Mary Nolan

Mary Nolan identifies herself as one of the scores of people who took up pottery during the pandemic after binging the Great Pottery Throw Down. She took a hand-building class at Calapooia Clay in Albany in the spring of 2021 and has been exploring several types of forms since—mostly functional, sometimes decorative, mixing hand-building and throwing. Her favorite things to make are zoomorphic pots, seed pod vessels, kirinuki-style vessels and coil pots with the forms created by the exposed coils on display.

“I’ve just about decided to scale back my wild, undisciplined experimentation for a while and focus on those things,” she says, and finds particular joy in her animal-footed ‘offering bowls.’ These works are inspired by a pre-dynastic period (3700-3450 B.C.E) Egyptian piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, a tilted bowl on human feet, subject to much ‘perhaps’ speculation by archeologists. “Possum feet, duck feet, beaver feet, tapir feet…these are more my style,” Mary explains.

Her full-time occupation is senior instructor of cultural anthropology at Oregon State University.