River Street Potters opened in April this year in the basement of 337 River Street West. The potters are Faithe Sovdi, Shannan Taylor, Dianne Newman, and Melanie McFarlane, and their only goal is nourishing their enthusiasm to create and play with clay.
“It’s not a business,” Faithe Sovdi explained to MooseJawToday.com. Technically, it is a business, she amended, but that isn’t why they do it.
“It’s a passion, right? To create and to make stuff! We hold a spring sale, we might do a Christmas one, but now we’re in the Moostletoe tour we don’t know if we’ll have time to do both.
“That’s as commercial as it gets, and then we do classes on the side.”
River Street Potters is one of the stops on the upcoming Moostletoe tour of art studios in Moose Jaw. The annual tradition, now in its 10th year, is on Saturday, Oct. 15 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is entirely free, sponsored by the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery and the Yvette Moore Gallery.
Sovdi teaches most of the classes at River Street Potters. She is a retired teacher and principal and teaches simply because she loves to. She charges the minimum she can and noted humorously that eventually she might have to charge enough to break even on the costs of clay, glaze, and the time it takes to fire each piece in her personal kiln.
Newman also teaches some classes. However, McFarlane and Taylor do not — for them, the project is purely personal, a way to explore the craft that brings them peace and happiness.
“This has been my dream,” Sovdi said. “I’ve always wanted to do it and I tried it once before in a friend’s garage.”
The garage wasn’t heated, though, and Sovdi found it difficult to work clay in sub-zero temperatures.
Sovdi has been playing with clay for 14 years and has previously taught classes and sold her work under the name ClayPlay by Sis. Her work has many fantastical elements — dragons, wizards, gnomes, fairy houses, and dragons are particular favourites.
She was thrilled that her daughter, McFarlane, who is also a published author, and two friends decided to join her. The group has been mentored by local artists including Wendy Parsons and Zach Dietrich, Kathy Verbeke and Dorothy Yakiwchuk, and Rob Froese.
“They mentored us, those of us who were really into this, and I learned so much from them, I can’t even begin to tell you,” Sovdi said. “I fell desperately in love with pottery. But because I’m a hand-builder, I don’t like to just build a functional piece. I thought if I could learn the wheel and how to make mugs and bowls and all kinds of different fun stuff, then I could add to it.”
And that’s what she does. When she isn’t hand-building fantastic, beautifully-glazed and detailed decorative pieces, Sovdi builds functional pieces on the wheel, then hand-builds on top on them to bring them to further life. The eye of a dragon peers out from the rim of a mug, for example, its claws scoring the surface, a glittering, rich copper glaze livening its scales.
Each of the River Street Potters brings a different interest to the art. The quartet loves to gather in their new studio for a form of play that is healing, satisfying, and interactive; hours can slip by unnoticed and unhurried.
McFarlane combines glazes to create new shades and colours, blended gorgeously. Newman has worked for about 18 years to master the wheel, although she is doing more hand building now that she’s a River Street Potter, Sovdi noted.
For Taylor, being an artist is about the combination of calm and excitement. Art for art’s sake is inherently soothing. Anxieties and worries fade away and joy takes their place.
“She and I knew each other (from work), so when she retired, she asked if I would teach her how to do pottery stuff, and she just wanted to make a wizard for her son in the worst way,” Sovdi said. “So, we made a wizard together, and she was saying, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this!’”
That’s the kind of delight and individual expression the River Street Potters are all about.
Find them on Facebook at facebook.com/riverstreetpotters to learn about upcoming classes and see the work they and their students are producing, and if you’d to see the studio in person the October 15 Moostletoe tour is the perfect opportunity.
(This article is part of MooseJawToday.com’s coverage of local artists for the Moostletoe tour. Watch for further articles as the date approaches.)
