Women Working with Clay Symposium

Maggie Jaszczak is a potter and mixed-media artist originally from Ontario, Canada.  She completed her undergraduate studies at Alberta College of Craft and Design, Kootenay School of the Arts, and Concordia University in Canada, and earned her MFA in Ceramics from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 2013.  Jaszczak has participated in numerous ceramic residency programs, including Penland School of Craft in Penland, North Carolina, New Taipei Ceramics Museum in New Taipei City, Taiwan, and The Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana.  She exhibits her work nationally and has taught classes and workshops throughout the United States and Canada.  A 2024 McKnight Artist and Culture Bearer Fellow, Maggie lives with in rural Minnesota where she works as a studio artist.

Demonstration Description

Over the course of my demonstration I will look at a number of ways to create form using both hand built and wheel thrown elements.  Focusing primarily on vases and candle holders, techniques will include slab-work, drape molds, closed forms, and combining multiple parts to create larger or more complex vessels.  Throughout I will demonstrate a reductive process for working quickly and roughly in the beginning, then paring away to reveal and refine form and surface.

Artist Statement

Guided by the Shaker design philosophy that ‘beauty rests on utility’, I make quiet, mostly undecorated earthenware pots.  With an eye to contemporary design, I draw on my interests in early clay and wooden objects, still life traditions, and folk art throughout history, to make trough-like vessels, vases, mugs and bowls, and other forms. 

Minimal in form and surface, and hovering between primitive and refined, my pots combine soft lines and profiles with painted layers of mostly white slip and glaze.   Using hand building and wheel throwing techniques, pieces are built roughly at first, and then scraped and pared down to achieve their final form.  Dragged grog and finger and brush marks emphasize the subtleties of material and process as the primary decorative elements, and red clay gives depth to the layers. 

Kyungmin Park is a South Korean-born ceramic artist who lives and works in Boston, MA. She earned her BFA from Alfred University and her MFA from the University of Georgia. Park is an Associate Professor at Endicott College in Beverly, MA.

In 2025, Park was a Demonstrating Artist at NCECA. She has received the 2016 Emerging Artist Award by NCECA and the 2015 Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist Award, as well as Matsutani and Windgate fellowships.

Her residency experiences include the Archie Bray Foundation, Red Lodge Clay Center, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, AIR Vallauris in France, and the Jingdezhen International Studio in China. Park’s work has been featured in Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times, and exhibited at Aqua Art Miami Basel, SOFA Chicago, The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, Scripps College, The Fuller Craft Museum, The Korea Society, and Allouche Gallery, to name a few.

Demonstration Description

I will demonstrate my hand-building techniques for creating expressive figurative sculptures using pinch, slab, and coil construction. My process emphasizes shaping from the inside out, a method that mirrors how personal stories and emotions merge from experience. During the demonstration, I will share strategies for building and refining sculptural forms, integrating narrative through gesture, surface details with underglaze, and glazes. I will also discuss technical considerations for working with large-scale and approaches to layering surface treatments that blend storytelling with form. 

Artist Statement

No matter where we are from or what languages we speak, we all have our own stories to tell. The more we share, the more connected we become, and the more we can overcome the barriers that divide us. I use figurative sculpture to narrate my personal journey and to communicate emotions and experiences shared by people worldwide in ways that transcend language, cultural, and political differences.

As an immigrant, learning to speak, write, and adapt to new customs in the United States reminded me of what it feels like to be a child starting anew. This experience shaped my artistic vision, inspiring me to explore a regression to childlike states of mind, where imagination is free and unrestrained. My ceramic figures often merge childlike appearances with adult bodies. Expressive faces become the most compelling storytelling element, while amorphous forms symbolize boundless imagination. The lines and colors layered on these forms represent societal expectations and the environments of adulthood.

Through my work, I invite viewers to reflect on the complexities and commonalities of human experience. By sharing stories through clay, I imagine a world rooted in connection and empathy.

Lindsay Pichaske received a BFA from the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill and an MFA from the University of Colorado—Boulder. She is represented by Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis and exhibits her work regularly in museums and galleries, including the Jane Hartsook Gallery at Greenwich House Pottery, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Fuller Craft Museum, and the Daum Museum. She was the 2011 Taunt Fellow at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts in Helena, MT, and received an Emerging Artist Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts in 2013. Lindsay is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Webster University in St. Louis, MO.

