About Me



Where to start, I guess the beginning is as good a place as any.

I was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in St. Paul’s Hospital on July 26, 1971. Both of my parents have an artistic background, so I guess I can blame my penchant for pottery on them. My Mum took various art classes both in Burnaby and at ACAD in Calgary, like painting and intaglio print making. My Father was a rolling stone I mean jazz musician in the late 60’s and he also attended the Berkley School of Music in Boston
So there has been a spark of creativity in me from the beginning and clay has been the outlet for the past 11+ years. I first learned to throw while attending Mount Royal College in ‘93. I signed up for a campus rec. class and was hooked. I kept coming back and signing up for more. I think that lasted for about 3 semesters. To my parent’s relief, I finally got a grip on what I wanted to accomplish with my academic life and moved out of province to Prince George, BC to attend the University of Northern British Columbia. I received my B.Sc. in Wildlife Biology, but did not touch clay for 3.5 years during that time (unless you cound the clay I dug up for my Forest Soils class). I came back to Calgary and finally got back to clay in 2001 when I joined Fairview Studios, owned and operated by Dave Settles and I have been there ever since.
My education in clay has been pretty much self directed. In 2003, several potters from Fairview Studios, including myself, travelled to Ireland to attend a salt fire workshop with Marcus O’Mahoney at his Glencairn Studio just outside Lismore, not far from Waterford. Several years later, in 2006, I took a week long workshop at Red Deer College with Cathi Jefferson where the focus was on form and function. The next spring, I was off to Burnaby, BC to attend the Triennial Clay Symposium put on by the BC Potters Guild and most recently, I travelled to Lexington Kentucky to attend a Potters Council workshop. Aside from these semi-formal educational experiences, I have never really stopped searching out information about pottery. I use the internet heavily in my daily questing to learn even more about this vast topic, be it pictures, to technical articles. This art form is so vast that I will never lack for something new to learn. When I began this blog, the only goal I had in mind was to document my pottery life for myself and if it interested anyone else, then the more the merrier. As I get more involved with my own blog, I have begun following other potter bloggers and I have found that being able to take a peek into someone else’s pottery life is very enjoyable. I get to see what others do (pottery and blogging), how they do it, and all the other things that run through a studio potter's brain.