By Vicki Hillhouse
There’s a reason Penny Michel’s ceramic sculptures often look as if they could have been part of an archaeological discovery. The lines, textures, shapes and figures in her pieces are inspired by a childhood among Roman and Phoenician ruins in Carthage, Tunisia.
A resident artist at Telander Gallery, she started in ceramics in the 1970s and studied it as her major in college.
“Pretty much anything you can make out of clay — I’ve done it,” she says.
Art, however, wasn’t her initial career path. Instead, she went into finance, working in international banking for about a decade before reevaluating and turning back to her first love.
Working in ceramics is tricky because the process the original creation is changed by the effect of glaze.
“It’s a hard medium, in a way, because you build and then you glaze, and they’re two completely different worlds,” she says.
Watch a video to learn more about Penny Michel by clicking here!