When they're gone, they're gone.
I grew up on the coast of Maine, in an 1800s New England house. My mom was always making something. A curtain, a quilt, a corner of a room into something else. She cross-stitched. She sewed. My father was an engineer, the kind whose creativity ran logical and adventurous. He built us an art room. He took us boating and biking and hiking, and every weekend we made crafts out of what we found on the shoreline and in the woods. I think that's where I learned that art was something you could give someone. That paying attention was, in itself, a kind of love.
I went to art school as a painter. I left after a year, and I'm not sure I could tell you exactly why. I think I was afraid of what it would ask of me to keep going. Afraid that chasing it would change what it was. I packed up the brushes.
What came next was fashion. After graduation I freelanced in New York, working in and around W Magazine. I loved the rooms, the photographs, the way a single page could be composed to feel like a small, perfect world. But somewhere in the middle of all that beauty, I started to feel hollow. I was making things look beautiful. I wasn't sure I was making anything good.
So I went home. Back to Maine, this time off the coast, to a house on Sugarloaf Mountain. I gave myself the winter.
I came down looking for work that meant something. I went back to school again. This time for occupational therapy. The years after were small rooms and small hands. Children learning to grip a pencil. Children learning to hold a fork. Children whose hands needed someone with patience to remind them what they could do. I learned that patience is the medium. That the smallest victories are usually the ones worth waiting for.
Clay came later. A class on Saturdays. Then two. Then a wheel in the garage. And then it was the work, and it has been the work since.
Every piece I make is shaped, glazed, and finished by hand. I throw in small batches because I work slowly, and because I want each cup to be a little different from the one beside it. No two come out the same. When a batch is ready, I open the shop. When it's gone, it's gone, until the next one is.
What I'm making, finally, is the thing I've always made. I just took a long way around.
— Meredith
Each piece is marked.