About Me

I began my relationship with clay when I was in High School.   After graduating, I worked upholstering furniture and made fine wood and silk lined violin cases.  Those jobs gave me plenty of opportunity to work with my hands making beautiful pieces of quality for people.  I felt the attraction and call to pursue a life working in church ministry.  That life would be school, prayer and ministry for 20 years.  I remember having a wheel and a kiln and doing my clay art in the basements of whichever facilities I found myself in at the time.  They were simple pieces, and I enjoyed the excitement of people about them.   A revelation came to me through a fellow student who was a clay artist too when he said to me… "Mark, it is important that you own yourself as an artist.  You are an artist.  Clay is your medium."  Wow, the flood gates opened up.  “That is why I am the way the way I am,”  I thought.  My natural attraction to form, color, design and creative activities and ideas were now explained.  I used clay in my ministry work.  People loved it.  While in church ministry, I started a work for children called Project CLAY (Community Love Activating Youth) which offered children involved in the court system a place and a people to mentor, teach and care for them.  Life changed as it does. I left active ministry.  Project CLAY ended after 18 years. Ceramic art, gardening, property management and school teaching currently allows me to be free to make, live inspired and encouraging others to do the same.