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Bend Me, Shape Me
Pewabic Pottery is keepin' it real 105 years later
It's easy to romanticize artists and creative rebels; their indifference to convention is so seductive.
Thus, when I think of Mary Chase Perry Stratton over there on Jefferson Avenue at the turn of the century, the picture I get is not simply of the regal figurehead of Detroit's Pewabic Pottery (she founded it in 1903 with partner and Revelation Kiln inventor Horace Caulkins), but of a sublimely involved artisan – drunk on creative possibility. I picture her gigantic Victorian dresses splattered with wet clay from the potter's wheel and her long, sinewy arms bathed in glorious gray goo as she solves the "problems that arise" from a directionless lump of earth.
Pewabic Pottery (named for a Chippewa word for "clay with copper coloring" – tribute to the pottery's revolutionary metallic glazes) became a staple of the American Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the century, and Stratton's work began appearing in churches and institutions across the United States. The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Herald Square in NYC and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. are just a few of the places where her robust tiles, with their rich, earthy glazes, can be found. Examples of her vessel work also reside in museums from the Louvre to the Smithsonian to the DIA.
Thus, when I think of Mary Chase Perry Stratton over there on Jefferson Avenue at the turn of the century, the picture I get is not simply of the regal figurehead of Detroit's Pewabic Pottery (she founded it in 1903 with partner and Revelation Kiln inventor Horace Caulkins), but of a sublimely involved artisan – drunk on creative possibility. I picture her gigantic Victorian dresses splattered with wet clay from the potter's wheel and her long, sinewy arms bathed in glorious gray goo as she solves the "problems that arise" from a directionless lump of earth.
Pewabic Pottery (named for a Chippewa word for "clay with copper coloring" – tribute to the pottery's revolutionary metallic glazes) became a staple of the American Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the century, and Stratton's work began appearing in churches and institutions across the United States. The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Herald Square in NYC and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. are just a few of the places where her robust tiles, with their rich, earthy glazes, can be found. Examples of her vessel work also reside in museums from the Louvre to the Smithsonian to the DIA.
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