Bio

Bohn's Bio

I come from a family that loves stories, and grew up surrounded by raucous tales told over the dinner table, some impressive, some zany, some stretching the bounds of believability. Stories are wonderful things. It is through narrative that the complexity of life is distilled into bite-sized morsels, allowing others to share and delight in the experience of one.

My Clay Story begins when, as a child, I took my first ceramic class at the Brooklyn Museum. Soon, I was saving babysitting money for a kick wheel and had set up a primitive studio in the basement. Moving to Boston to attend college, I found that cooperatives were abundant and joined Mudflat Studios. Gradually, I moved into becoming a full time potter, making functional items based on animal themes, fairy tales, and stories of my own. I joined a smaller group, Feet of Clay Cooperative in Brookline, Massachusetts. Next came marriage and then children, a redirecting of my work into teaching which gradually lead me to return to college for a degree in art education and then to becoming a middle school art teacher in Newton, Massachusetts. In June 2018 I retired from teaching and have been able to spend more time working at Feet of Clay.

Potters are wonderfully warm and generous people and most of what I have learned has been from teachers and friends from the different studios in which I have worked. Throughout all these years, clay has been my storytelling medium, and whether it is a character from an existing fairy tale, an evocative expression on an anonymous face, or a creature twining around a jar, I envision each piece as one tangible bit of a larger, more complex existence. I hope that, as you look at the work, you will find yourself creating stories of your own.