by Charles L. Reynolds

Mention the word potter today and most likely people will think you’re invoking some bratty adolescent sorcerer with a garish scar bolting across his forehead and a reluctant vendetta against a scary man whose name his friends are too afraid to pronounce.

But at Mudflat Studio in East Somerville, a dedicated gang of real-life potters has been casting spells on clay for over 30 years—and teaching their tricks to adult and child students in the process.

“If you watch somebody throwing on the wheel, it looks pretty magical—the clay seems to be just slipping and sliding all over the place. It really can be quite beautiful to watch somebody throw,” said Lynn Gervens, executive director of Mudflat, located at 149 Broadway.

Of course, it’s much harder than it looks, she said. “If the wheel’s going a little too fast or your hands are a little dry and they get stuck, it’s easy to end up with a mountain of wet, mushy clay. It’s really about having some patience to keep at it awhile until it clicks.”

This clicking often occurs in a classroom environment, and Mudflat offers a full-range of classes for students of all ages and abilities, she said.

“We do a winter semester that starts in January, a spring/summer semester that goes from late April through the end of July. We do a very short three week semester in August, which is mainly for people who want to try this quickly and can do that without it being really expensive,” said Gervens.

Tuition is $400 for a 14-week semester for adults, $225 for the August semester. Both prices include all materials. There are also two scholarship funds: one for adults, established six years ago; and a new one, named after recently deceased Mudflat artist Elee Kaplow, for children, she said.

For those looking to save money, the August semester is an inexpensive way to begin in clay. “It’s also a bridge for our more advanced students who might want to do their own work for a month,” said Gervens.

“And then, we do a fall semester from September through mid-December. The semesters are 14 weeks long, with usually two or three weeks between semesters,” said Gervens.

Students come from near and far, she said. “Probably half of our students are from the Somerville/Cambridge area. We have a number of people who work in the downtown area and live further out and come for an evening class,” she said.

“Most of the kids who come for classes live much more locally: Somerville, Cambridge, Medford, Charlestown, adjoining neighborhoods,” she said.

Kids’ classes include parent and child workshops, kids’ hand building, kids’ wheel building, teen clay, and home school classes, among others. “We start with kids at the age of 4—that’s the youngest we do—and that’s the parent/child class,” said Gervens.

“A child comes with a parent or other adult—a grandmother or an aunt—and they work on a project together. But we have 8 year old kids who come with their parents and they’re working side by side,” she said. “It depends of the kids’ ages, interests, and abilities.”

Teaching kids is a relatively new phenomenon at Mudflat. “We started doing these classes in the early 90s, partly because when my daughter was in a parent/child nursery school,” Gervens said.

“The teacher asked the parents, ‘Do any of you work in interesting places where we can bring the kids of a field trip?’ So I offered to have a bunch of four-year-olds come here and I showed them how to work in clay,” she said.

“Then we started thinking, we don’t offer anything for kids, so maybe this would be a good thing to do. We had a couple of teachers who had some experience teaching kids and were interested in having us offer those kinds of classes. It kind of grew from there,” she said.

Gervens said that it’s gratifying to watch a child whom she’s taught how to throw pursue an interest in clay into adolescence and early adulthood.

“They start off learning how to make pinch pots, maybe even in a parent/child class. We have many kids who are in high school now and a couple who have graduated and gone off to college and are still finding ways to work with clay and fit it into their schedules,” she said.

Whether these students will pursue a career in ceramics after college is hard to say. Gervens did admit the difficulty of succeeding professionally as a potter—or any kind of artist, for that matter.

“Most artists need to have jobs to support themselves. It’s a risky business, economically. Many of the people who have studio spaces here are teaching here or maybe other places as well. They work part time or full time jobs other places,” she said.

“Our staff is working here because they want to be close to clay. There are two ways to go about this: you put all your energy into being at the clay studio or the painting studio or whatever it is. So you find a way to teach there or have some other part time job there that helps to pay the bills. But everything you do is related to clay in this case,” said Gervens.

“Or maybe you need to save all that creative energy for when you’re actually doing your artwork. So you go get some other job—waitress or secretary—and then you find time nights and weekends or on your days off to do your artwork,” she said.

“There are pros and cons to both approaches. But for me it was really about wanting this to be my life. I want everything I do to be centered on clay. Being the director here is a way for me to help other people find a way to be working in clay,” she said.

“That’s very fulfilling as well. It doesn’t get me in my studio as often, which would be nice, but a lot of other people get to do that,” she said.

These other people are her students, of course, but also the 18 clay artists who rent studio space at Mudflat, as well as that year’s artist-in-residence, she said.

The artist-in-residence program is another way that we try to support artists who are maybe just getting out of school or trying to figure out how they’re going to support themselves doing their clay work, Gervens said.

“It’s a competitive process when people apply every spring. They can apply by filling our applications, sending us slides of their work,” she said.

