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When Clay Has Agency

Stories from a research-driven ceramics studio

Fall 2025

Fall brings this particularly beautiful light streaming over the western ridge line, bouncing off windows, and lighting up the woods next to my small studio like a theater set. These broken sculptures in my garden tell stories in the raking evening light.

Each fragment catches the late afternoon glow differently. Some surfaces reflect, others absorb, all of them participate in an ongoing conversation about what happens when materials meet weather, time, and chance.

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Current Exhibitions and Events

Gallery Opening

This fall you can see my work at the Western North Carolina Sculpture Center in Lenoir, NC, where I’m thrilled to be part of the inaugural exhibition opening their new indoor sculpture space.

WNCSC occupies a remarkable site—the campus of the former Patterson School, which brought educational opportunities to rural communities from 1909 to 2009. Now it's home to workshops, classes, and demonstrations where sculptors work at large scale, plus a 12-acre sculpture park that's free and open to the public.

One hour west of Asheville, in the heart of a thriving arts community at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, WNCSC represents exactly the kind of place where material investigation and community intersect. Having my work accepted for this significant opening feels like validation of the systematic approach I bring to ceramic practice—the same methodical attention to material behavior that once guided my academic research.

The exhibition runs through February, and I encourage anyone traveling through the region to visit both the indoor exhibition and the sculpture park. Follow the Center on Instagram for updates on upcoming exhibits.

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Art Fair Event

Closer to home, I’ll be joining my friend Rebecca Bower at the Newfane Heritage Festival. Rebecca creates ceramic jewelry and sharply designed functional wares that demonstrate how contemporary ceramic practice can inhabit everyday life.

I’ll have a selection of sculptural work available—an opportunity to see how the teardrop and droplet forms I’ve been developing translate across different scales and contexts.

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Studio Focus

Kitchen Installation Project

Custom tile backsplashes are everywhere, but a custom-designed hanging ceramic sculpture installed as a functional backsplash? That's something entirely different.

This fall and winter, my primary focus shifts to designing and building a private residential kitchen installation.

This project excites me precisely because of its constraints. The space will push me to think creatively about shape, concept, engineering, hanging systems, access, and depth. These aren’t just limitations. They’re collaborators in the design process. The kitchen’s specific dimensions, the client’s daily routines, the interplay of steam and heat and light—all of these factors become part of the material conversation.

Working within architectural constraints reminds me of T Fleischmann’s metaphors in Time Is The Thing A Body Moves Through about shapes and figures in our lives that defy language to describe them. Sometimes the most interesting ceramic work emerges when we stop trying to impose language on material behavior and instead let the materials teach us their vocabulary.

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Glaze Investigations

My current glaze experiments reflect this collaborative approach to material research. I’m creating color maps with different base glazes to determine what might work best for the kitchen installation—not just aesthetically, but in terms of how the glazes will hold up to everyday life in a high-traffic space of a home kitchen.

Simultaneously, I’m developing a palette of glaze colors for a friend’s new teaching studio. This requires thinking about glaze behavior not just in my own practice, but in the hands of students who will be learning ceramic fundamentals. Which combinations are forgiving? Which reveal interesting accidents that can become learning opportunities?

I’m also experimenting in yellows for a private client—a color family that presents particular technical challenges in ceramic glazes. Yellow often requires specific chemistry and can be unpredictable. These experiments are teaching me about the agency of different ceramic glaze materials and the ways certain minerals assert themselves in the firing process.

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Current Inspiration

My reading continues to inform my studio practice in unexpected ways. I’m rereading Karen Barad’s Meeting The Universe Halfway, finding new connections between her ideas about material agency and what I observe in my own ceramic work. Barad writes about how matter and meaning emerge together, which resonates deeply with how I understand the collaborative relationship between artist, clay, glaze, and fire.

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Matthew Zapruder’s I Love Hearing Your Dreams offers a different kind of material investigation—how language itself behaves when we let it find its own patterns and rhythms. His approach to poetic form mirrors what I’m learning about ceramic form: sometimes the most interesting work happens when we create systematic constraints and then pay close attention to what emerges.

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And those broken sculptures in my garden? They're becoming their own research project. Each piece breaks differently depending on its clay body, firing temperature, glaze application, and exposure to seasonal weather patterns. Rather than viewing breakage as failure, I'm documenting these material behaviors as data about long-term ceramic durability and the ongoing life of fired clay objects.

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What's Next

Winter will be dedicated to finalizing the kitchen installation design and beginning fabrication. I'll be sharing documentation of this process, including the engineering challenges and material discoveries that emerge. Spring will bring new work developed from this winter's investigations.

Connect

Visit my websites at MD-Ceramics.com and good-glaze.com Follow my practice on Instagram @mdceramics.goodglaze​

Thank you for following these material investigations. The next update will arrive after the winter solstice.

Studio Updates is published quarterly from Brattleboro, Vermont Meg Dougherty