I'm a ceramic artist in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, and I've been working in clay for forty years. Long enough to have strong opinions about it, and for it to have a few about me.

For most of that time I made big things — coil-built bowls, planters, sculpture. Coil building is slow, unglamorous, physical work: you roll out ropes of clay, stack them, join them, and pull a form up inch by inch over hours, on your feet the entire time. I loved it. I loved every unreasonable minute of it.

Then my body started changing the rules. Chronic pain, arthritis, tendonitis, Ehlers-Danlos, scoliosis, a spinal fusion, and the accumulated evidence of a life spent skiing and working hard and not being especially careful about either. The coil work went first. It was simply no longer something I could ask of myself.

What I could not give up was the clay. Working with my hands isn't my job description, it's how I stay well — the thing that keeps me level. So quitting was never actually on the table. I just had to find a smaller door back in.

Earrings. I'd made them years earlier, just for fun, nothing serious about it, and used beads. But when I picked them back up in clay, something opened. They were lighter and faster and far more forgiving of my hands and my back — and, to my surprise, more freeing than anything I'd made in a decade. Forty years of learning how clay behaves, concentrated into something that fits in your palm. It turned out I never needed the work to be big. I needed it to be clay.

Every pair is pinched by hand, so no two are alike. I finish them with sterling silver ear hooks and fire them in my electric kiln or — twice a year, and I start counting down early — in a wood kiln. You load the kiln, then you and an amazing crew feed it around the clock for days in shifts, and then you hand the rest of it over to the flame and the ash and wait to find out what they had in mind. Nothing ever comes out the way you pictured it. Also, and I'd like this on the record: playing with fire is fun. Forty years in, that has not worn off.

I've been part of northern New Mexico's wood-fire community for almost twenty years, and it has shaped my work as much as any material has. You cannot fire a wood kiln alone — that's not humility, it's scheduling. In 2022 I founded the Seco Potter Fest here in Arroyo Seco, and it's grown into three days over Labor Day weekend with more than twenty artists from around Taos, northern New Mexico, and Colorado, live music, a clay table for the kids, and a silent auction for youth in the arts. It runs on roughly the same logic as a wood firing: a pile of potters, a lot of hours, nobody entirely in control. The difference is that everyone gets to show the public what came out of the kiln and go home with money. I've run it every year since.