Emily Armstrong | Armstrong Pottery

Interview with Katie Bonadies, June 2025

Pictured: RWS Clay Center Manager, Emily Armstrong of Armstrong Pottery.

Emily Armstrong (she/ they) co-manages the clay department at RWS and is researching glaze recipes when I stop by her studio for our interview. Her closed-door private studio has a standing wheel, a desk, and shelves with finished pots and works in progress. I last interviewed Emily in January 2022. Emily has just returned from seven months in residence at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts as their 2025 Salad Days Artist. I pull up a chair and balance my computer on top of a small shelving unit full of clay tools, then Emily and I start discussing this monumental accomplishment.

The Watershed Salad Days residency is a competitive, nationally recognized residency that covers access to a private clay studio, living quarters, meals, materials and kiln firings, as well as a $4,000 stipend. In exchange, residents are contracted to make 500 dinner plates for Watershed’s annual fundraiser. The plates are then sold and enjoyed in a communal meal on Watershed’s campus during peak Maine summer. Residents are expected to make the plates out of commercial terracotta earthenware, a clay body that honors Watershed’s history as a converted brickyard and the locally dug and processed red Maine clay.

Pictured: Salad Days plates made by Emily Armstrong for the residency at Watershed.

Changing clay body was a welcome challenge for Emily who typically uses a white-bodied speckled clay. Emily’s personal work incorporates vibrant colors and unique hand-drawn designs that are showcased by the contrast with the white clay body. A few examples of the work she made before the residency are on the shelves in her studio. She takes a piece down and shows it to me. It is a tray she made, decorated with hand painted, carved American traditional style tattoo animals in rich hues of orange, red, black, green, blue, yellow, brown, and white. Terracotta has its own bold appearance and Emily wasn’t sure how her aesthetic would translate or whether her designs and the clay body would compete.

The last time Emily’s work had to adapt was in response to an unexpected manufacturing change in the clay body she had been using for nine years. “It was painful and confusing, and I didn’t know anything about anything.” The material makeup of the clay had changed and affected her underglaze, glaze, and kiln schedules. She felt forced to make different work, so  Emily started to experiment with everything. She worried at the time that her collectors and wholesale clients would stop supporting her, but the challenge reinforced her voice and forced her to evolve. 

The residency at Watershed has been on Emily’s radar since she was an undergraduate. The past three years Emily prepared an application but never submitted them because she let self-doubt get in the way. “I found different reasons to talk myself out of it like ‘I’m not ready yet’, ‘I’m not stable enough in my practice’. We find all of these different excuses, especially as artists, of having an expectation of where our work should be, what our business should look like, and how we’re choosing to live as an artist before we take on these larger opportunities.”

Emily graduated from MECA&D in 2015 with a degree in ceramics. In the spring of her senior year she applied to gallery exhibitions, residencies, and apprenticeships. She had been taught that’s how you build a ceramics career. A couple of months after graduation a former professor and mentor offered Emily a job as a production assistant to a local potter. The opportunity kept Emily working in clay. Over the past decade Emily has been steadily building her practice and growing her own business. In 2021 she became a potter full time and has been making pots ever since. 

Emily spent last summer preparing for the residency at Watershed by finding subletters for her apartment and studio, finding someone to take in her cats, moving all of her belongings into storage, and fundraising to pay monthly bills that weren’t covered by the residency stipend. These efforts took her energy away from her business and she wasn’t able to do as many shows or fill as many wholesale orders. She also took time to write out five different production plans of how she would organize her time at Watershed. She made schedules, then weighed the pros and cons of each, “You don’t even know if it’s going to work until you start doing it.” 

Pictured: terracotta mugs by Emily Armstrong.

Pictured: terracotta vase by Emily Armstrong.

When Emily got to Watershed it was a relief to stop thinking and start making plates. It gave her a chance to put her production schedule into action and see how it worked on a daily basis. She attributes this smooth transition to all of the preparation and forethought she put into the program before she got there. In the first month of the residency Emily had to acclimate to the new materials and attune her process to measure the inherent unpredictability of this particular type of clay. She tested how terracotta responds to handling, its rate of shrinkage, how it interacts with glazes, and how to work with lower firing temps. She formulated different glazes and slip recipes and had to design a new firing program for her kilns to get the results she wanted. She made glaze tests, slip tests, and performed test firings because not all electric kilns fire the same way. “I was very fortunate that my glazes and slips worked perfectly.”

