Charlotte Artists Shaping the Ceramic Scene

Grace Stott makes ceramics where trash and beauty collide: Cherubim hold empty cans of Diet Coke and crumpled-up Cheetos packets, rendered in clay and glazed to a high luster. “People like shiny things,” she says, making that observation sound like both a market niche and a philosophy of life.

Stott also makes clay versions of cats licking each other’s butts and mosaics of naked women contorting their bodies so they’ll fit like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. “Her work lands between fragile and robust,” says Renee Cloud, gallery manager at Goodyear Arts. “It’s an interesting place to play with in ceramics.”

Stott’s house, within walking distance of Bojangles Coliseum, overflows with her own art: an unfinished mosaic in her bathroom, a mural in progress in the kitchen, a large ceramic cube adorned with nude women (or, as she calls it, a “lady box”) on a side table. Her art competes for space with stray Duplo blocks and a bubble blower, the scattered possessions of Stott’s 3-year-old daughter, Mabel. “No matter where I’m at, I will take over the space,” Stott confesses. “Me and my daughter have that in common.” 

Cloud can testify to that habit. Roughly eight years ago, she and Stott shared studio space at Goodyear. She says Stott was supposed to clean out the studio before Cloud started working there. But when Cloud arrived, she discovered that Stott “had missed the memo. … Half the studio was pristine, and half was in disarray. She had pushed all of her accoutrements to one side, a sea of newspapers and ceramic shards and tubes of paint. On the other side, she wrote my name on the wall. And spelled it wrong.”

Stott has embraced the chaos of her own living environment and artistic practice: “I love great paintings, but with clay, there’s an illusion of collaboration with the material. It almost feels like gardening, where you have these hopes for it and you’re excited to see what it turns out to be. It feels less like you created it and more like Santa Claus came and brought you a present.” She grins. “Clay people are happier than other types of art makers.”

Stott’s smile reveals her braces; she’s 34 but looks more like a teenager in an oversized T-shirt. The orthodonture isn’t the only part of her that evokes adolescence. As she freely confesses, she’s been obsessed with making art about cats and women her entire life. “As a teenager, I was Art Girl,” she explains. “And because I was a teenager, I was like, ‘I have so many feelings about life and sexuality and my body, and what am I?’”

Stott’s “lady box,” a ceramic cube adorned with nude women

Stott’s family moved to Charlotte in 2005, when she was 15. “Growing up half-Mexican, half-white, I didn’t fit in anywhere,” she says—but when she discovered she was a direct descendant of three sisters who were accused during the Salem witch trials (two were hung, one got off), she decided she was a witch herself. 

As if that wasn’t enough teenage drama, she secretly married her husband, Casey Mattingly, when she was in high school. “Obviously it worked out, but we weren’t making good choices,” she says. “We were toxically obsessed with each other and thought that if we got married, we wouldn’t break up after graduation.” The unexpected hitch to their plan: Once you get married, you get dropped from your parents’ insurance.

Nevertheless, they stayed together. Casey went from being a musician and barista to software developer, while Stott tried to break into movie production before she realized she wanted to make art full time. Realizing that his wife had been happiest in her college ceramics classes, Casey enrolled her at the Clayworks studio as a Christmas gift. “And once I started doing ceramics again,” she says, “I just never stopped.”

Collector and ceramic artist Aaron Ligon met Stott at Clayworks. “I’m attracted to ceramic art that is super-difficult and that would not occur to me to make,” he says. “In a world where people try too hard to find their gimmick, Grace doesn’t have one—she just makes things in her style that reflect the world she lives in.” Ligon owns five or six Stott pieces and particularly treasures Infinity Kitty, a circle of cats who eagerly lick each other’s butts: “Part of what’s so beautiful about Grace’s art is that even in the hoity-toity art world where things are always too clever or inaccessible, she can make something unique and funny.”

She plans to fire white gold onto the spikes of her unfinished cat planter

Stott often cautions: “Don’t do art if you want to make money.” She nevertheless has taken various steps to advance her career—organizing group shows; creating the feminist exhibition Cherry Pie (which she basically treated as an opportunity to meet other Charlotte artists) in 2016; or curating Too Hot to Handle, an exhibition of ceramic mugs currently on display in the gift shop of the SOCO Gallery. She doesn’t lament losing favorite objects when she sells them. Anything that decreases the clutter in her home is a victory. She tells me she’s thinking of turning that “lady box” into a lamp to improve its commercial appeal, although she recognizes that might be a little too wacky for most tastes.

“It’s been great working with galleries like SOCO,” Stott says. “They can help you set prices, and they have a network of collectors who can buy work. It’s not like you make money just because you’ve made something. Someone has to buy it.” She shrugs. “Public art is where it’s at.” She leads me out to her back porch, where she has 100 small ceramic pieces arranged on the ground—dog heads and cherries and pineapples and opossums. It’s a commission from a local developer. She’ll glaze each piece and install them as a ceramic mural in the lobby of a new building, with some of her pieces also serving as miniature flowerpots. 

