Feature Artist: Anja Bartel

By Gina Malone

Anja Bartel owes her career as a potter to many elements of her life, including life and studies in her native Germany and experiences in the US where she is currently an artist-in-residence at Odyssey Clayworks. Even Hurricane Helene shaped her creatively, forcing her to find alternative clays after Highwater Clays was destroyed.

Anja grew up in the port city of Hamberg, Germany in a large farmhouse that she remembers being filled with handmade pottery, especially German salt-fired stoneware, and where creativity was encouraged. “My dad is a swing and jazz musician and, while I, sadly, didn’t inherit his particular talent, I remember lots of drawing, painting, baking, gardening and photography,” she says. “My parents had a VW bus and, later, a larger camper so we spent our summers traveling all over Europe for many years.”

After graduating from high school, she went to live in a “hippie commune” in Virginia. “Originally, the idea was that I would stay for six months and then return home to study graphic design at University,” she says. “Gap years and international travel are highly encouraged in European countries. But I ended up loving it so much that I stayed for seven years.”

Her life there was a learning experience on many fronts. “The commune is America’s oldest secular intentional community,” she says. “We grew our own food and worked in several different cottage industries, like an heirloom seed business, hammock making and making organic tofu. There’s about 100 people who share work and income and make decisions together. (Think having three housemates is difficult? Try 100!) It was an incredible experience that shaped me into the person I am today.”

She found herself drawn to an old pottery studio at the commune. “I started going in there and teaching myself how to throw,” she says. “If YouTube existed, I didn’t know about it yet, so I just tried and tried and found a dusty old book in the commune’s vast library about pottery techniques.”

When she returned to Germany, she began studying ceramics with a master porcelain potter in Bremen. “The guild system and its apprenticeship programs are still thriving in Germany,” Anja says. “There are 325 different professions that use the master/apprentice model, potter being one of them.

Apprenticeships typically last three years during which the apprentice works full-time with the master, helping with all aspects of the business. She taught me how to throw very precisely, how to throw 50-plus vessels in a single session, how to mix glazes, fire kilns, set up for market, deal with customers.”

Once Anja began working with porcelain, for her, there was no going back. “It is challenging and rewarding, and the result is just stunning,” she says. “Porcelain is really pure and fine clay, which practically means it just wants to flop down on the wheel, and feels like cream cheese.” After three years and a two-day test given by the German Ceramics Guild, she achieved Journeyman Potter status. It’s “a term,” she says, “that usually just evokes blank expressions in the US, but that I am proud of nonetheless.”

During an apprenticeship, as incredibly helpful as it is with the learning process, those apprenticing do not develop a personal style, Anja says. That happened, for her, when she moved to Asheville and began a residency at Odyssey ClayWorks. Living far from the coast, she found that her thoughts returned to nautical themes as she created. “My pots all feature sgraffito designs of marine life: lobsters, narwhals, sharks, octopuses, jellyfish,” she says. “I also have an entire sea urchin line where I slip trail thousands of tiny spikes of porcelain slips onto my porcelain forms. I listen to audiobooks while I work; they are about shipwrecks, marine biology and nautical adventures. My favorite book, of course, is Moby Dick.”

In addition to Odyssey Clayworks, Anja is represented in Asheville by Grovewood Gallery. “Anja has a wonderful ability to translate her connection to the sea into porcelain,” says Grovewood’s marketing director Ashley Van Matre. “Her work is beautifully crafted and unmistakably her own, with organic forms and intricate details that continually draw people in.”

Anja Bartel’s work is available regionally at Grovewood Gallery. She works from a studio at Odyssey ClayWorks in the River Arts District. Learn more at AnjaBartelsPorcelain.com and follow her on Instagram @porcelainanja. Sign up on her website for details about an online sale for the holidays, date still to be determined at press time.