The New and Improved Mudflat

Leah Bearce Guérin

VASTLY and impressively improved!

Mind you, it’s been perhaps as many as 20 years since I sublet studio space at Mudflat. Tons, shed loads can change in that time. The entire universe can shift on its axis. It can make a 45º banked turn into fabulous in those two decades.

And Mudflat seems to have done just that.

From the outside the joint’s pretty plain, so I was wholly unprepared for the amazing interior. The architecture’s a cross between a soaring, ancient, wondrous cathedral and the Parc 55 Wyndom lobby in San Francisco.  Or the lobby of Wolfram and Hart (only more open, taller and, probably, demon-free) after Angel moved in.

incredible, soaring ancient-yet-modern feeling space

Mein Gott, this is radically fabulous and light years beyond what they had before. The old place was small, crowded beyond bearing and claustrophobic fit inspiring -- OK, we know that I’m on a hair trigger for that but still! The basement of the original space was where the classroom, lounge, hand building area, glaze and glaze mixing areas could be found. The ceiling was painfully low. No, we didn’t need to duck or walk hunched over but it seemed a place better suited to hobbits nonetheless.

Lisa Knebel

Samantha Wickman

At the new place there are offices. galleries, classrooms and other work space on the first level. It seems to be a mostly open floor plan though I’m sure the glaze area is enclosed in some safe, airtight-ish room.

Individual studio spaces (and there’s, perhaps, twice as many now) and lounges are on the second level. I ascended an open staircase, like a beanstalk through the clouds only not so challenging to climb, to find a rabbit warren-esque maze of small workrooms. Sure, none of the compartments were exactly capacious but, honestly, how much space does anyone really need for potting and small-ish ceramic sculpting? Answer -- not much. Certainly not what I need for painting my large canvasses but I digress.

Back on the first floor, in the Mudflat Instructors gallery, I found two artists whose work absolutely delighted me.

Eileen de Rosas’ poppy, raven and koi painted mugs, bowls and vases.

Leah Bearce Guérin’s wonderful, witty watercolor-esque sketches on white ware.

Of the student work, Samantha Wickman’s fabulous drawing, cartooning on mugs just blew me, and Jen too, solidly away. Some are just amusing, some beautiful and some a wee bit scary in a German expressionist kind of a way. Incredibly, Jen and I only bought two.

Tilla Rodemann

Tilla Rodemann's work had a lovely light humor about it. Morning coffee in a rhino or crow mug would be smile-inducing.

I didn’t see much in the private studio spaces that really turned me on BUT there’s always a gem or three to be found.

Lisa Knebel’s beautifully glazed large bowls always slay me.

David Orser

Embarrassingly, I missed the names of the folks who created the wonderful dog bowls (no cat dishes? ‘the hell?!) and the sharp, handsome, organically incised black and white mugs.

I wish Jen and I could have afforded (or had space) to take home more of the tremendous work we found here. We took home a set of David Orser bowls. His studio’s in Maine now (he and his wife Laurel MacDuffie are the Cedar Mountain Potters). I’m a big, BIG fan of David’s work and David himself. He’s a tremendous artist and human bean!

Gotta say, I missed the presence of a spectacular ceramic sculptor. Way back when, that was Greg Pierce. He's since moved on to teaching all about art, clay and the wild world of glaze chemistry at Columbia Basin College out in Washington. His work had a wild, miles off-leash, organic energy.


More please!