Stott has created a woodland menagerie she’ll work into a 4-by-4-foot ceramic mural for the Link Apartments CYKEL common area in Seversville.

Behind the house is a small shack that serves as Stott’s studio. The shelves overhead are jammed with different glazes. We talk about her love of making naked women, how they’re more liberated in their own ceramic skin than she is in her own flesh (maybe, she says, because she was raised Mormon). “They’re sort of sexy, and they’re sort of not,” she says. “They’re being free, and I just want them to be comfortable.”

Her female nudes also evoke fertility statues, like the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf. “I had a really hard time getting pregnant,” Stott says. “Whatever’s happening in my life ends up in the art, but I want to make it fun and inviting and beautiful. And shiny and colorful and pretty.” She grins again, flashing her braces one more time. “There’s going to be gold on it.”

– Gavin Edwards

Five More ‘Fired Up’ Charlotte Ceramicists

Patrick Cooley, Cooley Clay

Symbiosis by Patrick Cooley. Photo by Chris Barfield

In the early aughts, artist Robert Putnam put together an advanced ceramics studio at Blue Valley High School in Overland Park, Kansas, and taught classes on clay sculpture. Patrick Cooley was one of his students. “I didn’t realize it at the time,” says Cooley, 35, “but I was spoiled by that.” After high school, Cooley attended Savannah College of Art and Design, where he earned a master’s in architecture and a minor in ceramics. He moved to Charlotte in 2017 to be closer to his wife’s family and took a job as an interior designer for architecture firm LS3P to support his young family. But he hopes to one day be a full-time artist and, in his free time, makes glossy ceramic sculptures inspired by the ocean. “Today, the design industry is very much inspired by nature,” Cooley says. His pieces, which he sells on Etsy, Instagram, and at nonprofit Clayworks, “continue that dialogue.”

Sam Mehalko, Movin & Groovin Ceramics

Checkered and striped mug by Sam Mehalko.

Sam Mehalko became enamored with pottery in a middle-school art class. But she didn’t work with clay again for more than a decade. In 2022, she enrolled in an adult pottery class in her hometown of McKinney, Texas. Within a year, she quit her job as a baker and barista to become a full-time ceramist and moved to Charlotte to be closer to the ocean and mountains. Today, the 28-year-old creates colorful and whimsical wheel-thrown mugs, bowls, vases, teapots, candleholders, and more in her garage studio. She sells her wares on her website and at art markets and local coffee shops: Provided Coffee in uptown and Concord; Verb Coffee in Concord; and CHNO Coffee in Indian Trail. 

Katy Murchison, Katy Murchison Pottery

Berry bowls in tourmaline, white and sapphire float by Kathy Murchison.

In 2019, Katy Murchison decided to go back to work after eight years as a stay-at-home mom to her two daughters. Instead of returning to her previous career in arts nonprofits (including the Arts & Science Council and Arts for Life), she decided to pursue ceramics—a skill she’d learned at the University of Alabama while she majored in art education. “I enjoy the process of starting with a lump of clay and creating a lasting work that artfully combines both beauty and function,” says the 53-year-old. In 2020, she converted a backyard shed into a studio, where she makes clean and classic functional pieces—bowls, mugs, spoon rests, trinket dishes, earrings—and teaches classes for adults and kids.

Jing Huang, Jing Huang Ceramics

Loop #12, glazed stoneware by Jing Huang.

Jing Huang felt her first “deep connection” to clay in 2008, when she started at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in Jingdezhen, China—a city known as the “porcelain capital” since the Song Dynasty. Today, she’s a full-time artist with three ceramic-arts degrees from schools in China, Canada, and New York. Since her husband’s work brought them to Charlotte in 2022, Huang, 35, works from her home studio and Clayworks, where she also teaches. Her fluid, abstract sculptures—made by hand with an ancient coil-building method—are regularly exhibited in museums all over the world. 

Huang says she usually starts projects without a clear plan. Her artistic style, she says, is “rooted in exploring themes of nature, identity, and culture displacement,” and she often draws inspiration from the landscape of her hometown, Guilin, a city in southern China known for its dramatic limestone peaks. She has a solo exhibition, Across Ten Thousand Mountains, on display at Gravers Lane Gallery in Philadelphia until Nov. 21. 

Zainab Elrahal

Delirium detail by Zainab Elrahal.

Zainab Elrahal took a freshman-year ceramics class at South Mecklenburg High School. She then took one every year of high school and continued at UNC Charlotte, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree with a concentration in ceramics in 2022. “I became incredibly enamored,” she says. “I have a visual processing disorder … and when I create sculptures, the constant vision issues are not as present as they are when working on a 2-D surface. I’m able to rely on my tactile senses instead of vision alone.”

Today, the 24-year-old works as the project manager for public art for the Arts & Science Council and as a studio assistant at Clayworks, where she continues to create her own works—which range from sculptural to functional—whenever possible. She sells her works and takes commissions via her website and at pop-up markets, including Clayworks’ holiday market on Dec. 6-7.

– Tess Allen