Although Martha didn’t take pottery classes until college, she has been fascinated with ceramics since childhood. Once her children were grown and she was well into her career as a software engineer, she took night classes to work with porcelain, her medium of choice. Martha retired early and since then has been working in her ceramics studio in Evergreen, CO, and teaching adult pottery at the Westminster City Park Recreation center. Martha creates one-of-a-kind functional pottery with surface designs that try to achieve a balance between positive and negative spaces, light and dark colors, and curved and straight lines. Each piece is wheel-thrown and hand-carved using the sgraffito technique, carving through a colored layer to show the clay color underneath, or the mishima technique, inlaying color into carved lines. Regardless of which technique is used, Martha often uses dot-painting techniques to enhance that design, and all of her work is then fired twice to produce a surface that is both enduring and beautiful.
