About the Artist
Susie Fowler, the Shade Tree Potter, takes the beauty and patterns she observes in nature and incorporates them into her work. Finding these elements to be both calming and restorative, she transforms them into unique pieces of artwork that others can take with them into their homes.
Her hope is that they can then then be viewed on a daily basis, exposing others to the tiny wonders that she finds in the details of the world around her.
Susie has been making pottery since 1971, and has an undergraduate degree from Austin College, along with a certificate of mastery from Boston University. Her artwork has spanned a range of styles and themes through the years, but has always focused on expressing the inherent art that she sees in nature.
Her pieces are currently featured at the Apis Restaurant and Apiary, and are available for viewing and purchase at her gallery in Spicewood, Texas.
In the Words of the Artist
I am pulled, as if by gravity, to investigate the patterns and shapes in nature.
I noticed the intricacy of the leaf’s vein long before I put my hands into clay.
Touching the detail, I traced the line from leaf tip back to stem and watched the color grow from root to bud. I capture these textures of petals, feathers, fossils and seeds in soft clay slabs – then piece the slabs together like a patchwork quilt.
My hands are drawn by the physical nature of clay – earth itself, with its capacity to preserve the scales of a lizard skin as well as the fragile edge of a bluebonnet flower. Clay is fluid and flexible. Slowly building with colored and impressed clay, my textured slabs become the walls of a landscape vase. Your eye is drawn around the path in a winding climb towards the cliff top – an aerial view at sunset.
I enjoy collaboration with collectors and have made vases, memorials, funerary urns, blessing bowls, sculptures and a Beehive shaped samovar- perfect for water, wedding wine, or a fancy lemonade stand.
It is the spirit of the earth, the inherent grace in all things that grow, which inspires me to make these pieces, in this way. I want my work to have the vitality of a freshly picked bunch of wildflowers and the timelessness of a fossil.
