ARTIST STATEMENT ~ LARA O’KEEFE
Beautiful pots are simple and useful at their core. North Carolina pottery is no exception when it comes to simple, useful, and utilitarian. I love the idea that, because of my training in North Carolina-based potteries, the pots I make today in 2024, are linked to pots made in a pre-industrial world by humble makers working on a dirt floor with clay dug right out of the creek bed. Before the advent of glass and plastic, these pots were life-giving. They sustained us, preserved and presented our food, and were containers for beverages. They were cooking pots, butter churns, milk crocks, and jugs made in an unself-conscious way by the dozens.
When I have had a long tiring day in the studio making thirty to forty pots, I think about Vernon Owens of Jugtown Pottery at the wheel at a very young age averaging 300 pots per day and I am inspired, humbled. Apprenticeship at Mangum Pottery, Jugtown Pottery, and with Mark Hewitt taught me to work with a production mindset. These teachers helped me to develop my work ethic and dedication to the process. Apprenticeship was foundational. Like any craft, I learned what tools to use, how to use them/ make them, pitfalls to avoid, where to find inspiration and materials, how to make even the most hated tasks satisfying, and how to show up continually.
I am proud to carry on the salt glaze tradition but I do not feel bound by it. With each firing my pots look less and less “traditional”. In my early years of making I wanted to make brown, ash glazed pots with minimal attention to decoration. Today I want rich, layered surfaces, color, imagery, and sculpted elements. I use simple slip-decorating inspired by Moravian and English slipware potters and wax resist painting more inspired by contemporary studio potters. These impulses to decorate slow me down and take my production down a notch. Push/pull between production and quality can be a challenge. I want to make small batch work but with financial pressures of single parenting and the size of my kiln I still try to keep my numbers up.
I am grateful for the foundation I have in apprenticeship and tradition but also glad to innovate. My catalog of shapes does relate back to shapes made by my teachers and their teachers before them but the flavor of my pots is now personal. There are so many contemporaries who inspire me, the potters in this group are no exception. We help one another fire, stack kilns, share material sources, glaze recipes. Coalescence of the NC potters working in our tradition is a beauty to behold and not something I take for granted. Craft exists on a continuum and depends on shared knowledge for preservation. May we all continue in this melting pot of apprenticeship, tradition, and innovation! Lara O’Keefe was born in Pittsboro, NC, where she now has her studio. She studied ceramics at Warren Wilson College and then worked at Mangum Pottery in Weaverville before a three-year apprenticeship at Jugtown Pottery in Seagrove. With her vibrant imagination she splices the decorative and ornamental onto strong functional forms at her pottery, while being a single mom of three girls - a teenager, and twin tweens. Lara also teaches at the local community college and a clay studio in Chatham County.
ARTIST BIO
Lara O’Keefe was born in Pittsboro, NC, where she now has her studio. She studied ceramics at Warren Wilson College and then worked at Mangum Pottery in Weaverville before a three-year apprenticeship at Jugtown Pottery in Seagrove. With her vibrant imagination she splices the decorative and ornamental onto strong functional forms at her pottery, while being a single mom of three girls - a teenager, and twin tweens. Lara also teaches at the local community college and a clay studio in Chatham County.
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