Mary Cotterman
NC Mountains Pre-Conference Artist
BRCC Anagama
Mary Cotterman has always been interested in how humans interact with nature. Most kids love to play in the dirt, but when Mary was young, she would make pinch pots out of the black Texas clay and have her mother bake them in the kitchen oven. When Mary was twelve, she learned at a summer camp how to throw on a potters wheel for the first time. It enticed her to a life of working with clay to create objects that meet the shape of a human hand with something nourishing. Potters have historically had to travel to find the right materials, bringing with them the magic and wisdom of fire and transformation. Similarly, Mary's interest in pottery and tea led her to move to China in 2015. She learned from old masters how to make and pour tea in the Chaozhou Gongfu Cha style, and also learned to speak Mandarin. Meanwhile, she studied making tea pots at the Ming de Yuan production studio. Later, she had a studio above a friend's teapot shop and made work there for a year while continuing to study tea arts, mentoring in formal Cha Yi from a master from a Beijing school. Mary was the first foreigner to study Chaozhou shou la hu teapots. In 2017, she worked a residency at Sanbao International Ceramics Village in Jingdezhen, the home of porcelain. There she curated and managed a gallery, and had the opportunity to study the way nature and people relate, how a confluence of stone, trees, and rivers, can create the perfect place to make fine wares. In 2018, Mary returned to the United States by taking the long way across Europe. She relocated to Asheville, North Carolina, where she could expand her knowledge of medicine, foraging for local plants, and learn traditional folkways and earth based practices. She makes her own distinctive pottery in Asheville, and every vessel contains the wisdom she has absorbed from around the world.
