Alison Gardner

Artist’s Statement

When I was about 7 years old, my parents took a pottery class at the City College. They left me, my brother, a babysitter, and some clay to play with and told us they were going to class to throw pots. That sounded like fun to me, so when they came home, they found us making pinch pots and throwing them against the wall. The next week my parents took us to class with them to show us what ‘throwing pots’ really meant. The teacher's demo looked like magic! I decided on the spot that I wanted to learn how to do that someday.

I love making functional pottery and I love using functional pottery and make the merging of beauty and function a goal in my work. I try to make pots that are beautiful, feel good in the hand and are fun to eat, drink, serve or pour from. I also love nature, and my pottery is heavily influenced by nature in form, color and patterns.

I delight in inventing my own glazes using locally sourced material from the Mendocino coast where I live. I use wood ash, river silts, local clays and muds, and a few materials which I gather on trips inland, such as serpentine from east of Boonville and volcanic ash from Lake County. This assures that each of my pots contains a little bit of Mendocino.

Alison Gardner hails from Santa Barbara, CA, moving with her family to the Mendocino coast when she was 10. 

Alison has been involved with clay since the age of 7, and refined her skills as a student in Mendocino High School. She studied pottery at the College of the Redwoods Mendocino Coast Campus in 1982. Working there as an aide, she learned to mix glazes and fire the kilns. Her studies also include an R.O.P. vocational pottery class and workshops or lessons from many fellow potters. These classes, and the many books and magazine articles she has read have influenced her style.

Early in 2000, Alison began experimenting with making her own glazes using ashes from her wood stove, local silts and clays. All her stoneware glazes now have some local materials in them, usually combined with commercial rock dusts.

Nearly all of Alison’s pots are high-fired stoneware, fired to cone ten (around 2380 degrees F, or about the same temperature as your average basaltic volcano). Most of her work is fired in a gas kiln using a reducing atmosphere. Other firing methods used occasionally include salt, wood raku and pit firing.

In addition to her pottery, Alison likes to garden, hike, mushroom hunt, cook, and most recently is involved in writing a wild mushroom cookbook.