Jane Shellenbarger: Still Learning Susan McHenry

Appears in the March 2022 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

A potter, a cooper, and a whitesmith demonstrated their crafts at Henry Ford Museum’s Greenfield Village near young Jane Shellenbarger’s hometown of Livonia, Michigan. On day trips to this replica of a 17th-century American community, while her mother visited the early American homes, Shellenbarger stood mesmerized, watching the potter at work on the wheel. When she was nine, she took her first ceramics class at the museum. She got a paper route at age eleven, saved her money, and bought a kick wheel with a concrete flywheel, which she taught herself how to use. Later she took classes with a local potter, Barbara Levine, and ended up working for her. These early learning experiences imprinted Shellenbarger, setting her on a course that kept steering her back to a life in clay. 

Shellenbarger excelled at math and science in high school, and majored in biological science at Michigan State University (MSU). But MSU wasn’t a good fit, so she dropped out after her first year. She then worked at various factory jobs, feeling disillusioned. In 1985, she went to live in the Florida Keys with an aunt who introduced her to potter, Leon Kula, who hired Shellenbarger to apprentice with him. Kula owned a gallery and exhibited the works of Will Ruggles and Douglass Rankin, among other notable potters from the North Carolina region. Shellenbarger’s exposure to utilitarian pots at the gallery influenced the direction of her own ceramic work. In lieu of wages for her assistance at craft fairs, Kula proposed to pay for Shellenbarger to take a class at Penland School of Craft in Penland, North Carolina. So, in 1986 at age 22, Shellenbarger enrolled in a three-week workshop with Mary Roehm that focused on wood-fired porcelain.

Time at Penland

“It was a transformative experience,” Shellenbarger says. “I was enthralled by Penland.” Being there made her realize how little she knew about ceramics, and how eager she was to learn. When she became aware of Penland’s Core Fellowship Program, Shellenbarger applied, but didn’t get in. She returned the following year for an eight-week spring concentration to study again with Mary Roehm, and after seeing some progress in her work, reapplied to the Core Program. This time she was accepted. 

Shellenbarger’s time as a Core Fellow from 1987–1989 exposed her to numerous ways of working and thinking, and she forged lifelong friendships with ceramic artists Maren Kloppmann and Suze Lindsay. She was most notably influenced by studying with potter, Michael Simon. Shellenbarger reminisces, “Michael loved watching people succeed, especially when someone’s work transformed and became more authentic. He exuded passion and sensitivity. He loved good pots.” She first saw Simon work on a treadle wheel at Penland and came to appreciate how much vitality his pots contained. Shellenbarger had already claimed the other treadle wheel in the studio that mostly went unused. “A treadle is like an extension of your body,” she observes. “You’re more connected to the speed of the wheel, and you can stop on a dime. There’s more of a disconnect with the acceleration from an electric wheel.” The treadle became instrumental as she began to hone her voice. Realizing there was still much more to learn, she left Penland when her fellowship ended and headed to the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) to study ceramics.

Academic Pursuits

Without access to clay during her first year at KCAI, Shellenbarger studied drawing and design, which would later factor into her ceramic work. In ceramics, she studied with George Timock, Victor Babu, and Ken Ferguson. She recalls how Ferguson would deliberately throw distilled forms, being mindful of not over-demonstrating. He didn’t want students to become overly influenced by his personal aesthetic. This later influenced Shellenbarger’s own teaching philosophy. “It taught me how to stay out of the way, to not be too leading,” she explains. 

In graduate school at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville (SIUE), where she studied with Dan Anderson and Paul Dresang, Shellenbarger continued a style she had begun in her last semester as an undergraduate student, incorporating drawing and inlaid color on her thrown-and-altered utilitarian pots. She ended up simultaneously exploring two bodies of work in graduate school—one that integrated imagery and form, and one that was left unadorned so the form could be the focus. Her pots were fired in atmospheric soda, salt, and wood kilns. Heavily influenced by Anderson’s techniques, Shellenbarger recalls how he would sandblast the layered glazed surfaces. “In ceramics, glossy glazes become a burden. With sandblasting, that glare gets erased and you get some depth back.” She still utilizes this technique in her work, and remains fascinated by how the interface between glazes after sandblasting reveals new colors and textures. 

Becoming a Teacher

After graduate school, Shellenbarger became a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana, then returned to Michigan in 1997. Her aunt lent her some money, which she used to purchase 5 acres of land with a barn, located in Hale, just 3 miles from her parents’ home. She renovated the barn, turning it into her studio, Mill Station Pottery, and built a kiln. She fostered relationships with galleries, supplying work to them for a few years.

In the summer of 1999, Shellenbarger re-encountered her former teacher, Michael Simon, at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine. While she was working as a seasonal assistant there, Simon became ill with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Needing someone to fill in for a few days while he recovered, Simon declared, “Jane can do it!” This vote of confidence from a teacher she deeply admired allowed her to see she was ready to teach. Upon returning to the classroom, Simon asked Shellenbarger to team teach with him. The two sat side by side on treadle wheels, hearkening back to their days together at Penland. 

