Adventuring from work on the wheel and decades of functional pots, I began working on a series of wall pieces involving clay shards, exploring surface, color, and the effects of fire. Breaking larger pieces and then assembling and reassembling them. Broken/mended, serves as a metaphor for how we lose and find our footing again and again.

Locating and placing the clay pieces onto the painting is both spontaneous and carefully considered. Such a pleasure to learn and appreciate Effie's vision and imagination as we create individual wall pieces with painted surfaces and applied clay shards.

The brick kiln structure has a fire pit underneath which allows stoking with good-sized logs over a period of 5-6 hours in order to achieve a temperature of 1000 degrees. The pots are wrapped in copper wire, seaweed, and straw. The pots are then packed into saggars, containers that hold the pots during the firing process. The saggars are filled with sawdust, copper carbonate and salt and they rest in a larger bed of sawdust, copper carbonate, and salt. As the temperature rises, the chemicals become gaseous, fuming the surfaces with lustrous colors as the fire, smoke, and gasses travel across the pots. After the kiln cools overnight, I carefully unload each piece from the ashes. Every piece is different and surprising. This process is only for those who delight in the unpredictable and unexpected.

I've recently personalized and reinvented the traditional oyster plate after receiving an invitation from the Oyster Recovery Partnership (ORP.) ORP wanted to give oyster plates as an award to Senator Barbara Mikulski and citizen Anne Johnson. My work in oysters is inspired by my husband's project, The Wye Oak Commemorative Oyster Knife, completed with our oyster-shucking friends, George Hastings and Paul Bartlett.

Collaborations with my husband, Dale German, master cabinetmaker:
Singing, Dancing, Washing, Dying.

These collaborative pieces include drums, sinks, funerary urns, and other containers for all kinds of uses. Sinks rest in custom-made wooden cabinets; containers and drums are wheel-thrown and fired at both high and low temperatures. The sizes range from 4-14" in height. Dale and I explore form and function that lend themselves to the combination of clay and wood, including handles, knobs, lids with wood and clay shards, and framed wall pieces. Most often I present Dale with the finished clay piece and he brings his artistry and craftsmanship to design the wood elements. What an interesting process to learn and appreciate Dale's imagination and unique artistic sensibility in this collaborative work.

These are hand built sculptural forms made with coils of clay over a period of weeks. Each pot is burnished until very smooth, and then fired with wood as the fuel in a dramatic hands-on process. The temperature reaches approximately 1000 degrees. The pieces are packed into saggars, clay containers that protect them and affect the flow of smoke and flame across the surfaces during the firing process. Each piece is surrounded by sawdust, seaweed, straw, copper, and salt, decorated with copper wire and string. The loading and packing of each pot and the play of fire and smoke during the firing combine to make unique and wonderfully unpredictable marks on the surfaces of the pots.

Each form is 14-16 inches in height, 6-7 inches in diameter. Loading and firing takes about 6-7 hours. Unloading the pieces after an overnight cool-down is always surprising.

The udu is a Nigerian clay pot drum with an origin in traditional water storage jars. These drums are thrown on the wheel, sometimes in two parts, burnished and then fired in the low temperature sawdust/salt/copper firing process. They range in size from 10-16� in height, 6-9� in diameter. The size and the shape of the pot and the openings will affect the tone and penetrating watery sound of each drum. Drums rest on rope stands made of hemp, fashioned by Dale German.

I have been making pots now for forty years. I thoroughly enjoy the feel of the clay itself and, over so many years, a steady dedication to making affordable objects for daily use. These functional pots are porcelain and white stoneware, fired in a gas kiln to 2300 degrees. Recently I've added a reinterpretation of the traditional oyster plate.

Making bowls and cups and plates, washing clothes, raising kids, going to work, coming home, pulling handles, wedging clay. The passion deepens, the opportunity for creativity expands, seasoned by time and applied practice.

More and more often I receive requests for cremation urns from family, friends, and others. What an honor after years of making the cups and bowls and plates that fill their kitchens, to now make containers for this purpose. As potters, we think about vessels and shapes and I think of the urns as â??The Shapes of Our Lives.â? Recently friends have asked me to make the urn they will use in the future and will even join me in the studio as I make the urn for them. â??Urns While You Waitâ? gives us the opportunity to hold living and dying all at once with grace, cherishing it all. Some of these pieces with wooden handles are made in collaboration with my husband, master cabinetmaker Dale German, with wood from the Wye Oak and other wood provided by friend Bill Waldman.

Reflections by John Viles on "Tall Red with Shoulders" October 2018

"The collaboration began with a drawing of a broad shouldered, tall standing vessel with measurements indicated. Pat came highly recommended as one of the best ceramists on the wheel. We discussed how to proceed including her husband Dale a fine woodworker. So Pat made a beautiful, smooth tall vessel and at the very bottom of the vessel are four small circles representing wheels. My father was in the car business and would have appreciated this small detail on his Urn. Dale made a zebra wood lid fitting perfectly. Afterwards, I painted and put multiple coats of gloss over the fire engine red (my father’s favorite color). This collaboration was very important to me. As an artist, I have never experienced anything similar."

Reflections by Lee Hoyt on "Urns While You Wait":

"...when we entered Patâ??s studio it became a total immersion experience. I discovered the smell of the clay in its various stages of dampness or drying, the physical sensations of playing with pieces of clay as I watched Pat working at her wheel, and the mesmerizing sight of Patâ??s hands guiding the clay from shapelessness up and down and out and into voluptuous vessels and perfectly fitted lids.

...At first glance the urns are full of air and empty of everything else. But upon further contemplation I see more broadly, understanding the many elements that came together for the potter to be alive, for the earth to create the clay, the water used to form the urn, the wood for the fire required to harden the urn and to fashion handles, the trees from which the wood came that required sunlight and water and nourishment from the earth, the people who transported the materials, and so on â?¦ the urns are interconnected to everything else in the universe by this reasoning. And the urns are full of the whole universe, though they are impermanent, just as my body is full of everything, connected to it all, but impermanent."