“We have a committee that reviews all that and the winning artist is awarded a studio space for a year, no fee, and a fifty pound bag of clay,” she said.

Whether they are a professional artist, student, or teacher, those who come to Mudflat are united by a passion for clay. Once they discover it, people seem to really love working with the material, Gervens said.
“If they don’t mind getting dirty,” she joked.

“The process is basically that you start with this bag of wet, mushy clay, and then you form it on the pottery wheel or using hand-building techniques, like rolling out coils or slabs or pinching,” she said.

“Most of the focus is on functional things in our classes, but people do a lot of other stuff—and you can do that by doing the wheel-throwing or the hand-building, the coils and pinches,” she said.

Gervens said, “If you haven’t ever touched clay before, hand building is probably an easier technique to learn because it’s the way we all learned how to work with clay as kids: you pound it on the table and roll it with the rolling pin.”

“Working on the potter’s wheel is tricky because you have to learn all the different ways to hold your hands in order to manipulate the clay to make it move and get taller and thinner and not stick your fingers,” she said.

Making things even more complex is the fact that “there are three distinct kinds of clay,” Gervens said. “The pink stuff is a high-fire stone wear, the white is porcelain or white stone wear, and the red is terra cotta, or low-fire clay.”

After the artist has shaped and formed the clay into whatever he wants, he may consider applying a slip or liquidy clay you can add colorants to, Gervens said. Then, members of the Mudflat technical staff fire the pieces to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit to prepare them for the glaze. “They’re very porous at this stage,” she said.

“Now, you have to apply the glaze by painting it on or dipping it in a bucket of glaze or spraying it on,” Gervens said. This occurs in the high fire glaze room, crowded with buckets and barrels of glaze suspended in water.

“There are shiny glazes and mat glazes. There’s a whole range of different colors, depending on what temperature you’re firing to. You can overlap the glazes to get yet a different color. So there are a lot of ways to be creative working with the clays and the glazes and for making really beautiful things,” Gervens said.

“Once glazed, the pieces return to the kilns to get fired to the appropriate temperature for the clay body. Most of these get fired to what we call Cone 10, which is 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. It takes about 12 hours,” she said.

“We have three electric kilns and three gas fire kilns,” she said. “But the electric are much smaller and a little easier to fire because you just turn the switches.”

“You can’t really do anything to regulate the atmosphere inside an electric kiln. These fires in what we call an oxidation atmosphere. All the elements do the same as in an electric stove—heat everything up,” she explained.

“However, in a gas fire kiln, or oil or propane—any kind of natural fuel—you can do different kinds of firing,” she said.

“Another kind would be what is called a reduction firing: at certain times in the firing you can choke the kiln a little bit in terms of the air that’s going into it, and that changes how some of the glazes, the colors of the glazes, change. So something in oxidation will have more of a yellowish coloring to it and in a reduction it will be bluer,” she said.

“The firings all take the same amount of time, but a gas firing kiln you have to watch more closely because you’re increasing the amount of gas that goes into the kiln and you have to watch those points where you want there to be less air going into the kiln,” she warned.

They may be complicated, but today’s firing techniques are an improvement over those of the past. “One primitive technique has the potter dig a big pit, throw the pots in it, put a bunch of cow patties on top of it, light it, and it gets hot enough to make the clay go through some chemical changes so that when it gets wet, it won’t fall apart,” Gervens said.

Though many contemporary potters still employ these ancient techniques, it must be noted that no cow patties were found during this interview.

“What we’re doing here in firing these to such a hot temperature is going more to the commercial end of things where you can put all of these pieces in your microwave and dishwasher and they’re safe to use for food,” she said.

“Because we fire them a little hotter, they also tend to be more durable, sturdier—they hold up a little better,” she said.

“There is something about people who work in clay and a feeling of community,” she said.
“When you work with clay, it’s great to be in a studio like this because of the equipment that’s involved. It would be very hard for someone to put one of these kilns in their basement or backyard or garage or something,” she said.

“And it’s sometimes not as much fun to be working on your own. It’s very isolating sometimes to be an artist or a writer or a filmmaker, whatever. So it’s nice to have a community of people that you can share that passion for. Because of clay and needing a piece of equipment like a kiln, it kind of draws everybody together,” she said.

“It’s still private in a way because you’re sitting there working at this wheel.

“The person next to you probably isn’t kibitzing with you about what you’re doing unless you ask for that feedback. More often what happens is, in the same way when you’re writing, there’s self-criticism.

“You might end up with a whole board full of mug shapes that you just threw. Maybe the first couple aren’t so great, but then they get a little better,” she said.

“As the maker, you might sit there and say, ‘I’m not going to save these to put handles on, finish, or fire a glaze.’ But in a class situation you might bring these things to a critique—just as a poet might when he brings writings to a reading—to get feedback from people about, will this handle work, is this glaze ok, what about this combination, how does the room feel, is it comfortable to you,” she said.

