Website coming soon with handmade ceramic goods for your home or business.
Website coming soon with handmade ceramic goods for your home or business.
Puppers Grove Pottery is centered on fine art ceramics rather than production ware.
The work begins with form, surface, and atmosphere – along with the tension between discipline and unpredictability that makes fired clay such a compelling medium. Each piece is created by hand as an individual work, shaped slowly and brought to completion through processes that leave their own distinct record.
These are ceramics intended not simply to serve a function, but to hold presence: pieces to live with, return to, and experience over time.
The name is not accidental. It’s rooted in the grove, in the life being built here, and in the dogs who have appointed themselves stewards of the place. One inspired the name; both remain deeply committed to oversight, morale, and occasional interference. The work is serious. The household remains less so.
Raku is a process that resists repetition. Flame, smoke, reduction, heat, and timing all leave their mark, producing surfaces shaped by tonal variation, crackle, carbon, luster, texture, and depth. The outcome can be guided, but never entirely controlled. That uncertainty is not incidental. It is part of its expressive power.
These pieces may take the form of vessels and sculptural ceramics, but they are created first and foremost as art objects, works defined by presence, surface, and the visible effects of fire. The emphasis remains on singularity rather than sameness, and on a slower process that allows each piece to arrive on its own terms. There will be no mass production here. The kiln would object, and the dogs have yet to approve any such nonsense.
Puppers Grove Pottery is built around firing methods that emphasize variation, surface and the direct interaction between material and process.
Raku firing is central to the studio’s work. Flame, smoke, oxygen and timing all contribute to the final surface producing finishes shaped by crackle, carbon, luster, tonal variation and texture. While the process can be guided through experience, it cannot be fully controlled. Each firing introduces variables that leave a permanent record on the surface of the piece.
In addition to raku, the studio will explore alternative firing methods that expand on these ideas focusing on atmosphere, surface development and the relationship between heat and material. These processes are not used to produce uniform results. They are used to create work that reflects the conditions of its making pieces shaped as much by fire and environment as by the hand.
Puppers Grove is being built deliberately, from the land up. What is taking shape is more than a workspace. It is a studio life organized around slower rhythms, sustained attention, and the long return to clay after years spent elsewhere. After nearly 30 years in a career that took me away from the studio, I am returning to a long-held focus: ceramic arts. This studio is being built from the ground up on our 12-acre homestead as Puppers Grove Pottery begins to take shape.
In the months ahead, we’ll share glimpses of the process – from raising the studio building, to the first firings, the first collection, and the life around it, the gradual shaping of a practice rooted in both discipline and place.
There is still much to build. That, too, is part of the story.
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