THE FIRST  DECADE AND BEYOND

• ​CNC  started  her pottery career in 1971 with full scale wares such as  hanging planters,  vases and  pitchers.    When her third son was a toddler in 1976, she  was  approached by a   Saratoga Springs  miniature shop and  asked to do some work in 1" scale.  This snowballed into a new specialty which fit her  dual life as both mother and potter.  With  a background in art history,  she enjoyed the research necessary for making  authentic scale replicas  and soon was  creating scale minis of decorated stoneware and other  traditional pottery  for shops at Bennington Museum, The Smithsonian  and  Museum of American Folk Art.   Her authentic replicas of actual 19th century  decorated stoneware   led to  a close relationship with  major stoneware collectors and commissions  to  replicate their  collections  in miniature.   During this period  CNC and her husband participated in many miniature shows across the country,  and  her tiny pots  found  their  way into  collections  all over the world.  

EXPERIMENTATION AND CHANGE
​BY 1990 CNC was focusing less on production and was playing more artistically with new ideas and creative play.  She began taking pottery workshops and adult ed courses at nearby Skidmore College.  This  gave the self taught potter   more contact with fellow potters and a chance to broaden her artistic horizons.    In 2000 she  received a  New York State Decentralization  Grant  for a project involving glaze additives from natural  materials found in  Warren County.  From 2005 on her home with her late husband was in New Bern, NC.  Primitive firing of her ancient pottery replicas  fired in mini kilns of her own design  has become a recent interest, and much of her original work has been   fired in pit, saggar and raku  kilns as well.   

October 2019 brought many changes to Carolyn's work in pottery when she moved to  a new home at the Quadrangle Independent. Living community in Haverford, PA.   The facilities there include a spacious and well equipped pottery studio,  the prime reason for her choice of this  new place to live.   Covid restrictions  curtailed her pottery for  the better part of a year soon after she was established at Q.    Although she had a portable potter's wheel in her apartment,  there were no opportunities for firing any pottery during the Covid lockdown, and so her creative juices were employed   elsewhere.   In November 2022 she was a dealer in the Philadelphia Miniaturia, her first major miniature show since her move to North Carolina in 2005.  In late 2022 she  became an  active member of the Raku Guild at Mainline Art where she was able to fire raku and do experimental saggar firing.  In the meantime CNC  is always delighted to  correspond by  email ([email protected]) with mini enthusiasts.