Emily Richards

Emily Richards’ work can get pretty messy. As an instructor and manager at The Muddy Pig, a pottery wheel studio in Little Rock, her typical day might include teaching private lessons, leading group classes, or trimming, glazing, and firing pieces made by studio members. It’s a job that requires her to get her hands dirty in the most literal sense—like, clay under the fingernails and splattered on clothes kind of dirty. But it’s all part of an ancient craft she finds joy in both following and teaching.

Her own path to ceramics was accidental. While at Arkansas State University, she chose a degree in studio art with an emphasis in painting and drawing, then signed up for the requisite ceramics class. And then she took another, and another, and another, until she had enough credits for an emphasis in ceramics, too. She found she had fallen in love with the medium’s limitless possibilities. “When you’re working on a canvas, it feels like, this is your space. But when you have a ball of clay, you get to make literally anything,” she says. “It’s way more freeing. And it feels less permanent during the process. At any point, you can squish it and start over.”

When she’s not teaching others and managing the studio, Emily finds time for herself at the wheel. Her current work showcases a penchant for precision, with fine lines unfurling as flowers and vines around the curve of hand-thrown vases. She first sketches out a design in pencil, which will disappear in the high heat of the kiln, then goes over it in liner glaze for an effect that resembles pen and ink on paper. Painting directly onto the bisque—clay that’s been fired once but not yet glazed—accentuates the delicate details. She uses colored glazes as an accent around the lip of each vessel and inside, making them water-tight and functional, before a final firing.

While vases are her favorite thing to throw, Emily concedes she’s not always sure what that 3-pound lump of clay will turn into when she first wets the wheel and starts shaping it. “At a private lesson recently I told the student, ‘You need to listen because the clay will talk to you. It will tell you what it wants to be,’” she says. “Sometimes it wants to be a bowl, sometimes it wants to be a vase. But if you get good enough, you can start to control it and you get to tell it what you’re going to make.” See more of Emily’s work on Instagram (@emilyrichards_art), and sign up for one of her classes at muddypigstudio.com.