Developing Her Teaching Style

In 2001, Shellenbarger accepted an invitation from her former KCAI professor George Timock to teach there for a semester. During that time, Victor Babu retired and his position opened up. Shellenbarger applied, got the job of assistant professor, and taught at KCAI from 2002–2007. She went on to teach at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan, from 2007–2011; and since 2011, she has been an associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), School for American Crafts, in New York, where she teaches alongside Peter Pincus.

It was Timock’s organic teaching style that most influenced her own. Of Timock, Shellenbarger says, “He pushed his students to explore beyond their comfort zones. I just wanted to make pots, but he had us make a life-size, free-standing figure. Or he’d have us carve plaster into intricate forms and make complex molds from them.” Universities tend to focus on the syllabus, wanting to know with certainty where the class is headed, but Timock fought against this. He preferred to meet students where they were, encouraging them to try things they thought they weren’t capable of—something a preplanned syllabus can’t anticipate. This kind of teaching requires flexibility and more energy, but as Shellenbarger attests, it’s so much more dynamic and rewarding. 

In her own classroom, she employs the same approach. She’ll give a prompt for an assignment, have students conduct research, and propose how they want to enter it. “It’s like the spoke of a wheel with individual people coming toward the same center point in different ways,” she explains. Students invariably come up with solutions teachers don’t foresee. Teaching this way allows Shellenbarger to anticipate what students need. If someone asks about a specific process or technique, she knows what the next day’s demo will be. “Students choreograph the semester by their needs and ideas. It’s exciting.”

Shellenbarger notes a difference between studying at Penland versus her academic pursuits. “At Penland and places like it, people are there to give you their way of doing things; in essence, they’re handing you their voice. It’s a prescription for how they work. This can be wonderful in that students learn a lot, but it can be dangerous too. An instructor’s voice can often get in the way of finding your own voice.”

Shellenbarger distinguishes between teaching and leading, an important point she learned from Ken Ferguson. “I don’t provide solutions, only techniques and discussion. I want to encourage students to find their own authentic answers.” At the end of each semester, she and Pincus look over student work at RIT, and if none of it looks like theirs, they know they’ve done a good job.

Harnessing New Technologies

A new component in Shellenbarger’s work is digital technology. Teaching at RIT, she’s encouraged to make use of the Fab Lab, a digital fabrication laboratory. She’s recently been digitally printing custom-designed roulettes that she can roll into clay. 

Another exciting area of discovery is laser etching. She creates a drawing, turns it into a digital file, and watches the vitreous clay melt along the cut line as the laser passes through it. It leaves behind a mark that looks, ironically, archaic. She’s excited to find crossovers like this. “Teaching helps you mine those things. I need to learn this technology to help my students.” Shellenbarger is excited about integrating these new technologies into her creative efforts in ways that still engage her hands and process.

Current Explorations

Over her 45-year career, Shellenbarger has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and has work in the permanent collections of The Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and Ohi Museum, Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan; among others. Her current work is represented by Schaller Gallery (www.schallergallery.com) in Baroda, Michigan.

For some time, her focus has been on vessels that contain or pour. There’s a level of specificity in these forms that continues to intrigue her. She loves thinking about how the pots will be used. There’s also a ritualistic component that appeals to her. “When making a container, it’s metaphysical in terms of space. Pouring is an offering. It’s a challenge to solve, from the ergonomics to how beautifully it pours.” She wants the work to draw from an “ambiguous history” while being rooted in the present. “I want it to look ancient, like it was just excavated from an archaeological dig, but I also want it to feel contemporary.” She strives for a “crude elegance” in her work, finding pleasure in that paradox.

Shellenbarger often finds herself asking Pincus, her colleague, “Why do I have so much failure right now? In graduate school, everything seemed to work out.” She’s come to realize it’s because expectations change, and the level of what she’s aspiring to is higher. “There’s a sense of precision I’m now looking for, a specificity that wasn’t there before. When I was younger, searching and risk taking were foremost, as I was trying to find my voice. But once you find your voice, you enter a different stream.”

She feels like she’s still searching. Today she’s leaning toward minimalism in both her work and her thinking, a shift she describes as “less flourish, more essential.” She recognizes that this is what Michael Simon achieved in his work. “He was a master at understanding subtlety and iconic forms and profiles. His work was pared down. He gave you the essence.” 

As Shellenbarger continues to pare down her own work, she’s no longer drawing on the surface of her pots. “It doesn’t have staying power for me anymore. I don’t want to live with it.” Something Will Ruggles said after a wood firing at Penland has stuck with her all these years. He was studying a pot fresh out of the kiln—the form was perfect, the decoration had a subtle beauty, and the effects from the firing were successful. “But can I live with it?” he asked. This is a question Shellenbarger finds herself asking. “Sometimes a pot can be too loud.” The pots themselves continue to be her teachers. Now she’s drawn to the ones that have a quiet, subtle, yet strong sense of themselves. “You want to look at them and daydream yourself into them. Those are my favorite pots.”

*Photo: Geoff Tesch (www.thefotofarm.net).

**Photo: Schaller Gallery (schallergallery.com).

To learn more about Jane Shellenbarger, visit janeshellenbarger.com or follow her on Instagram @janeshellenbarger.

the author Susan McHenry is a studio potter, writer, and educator based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College. To learn more, visit emptyvesselpottery.com or follow on Instagram @emptyvesselpottery.