“There are lots of ways that all artists look for feedback on their work and look for ways to grow their work to continue looking for creative solutions to express your work,” she said.

Gervens said one creative solution Mudflat Studio will be undertaking soon is to move to a bigger and better space in the old Broadway Theatre, just down the road from the current location in the old Tuck’s Department store building at 149 Broadway.

“We’ve been in this space for 18 years. Mudflat’s 33-years-old. Before we were here, we were in East Cambridge on 1st Street. We moved here in 1985, and when we first moved here, there was plenty of space to grow—which we’ve done! Now we’ve run out of space,” she said.

“We felt like we were really compromised here in terms of the quality of experience that our students get to have. We have one sink for two classrooms down here,” she said.

“The slab roller that gets used in a hand-rolling classroom is in the wheel-throwing classroom,” she said. In addition, the cubbies are too small, the ceilings too low, and the walkways around the work tables too narrow.

“We were looking for a new location so that we could expand on a couple things that we do: offer a wider variety of classes, do more community outreach than we can support in this building,” she said.

very hard to establish some relationships with the senior center here across the street and another over by the Holiday Inn off of Washington Street,” she said.

“We also come to the schools in the neighborhood: the Capuano School, which used to be the Edgerly; Full Circle and Next Wave High School and Jr. High School; East Hamm Brook Community School. So we really wanted to stay in the neighborhood where we could continue to have those relationships that we’ve worked pretty hard to establish in the first place,” she said.

“It was hard to find a large enough space. When the Theatre building came up as an option, we put together a team and we put together a proposal, and our proposal was selected by the task force and recommended by the Mayor and approved by the board,” she said.

“This was Mayor Kelly-Gay. We submitted our proposal in November 2001. It finally got approved by the Aldermen in June of 2002,” she said.

Gervens said Mudflat hopes to move in as soon as a legal issue with the Theatre’s remaining tenant-at-will has been resolved. It’s frustrating to wait so long, but there are some spectacular plans for the new building, Gervens said.

“The classroom space for hand-building will be twice as big. That’s part of our goal: to have a larger studio where there can be more space,” she said.

“When you have 10 students in here working, there’s not a lot of clearance to walk around. It will be nice to have smaller tables where fewer people can sit to work or one person can have a whole smaller table to work at,” she said.

“Another thing we’re adding in the new space is what we’re calling ‘multi-purpose rooms.’ It’s about having a space where, when we have visiting artists come to do workshops on weekends, we can have that workshop in an extra classroom space, as opposed to having to kick the students out of the classrooms during open lab hours,” she said.

In addition, Gervens said the ceilings will be higher, there will be skylights in the building, and there will be big windows along the front of the building that open to let in fresh air.

Wherever it’s located, Mudflat Studio aims to please. “We try to foster that kind of environment here where people feel comfortable working, she said.

“We want them to feel welcome and we want to be there to help them whenever and however we can,” she said.

This friendly attitude helps to accomplish its mission to promote and expand awareness and interest in ceramic arts.

The Porter Square Gallery also helps. Open year-round and offering the work of 47 ceramic artists, all of whom are affiliated in some way with Mudflat, the Gallery is a great opportunity for us to have a more public face for our organization that’s in this retail shopping center, Gervens said. “We’re very pleased with how it’s going there.”

“There’s a huge range of work there, which is nice—a big price range, as well as the styles of work,” she said.

“It’s nice to able to represent so many of our artists there as well. It’s a great way for them to supplement their income, to sell some work there,” she said.

Another way Mudflat raises awareness of ceramic arts is through their open studios and sales, which occur twice a year, she said.

“The one in May coincides with Somerville Open Studios, which is that weekend long event all over Somerville when people get to go around and check out artists’ studio spaces and a huge variety of artwork,” she said.

“That event usually happens the first weekend in May and involves over 200 Somerville artists,” Gervens said.

“We also do a second open studio event in December, which is about 10 days long. We usually have 75-85 people who are at Mudflat who participate in those events. There’s an opportunity to see a lot of different clay pieces, functional and sculptural pieces,” she said.

Gervens said through its open studios and Gallery, classes and scholarships, Mudflat Studio has succeeded in increasing interest in clay and in the process has become an indispensable part of the Somerville community.

While patiently waiting to move into the new building, Mudflat artists keep working their magic on clay.
That famous teenage wizard may have a phoenix-feather wand, an invisibility cloak and a supersonic broomstick. But the Mudflat potters have wheels and kilns and steady hands—tools that produce pieces beautiful enough to please even the most discerning aesthete yet functional enough for a college sophomore. And if you buy or make a mug at Mudflat, it could, if taken care of, last your lifetime and your children’s lifetimes and your children’s children’s lifetimes.

In an age of excess and waste as embodied by the ubiquitous paper coffee cup, somehow this seems truly magical.