Finding my Why
I’m Kathryn, the potter behind Katie Alma Ceramics. I live in New Jersey with my husband, daughter, and 2 dogs. I grew up in NYC, in a tiny apartment in the East Village with my parents and my corgi, Ned.
I spent a few years in college not finding my niche, then I joined the workforce - more interested in the newfound freedom an income offered rather than personal fulfillment. A few moves, jobs, and adventures later found me living in California with my future husband. We moved again to be closer to our roots, and becoming a wife, homeowner and mother over the next few years put things into perspective for me. I didn’t want to live life in the fleeting moments between 5pm and 9am. But for the time being my life centered around an infant. When my daughter was a year old I began taking a ceramics class at night at the local community college. I did not consider myself artistic – I couldn’t draw or paint after all – but it was the only class that met at night and sounded halfway interesting, and I needed something for myself. To my great pleasure, I loved it. I continued to take classes at the college. Not only had I found something I enjoyed, but I found people I liked being around. In the fall of 2020, with a push from a friend, I started selling my work on Etsy (I had a lot of it from 3 years of classes). I claimed a corner of the garage where I set up a folding table and a set of shelves so I could work at home. In 2023 I made my first big purchase: a kiln – there was no going back at that point!
A (hopefully) final move in 2025 and a slow but steady process of setting up a proper studio for myself in the basement have been my focus of late. Because life does not steadily meter out activity, I also have been given an opportunity to teach. This has been my reach goal forever, and while I did not think I was ready for it yet, I am proudly and without humility able to announce that I have risen to the occasion.
Over the course of these last 9 years I have defined and refined and redefined my artistic style many times over. The amount of exploration required – both of self and with clay – is astounding.
It took me a long time to feel like I had a style, a POV, that certain something that makes my work a continuation of myself. And the reason for that is when I first started playing in mud, I was so excited by ceramics that I wanted to try every single thing. There are hundreds of ceramic niches, and I was going to try everything my professors would let me try (there are still some I haven’t gotten to). I spent the first couple of years never making the same thing twice. This was a very important part of my journey – I needed to explore – but it also contributed to this terrible thing called imposter syndrome: “I’ve been doing this for 3 years and don’t have anything to show for it? Can I even call myself a potter?” Someone told me once that as soon as you sell a piece of your work you can call yourself that type of artist… I don’t know… Once I started working at home and I didn’t have a studio’s resources at my fingertips, I had to redirect my excitement from jumping around to focusing in on one particular process and hyper-fixating on every step of that process. I didn’t buy a wheel because, well, they’re expensive and messy and I don’t have running water in my studio. Over time this caused my ceramic interests to pivot towards a different type of pottering than I had favored in school. I never liked hand-building in school, and now it is my preferred method. It is slower and I feel more considered, and less messy too. This preference doesn’t stop me from experimenting with slip-casting, or buying a broken-down kick wheel with the intention of fixing it up and figuring out how to use it though. But it has caused me to prioritize and focus and in the tedium of repetition I found my style. I also figured out why I make pottery. At some point when we produce things, we have to ask, why? Why, beyond a job am I creating something that will live on in perpetuity? My why is joy. I make work that makes me smile: silly snails, rocking vases, mushrooms that tinkle in the wind. I love the smile or chuckle or giggle my work elicits – it is external evidence of internal joy. It can break the monotony of a moment, snap the mind out of a rumination. Interrupting with joy and contributing to the positive energy of the universe is, at the end of my day, a worthy cause and a why I can be proud of.
