Meet Susan DeMay | Clay artist, making functional and decorative wares with bright, saturated colors and a variety of motifs.

We had the good fortune of connecting with Susan DeMay and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Susan, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
As a young adult (on my own at age 18,) I worked in a number of unskilled labor jobs and I came to know that I could not do these for the rest of my life. Even when I was in high school I had worked in a jewelry factory and did the same thing all day long — this did not agree with me. I also did not like having difficult bosses in a number of the jobs in which I worked throughout my adulthood. Having my own business seemed like a great way to circumvent this issue!
I decided to go to college with the idea of finding a way to do “art” as a career choice. In my youth (elementary school through high school,) I loved drawing, painting assemblage and clay, and wanted to find a way to do this work throughout my workday, without having to have an unrelated job on the side. While I was going through various college art programs, I found ceramics to be very engaging and to be a plausible way to make a living through pottery-making. Ceramics, more than the other artforms I had tried, suited my personality. I liked how the process was broken up into a variety of steps.
Additionally, I am not one to sit all day long in one position and working in clay is very kinesthetic and this also suited my personality. To this day, I enjoy the process and have developed interesting ways of creating work that makes the my studio feel less like a factory.
While I was in college and had access to materials and equipment, I developed skills and design ideas that appealed to a lot of people. After acquiring my own materials and equipment, I was ready to set up my own operation. I had a couple accounts and could begin a business with a small market established already. The demand for my work grew from there.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
People tell me that they can spot my work “a mile away!” I attribute this to the fact that I use a full palette of glaze types and colors. I was using this wide range of colors early on when earth tones was the only acceptable color choice, except for maybe traditional Asian copper reds. Since then I have incorporated some 50 glazes into my work, a practice that I have regularly been criticized for by other potters. “Susan DeMay never met a glaze she didn’t like and try to squeeze into each and every platter.”
Understanding and working with this many glazes is not easy! Some are runny, some bubble easily, some are incompatible with others, and so on. Each has its own quirks, with the amount of water in each being very specific. Through much testing and other experimentation, I have gained control over this many glazes and create with them a variety of images that are very stylistic. My techniques do not rally involve “painting” per se — instead, I pour, dip, splash, blob and employ a variety of resist methods.
I learned how to employ others to help me in various parts of the business — without them I could not have produced enough to keep up with the demand. At the height of my profession, I had nine employees and over twenty outlets, with the Smithsonian Museum Stores being my biggest account. I shipped to the Smithsonian for nearly ten years, before becoming a fulltime ceramics professor at Vanderbilt University. I kept my business going on weekends and in the summer, with assistants working when I was not there. When I retired from teaching, I still had a handful of accounts. I ship and deliver to those to this day — in Nashville I sell to the Frist Art Museum Store and at the Clay Lady Campus. I am amazed that after all these years there is still a local demand for my work! I expect to be producing for a few more years and am still excited with what I am doing.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
When my best friends come to visit, I would have many spots on the itinerary. My friends are artists as well, so during the day I would take them to the Frist Art Museum and the Parthenon. I would tell them to come for the first weekend of the month and to go on the art walks with me. I especially like the Wedgewood/Houston neighborhood. While we are downtown, I would take them to the lower Broad music venues which is always so much fun! I think they would enjoy catching a show at the Ryman. The restaurants in the 12th Avenue District (the Gulch) offer fantastic places to eat.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
When I was in graduate school at Peabody/Vanderbilt, I worked for the renowned Nashville ceramicist, Sylvia Hyman. At that time she was producing a line of functional stoneware while also developing sculptural forms. I saw that a clay artist could make a living through pottery-making while also exploring unique sculpture. She was a role model for me in so many ways. I learned of the many venues in which she sold her work and the many ways in which she promoted herself. She was generous to me with her knowledge, disciplined in her practice and very strict with how she wanted things done. Sylvia worked in clay up until two weeks before her death at the age of 92, and we had been dear friends for three-and-a-half decades.

Website: https://www.susandemay.com

Image Credits
Luton Photography