was the first woman Class President, she spent the next 30 years working as a craft beer brewmaster in the Pacific Northwest. Teri was Founder and first President of Pink Boots Society, an international scholarship-generating 501(c)3 nonprofit charity created to inspire, encourage and empower women and nonbinary in the fermented beverages industries. Teri was also an international beer judge, author and beer industry conference speaker. She loves her current career as a Ceramic Artist & Sculptor!

Contact:

Website  |  Email  |  Instagram  |  Facebook|  Phone 503-496-9745

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Diane Fisher

Diane Fisher Pottery

Contact:

Email | Phone: 541-621-3625

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Ray Foster

My infatuation with art began in high school. After completing my college degree, I became a high school pottery instructor in 1977. Much of what I taught was learned on the fly as I expanded my curriculum. Along the way I participated in many seminars, graduate classes and even spent a year in England studying with ceramicists there. To this day, I’m still learning about the myriad possibilities of the ceramic process. My work has been designed for practical use. All pieces are high fired to a hard cone 10. The shapes I employ are simple and decorated with a range of graphic designs. My unwavering goal is to produce a durable piece of functional art with a flair. Now retired, I create new work in my Jacksonville studio.

 

Contact:

Email

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Julie Furrer

Mizzle Ceramics

My journey towards clay has been a long and wandering one. I’ve gone from stay-at-home motherhood, to corporate marketing jobs, to working alongside my honey on the construction sites. But now I am here, making what’s exciting to me. Taking a muddy raw substance and creating art that can be interacted with. If it gets me excited, then I want to make it. And I have years to discover the endless possibilities of clay.

I hope you enjoy what I’ve made and I will always continue to explore the muddy world of ceramics.

My work can be found on my website and at Art and Soul Gallery in Ashland Oregon.

 

Contact:

Website  |  Email

Johannes Gaston

Sterling Creek Studio Jacksonville

I studied historical metal smithing as an undergraduate and product design for my masters degree, in Zurich, Switzerland. I trained Metalsmiths in Swaziland Africa, briefly taught college design courses in Minnesota and then spent most of my life as a product designer, serving clients ranging from tiny startups to large global corporations. In 2014, I retired as a ceramic artist (together with my wife) in historic Jacksonville, Oregon.

 

My exploration of making functional objects from clay has taken me in different directions,
resulting in several distinct categories with unique characteristics as follows:

 

TOUCH-STONE
We don’t hold or touch our lips to many objects on a daily basis. Perhaps that’s what made me decide to focus on the “tactile” aspects of functional ceramics at a time when so much of our world has become virtual and completely devoid of physical connection.

 

I create dozens of sketches, then hand sculpt my tactile designs and make multipart molds, which I cast with porcelain slip and painstakingly finish. I often leave areas that are touched by hands “unglazed” in order to emphasize the beauty of raw fired clay, something we rarely experience with commercially made ceramics.

 

TERRA-CHROMA
The “Painted Hills” of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Northeastern Oregon served as my initial inspiration for working with colored clay, aka.Japanese “Nerikomi”. While traditional techniques (including Italian “Millefiori”) often have repeating patterns, (sometimes suggesting flowers, etc.), I tend to focus on abstracted “layers of the earth” and geological forces.

 

The textured bottoms reference ribbing of petrified sea shells, also providing a pleasant tactile experience when held in your hands. These pieces are predominantly stoneware and colored with oxides. The interiors are coated with a clear glaze to become functional. The exteriors are unglazed to suggest natural rock and soil.

 

VITA-FORM
Plants and trees grow and transform through unfolding or concentric layers. I used those principles to develop a series of sculptural bowls and serving dishes. Just as plants change in size and scale as they mature, I am exploring many sizes of different designs, ranging from tiny ramekin to large serving bowls. Most pieces are created with stoneware clay and completely glazed to reflect the translucent colors and textures of organic plant forms.

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Instagram  |  Email

Holly Gonnella

DAISY VORTEX

Contact:

Email | Website

Frank A. Gosar

Off-Center Ceramics

Whimsical and functional stoneware pottery: wheel-thrown, hand-painted with ceramic minerals and stains using hand-made brushes, and fired to cone 10 in reduction.

Please visit our website for current gallery and show locations.

Contact:

Email | Website

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Linda Heisserman

I love “throwing” on the wheel. It is meditative for me….All my pieces start out on the wheel. When they have dried some, I trim them and set them aside for the next step.

I hand carve each piece using a single edged razor blade and dental tools. The razor blades give me a much more sweeping carve then a regular clay carving tool. I start carving when the piece is leather hard. I have to carve or perforate the piece at this stage so as not to have create cracks. I continue to shape as the piece dries. In the end, I use a green scrubby to smooth off the sharp edges. For me, each piece seems like a miniature sculpture. I like how the light plays off the surface whether it is glazed or not.

The pieces are then placed in the bisque kiln and fired until they are the hardness of a red clay pot used for flowers. In this stage, the piece is porous enough to absorb the liquid glaze and solid enough to not melt when dipped into the liquid glaze.

The piece is then put into a gas reduction kiln along with about 80 other pieces, some big some small. The kiln is fired to 2300 degrees over a fourteen hour period. It is then allowed to cool for another fourteen hours. The pieces which emerge from the kiln have gone through a lot of structural and chemical changes. They are a joy to make, hold and use.

Contact:

Email | Phone: 541-419-1500