During the residency Emily fired a Bailey oval kiln that fit 44 plates 11” in diameter (10” when complete) in each firing. She was able to fire both bisque and glaze loads in the same kiln so she could do mixed firings, which helped to make the process faster. It wasn’t until she had only bisqueware and was ‘ripping’ glaze kiln after glaze kiln that she began to burn out. Emily had been accustomed to working nonstop in her personal practice and would go months before she realized she hadn’t taken a day off. Historically, Salad Days residents have pulled all-nighters, working back to back. Once Emily got into a groove at Watershed, she discovered that she was more productive working Monday to Friday from nine-to-five. “What a great life skill, I thought, that I don’t have to sacrifice my own well being to make pots. I can just organize my time.”

I ask Emily to explain the intricacies of making plates because I have heard they are more difficult to make than other types of functional pottery. “We are always thinking of the design and aesthetic, but the functionality supersedes all.” She explains that the first consideration is weight; plates need to be durable because they’re made for practical use. Thick plates take longer to dry, which can end up exploding in the kiln. Emily typically prefers to work with softer clay, especially when she throws plates because she can move larger amounts of clay more easily on the wheel. She likes to use reclaimed clay–leftover clay that is processed so that it can be used again–because she can control the moisture level. Emily processes all of her reclaim by hand, which includes mixing wet and dry clay scraps and reconstituting the mixture to the desired viscosity. This was a significant time consideration to factor into her daily schedule of throwing, trimming, decorating, waxing, and glazing during the residency. It’s a labor intensive process and, ultimately, Emily decided to make her plates as thin as possible to minimize trimming and the amount of reclaim. 

Pictured: Emily Armstrong makes plates in the studio at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. Emily was this year's Salad Days Artist in Residence that concluded this April. The fundraising event will take place on Saturday, July 12, 2025 from 11AM - 2PM at Watershed, 19 Brick Hill Road, Newcastle, Maine. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the residency program.

Plates have a large, wide, flat surface which allows space for movement during the drying process. “The center of plates, if they’re not compressed enough when thrown on the wheel, tend to bubble outwards and convex. We want the face of our plates to have not just flat but an ever so slightly concave shape.” Plates need to be slow dried and if they’re not compressed enough they will form s-line cracks down the center or bottom. “They have to sit for enough time that the rim is set up, not sticky, like firm leather. The center will still be wet and tacky and you need to wrap and cover it properly so the rim doesn’t continue to dry out but your bases do.” Space is another consideration so the plates can set and dry undisturbed. They also need to be flipped at the right time so they don’t sink and slump, Emily explains. Flip them too fast and the plate will warp. Even if a plate has made it through throwing, drying, flipping, and bisque firing it could still warp during glazing. “Pots move around in the kiln. The clay particles are always working to get closer and the glaze surface bubbles up and off the pot then settles back down and goes through all of these chemical reactions to get the finished pieces.” Emily tells me there are different ways to control for all of these things that could go wrong, and that it takes a lot of forethought. 

An example of Emily’s Salad Days plates is in her studio. Her vibrant custom color palette becomes more bold against the earthiness of the red clay. By playing with scale and perspective, the surface designs on the Salad Days plates are a continuation of the foundations of the work Emily has been making for over a decade. She tells me each plate is hand painted and hand carved with a unique combination of folk-inspired floral motifs or line work reminiscent of topographical maps and abstract shapes inspired by Mid-Century Modern textiles. These elements, combined, had given Emily enough creative space to play and evolve throughout the residency and avoid exhaustion. Emily finished the plates early with a minimal amount of loss, giving her a month to focus on making personal work. She says she found it hard to make work for herself because she was burnt out, but made use of her materials and remaining time there nonetheless. 

I ask Emily, “What’s next?” and get an excited response. Emily loved working with terracotta so much that she has no idea what she’s going to do. She’s torn between the familiarity of the clay she usually works with and the terracotta, which she feels has more for her to explore. She’s unsure whether she needs to decide between one or the other, and is questioning how to integrate both into her practice and cohere the two bodies of work. She’s currently rehydrating her white speckled clay to fill orders for her wholesale clients. Her last batch of personal work from Watershed needs to be fired, so she has more time to work that out. “This has really helped me realize I don’t have to box myself in. My work is still my work because I’ve consistently found ways to relate it back to itself through its different iterations. I get to decide what the work is.” 

Tickets for Salad Days go on sale Tuesday, June 3, 2025 and the event takes place on Saturday, July 12, 2025. Emily takes commissions that align with her body of work and is currently open to taking on new wholesale clients. Contact Emily Armstrong through her website, www.armstrongpottery.com, and follow her on Instagram, @armstrongpottery.