Demonstration Description

I will demonstrate the techniques I use to sculpt animal figures. I will guide you through my process, including building solid on an armature and hollowing, rendering facial features, anatomical sculpting, and developing surfaces. You will also gain insight into technical aspects of creating pigmented porcelain textures. I’ll share my experience working with a variety of mixed media materials and clay, as well as my thought process as I contemplate how surface additions contribute to the texture, meaning, and personality of a figure. 

Artist Statement

I use the animal figure to explore empathy and sentiency, and to challenge the perceived order and comfortable classifications of life. My figures are tricksters—both familiar and alien, corporeal and ethereal—existing at the interface of human and animal worlds. Their stoic postures and ornate, often beautiful appearances can act as facades for existential uncertainties. The figures are subtle hybrids, inspired by the nuance and sameness of species’ behaviors and anatomies.

Material and process are the tangible means through which I contemplate the realm of these figures. Using clay, a material that relies on touch to take shape, I sculpt body parts, establish gestures, and articulate fine details so that each figure develops a unique physical and emotional presence. Like a taxidermist, I often cover the sculpted figure in a ‘skin.’ Rather than animal hides, however, the skins I create are made of less traditional materials that upset their expected roles. As human hair impersonates muscle, and porcelain becomes fur, the borders between the body’s inside and outside collapse, and the lines between animate and inanimate blur. This slow process of adornment allows me to both control and understand the figure as it comes into existence. My practice is an empathetic gesture; the desire to create a believable sense of life pulls me forward as a maker.

After 24 years working as a Professor in Ceramics at Penn State University, Liz retired and moved to West Seattle and has found her way back to life as a full time Studio Potter.  She has led workshops at many schools including Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland, Arrowmont, The Archie Bray Foundation, and Anderson Ranch. Liz was lucky to have studied under Betty Woodman in the late 70’s where her love for decorative pottery was excited by ceramic history and and a youthful curiosity for cultural diversity as it takes shape around food served on handmade pottery. This foundation has become the backbone of her work. Education, additional teaching experience, exhibitions, publications, and awards can be found on Liz’s resume in her website     lizquackenbushclay.com

Demonstration Description

The story I have told throughout my career is that of feeling awe inspired by life itself. I believe joy is the most expansive emotion I can feel. Sharing my joy with others through my work is at the core of everything I make.      In 2023 I was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. In 2024 I was given a Stem Cell Transplant. During these years, rather than joy, curiosity and determination overwhelmed all aspects of my daily existence. I am fortunate to be able to pick up the most endeared threads of my previous life and start anew.      The cycle of life and death have always played a large part in the steerage of what I make. The idea of clay as a harbinger of microscopic organisms was likely the first clay awareness that resonated in me. The firing freezes time. In a metaphorical way, using pottery brings it back to life. Now that I have had a personal, lived experience with this dynamic, I look forward seeing what I will make.

Artist Statement

The story I have told throughout my career is that of feeling awe inspired by life itself. I believe joy is the most expansive emotion I can feel. Sharing my joy with others through my work is at the core of everything I make.      In 2023 I was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. In 2024 I was given a Stem Cell Transplant. During these years, rather than joy, curiosity and determination overwhelmed all aspects of my daily existence. I am fortunate to be able to pick up the most endeared threads of my previous life and start anew.      The cycle of life and death have always played a large part in the steerage of what I make. The idea of clay as a harbinger of microscopic organisms was likely the first clay awareness that resonated in me. The firing freezes time. In a metaphorical way, using pottery brings it back to life. Now that I have had a personal, lived experience with this dynamic, I look forward seeing what I will make.

Keynote Speaker

Dina Nur Satti is a Brooklyn-based ceramic artist of Sudanese and Somali heritage. Raised in France and Kenya, she holds a B.A. in International/Intercultural Studies from Fordham University, with a focus on the cultures of Africa and the Middle East.

Her pursuit of ceramics was born out of her studies in African art and precolonial African societies, and an interest in learning how ancient objects provide an insight into the migrations, beliefs, cosmologies, and communal bonds of a people. Through her sculptural vessels, she investigates ritual, transformation, and cultural memory with a focus on coil-built techniques and esoteric symbolism.

Satti has participated in exhibitions internationally, including at the Triennale di Milano (2025), Montague Contemporary (2025), Petrie Museum in London (2024), and Efie Gallery in Dubai (2025), as well as at 1-54 Art Fair in New York and Marrakech. Her work has been featured in Vogue, Whitewall, Interior Design Magazine, Business of Home, and Architectural Digest Middle East, which named her to its AD100 list in both 2024 and 2025. She has been an invited lecturer at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Gasworks, and has held residencies with Saint Heron, Palm Heights and Petrie Museum.