By Miles Hilton
Marcia Merrins opens her artist’s statement with the sentence, “when I make something with my hands, I put my heart into it too.” Merrins, a ceramicist who works and sells pottery as Kniti Griti Works, is passionate about process. Her pieces display at least three firing processes – wood firing, traditional Japanese Raku firing, and contemporary electric kiln firing – used for distinct ‘product lines’ of ceramics.
personalities of people, characters, or archetypes, and can
also be commissioned.
Her displays include fairy houses – small clay cottages with fairies perched on the roof – footed bowls that feel like the lower half of huge ceramic dolls, and animals in various shades of brown, gray, and black, the result of the traditional firing processes she uses for those pieces. Merrins explains, each piece has an unique shape because, “every piece is constructed by hand, without the use of a potter’s wheel.”
A dazzling array of Kniti Griti Works wares are now on display at the Octagon gallery, at Patterson Library in Westfield, through May 10, 2024.
At the gallery opening, the small space contains more individual pieces than I’ve seen at any previous exhibit. Pop-up shelves along one wall are crammed with 3-foot tall footed bowls, each a recognizable “personality” such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Lucille Ball, or a beach-goer. A shelf along the opposite wall holds a dozen fairy houses, each with the same basic structure but different coloration and detail, while the rest of the space is filled with beautifully-colored clay animals. A herd of bison takes over one wall, a herd of elephants fills another.
Merrins began sculpting “12 to 15” years ago, setting up Kniti Griti Works soon after to sell the surplus of ceramic pieces she was producing. “My first wonky little bowls I thought were magic”, Merrins reminisces. After a while, she tired of creating simple bowls. “That’s when I started putting feet on them.”
personalities of people, characters, or archetypes, and can
also be commissioned.
Merrins clearly iterates on a few basic themes (another wall full of individual sculpted and glazed flatware is the exception), using the stability of a few sculpted forms to play with color and detail, drawing out the personalities of each piece. This process of detail and glazing is under careful control in the footed bows and fairy houses, which are fired using the electric kiln process you’d encounter at a paint-your-own pottery store. But her clay animals, fired using wood and Raku processes, are an entirely different story.
“The Raku technique is essentially when glazed ceramics are taken from the kiln while they are still glowing red hot and are then placed in a material that would be able to catch fire,” Merrins writes. The process of transferring pieces from the kiln to the flammable material is typically a three-person job, which Merrins performs alone. “The Raku animals are glazed,” but by “kind of splashing it on,” says Merrins.
By contrast, wood-fired pieces are not glazed. Instead, “they go in white, and all the brown and gray colors are from the actions of the flame and the ash.” Wood firing is an even more intensive undertaking, so involved that it requires a community of “potters who love that process”, organized as Scott’s Creek Collective, to perform. Many of Merrin’s wood-fired animals have pearlescent sheens reminiscent of oil-slicks. But even this effect, the artist tells me, is due to “the melting of the ash onto the surface” of the piece rather than a glaze.
Raku and wood firing leave many more artistic choices up to physics. “Ash, smoke, heat, and other random events result in beauty on clay,” writes Merrins. The animals it produces benefit from this randomness, their lively sense of natural motion enhanced by the random play of color and texture across their skin. This series “brings awareness to threatened endangerment” of many of the animals it represents. Perhaps ironically, it also produces “a high breakage rate”.
Merrin’s work is available online on Instagram and Facebook, as well as at www.knitigritiworks.com.
The Octagon Gallery is located at 40 S. Portage St. Westfield, NY 14787 and can be contacted at (716) 326-2154.