Susie Fowler's friends call her "the beauty-maker". She aspires to find and reveal beauty, in nature and in clay. Her stunning clay pots contain many amazing elements. They are inlaid with colored clay, carved, drawn on, tooled, impressed with grasses and flowers, and pieced together like jigsaw puzzles. Each pot is created inside other pots, using smaller clay pieces, and then working in a circular motion around the inside of the form, connecting the pieces. Working this way prevents her from checking on the image as she goes along. And it requires a clear thought process with no interruptions, so that the flow of the images stays uncluttered.
Fowler lives and works on her 33-acre native wildlife preserve outside of Austin, Texas, where she picks the flowers and grasses used to impress her pots. Her largest pots stand 21 inches tall and are 21 inches across (and weigh over 100 pounds when the clay is wet)! Fowler's art is best described as something like ink-covered crayon palettes that we would carve through with a toothpick as a child, to reveal a drawing underneath the ink. She has developed her method over 30 years.
Fowler first mixes colorants into a blend of light stoneware and porcelain to be used in the coil inlay. (Coils are pieces of clay rolled up like a snake.) Then she selects a large or small pot in which to work. She throws out small slabs of stoneware clay and proceeds to throw it and stretch it out like pizza dough. Then she adds impressions of native grasses and flowers. She begins the building process by pressing slabs of clay into the base of the form and continuing up the sides of the form to create the pot, working from the base to the rim, continuously adding more slabs of impressed clay. She joins them together with the colored coils until the entire form is covered with clay imagery. The piece must then stiffen to a "leather-hard" consistency. Then, the clay pot is removed onto foam rubber pads until it's firm enough to be turned.
At this point the pot is turned on a banding wheel as Fowler draws, tools and carves, which ties together all the built-in imagery. It dries under plastic sheeting, is bisque fired and then glazed with her own glazes made in large tubs. Finally, she removes the exterior glaze coat by scraping it off, sanding it with a nylon scrub pad, and cleaning it with a damp sponge. This leaves the glaze in the impressions, drawings and tooling marks only, while revealing the raw clay texture of a matte surface and highlighting the drawings with black or blue lines. The pot is fired again, cooled and ground smooth. The interwoven texture of images on Fowler's clay pots are awe-inspiring.
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