The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Climbing up a spiral staircase, I met Liz Quackenbush in late 2019 during her Jean Griffith Fellowship residency at Pottery Northwest in Seattle, Washington. Her husband, Tom Farbanish, had built this staircase for her to access a loft in the upper region of the former PNW. I’d seen her work and owned a mug, and I felt shy meeting her. She was friendly and asked, “What do you make?” Curious from the moment we met, I was thrilled to be easily chatting away with a pillar of the clay community. She retired as Professor Emeritus from Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, in 2018, and she and Farbanish moved to West Seattle. Before Penn State, Quackenbush taught at a few universities, had been a studio potter for eight years, and had participated in numerous ceramic residencies.
Her handbuilt porcelain pieces beg to be touched and held—caressed even. Like lifting clouds, her work is elegant, charming, complex, deeply textured, and deeply storied. As a potter whose work can be sculptural, she believes in people using handmade pottery, so there’s always a considered function. While her detailed and refined pots may seem too precious to handle, she wants us to use them. The tension between the strength of the piece and its fragility is powerful. As powerful as her themes—which touch upon ancient pottery from around the globe— from her daily life of gardening and cooking, to evidence of her attention to the patterns all around us. An avid gardener, she brings the outdoors into her pieces: leaves, flowers, ground, and sky repetitions abound. The garden is in her DNA.
Pause in the Garden
Then Covid came, and everything went quiet for a while. We met again in early 2023. Rain City Clay, Deb Schwartzkopf ’s community studio in Seattle, Washington, offered a ten-week handbuilding class taught by Quackenbush, and I signed up. Schwartzkopf, a former graduate student of Quackenbush’s at Penn State from 2003–05, is now her friend and neighbor. I missed seeing Quackenbush at a few of our classes; she was dealing with fatigue and was in the early stages of learning about her blood cancer.
In 2025, we reconnected after she’d been in months of treatment, receiving chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant. I arrived at her studio for an interview as she was about to start her first glaze kiln after a two-year forced hiatus. “I feel like I’m getting myself back,” she told me enthusiastically. She’d taken a long break from clay, glaze, gardening, anything potentially connected to mold due to her cancer treatment. Cups, sculptures, pitchers, owls, and other creatures filled up her front-loading kiln, ready to be glaze fired. Quackenbush beamed with a new fervor. The blood cancer may have developed during her last few years at Penn State, where she felt her energy level dropping.
By Summer of 2023, she received a diagnosis as she tells me, “I’d wake up with a list in my head of what needed to be done that day; laundry, sprinkler, make slabs, but all I could do was brush my teeth and then head back to bed.” She shared about a “wound-upness”—a surface tension in her own life—what recedes, what comes forward, and we discussed how this comes through in her work. “How can I decorate something that is feathery, with something other than feathers?” Environments, camouflage, leaf-like pine needle structures become part of the camouflage. “As someone who likes pattern and decoration, it’s interesting to consider the stories in your own mind about the origination of the pattern. I like the idea of going back to a piece, a form, and its origin. Perhaps you see a Chinese pot and it looks like a gourd. Instead of looking at the pot, how about looking at the gourd? Then you take the gourd and turn it into a teapot, which maybe I would do anyway. Maybe even grow your own gourds!” We discussed the language of form, she continued, “Why did someone make it this way? Something in their culture suggested use.” Echoing back to history, “I’m fascinated by the origin of form and how to create work I want to live with and share with others.”
What is in the DNA?
In her studio are several shelves with pieces, some before the illness, a few current, still in progress, that didn’t make it into this firing. Textures, stumps, animals, leaves, flowers, spirals, and helixes. I’m struck by the helixes, infinity twists, and what look like DNA symbols. It’s fascinating how a symbol appears on the surface and is intertwined in her life. With her stem cell replacement, she now has a second set of DNA.
She shares, “The DNA I’ve represented as an umbilical cord and connected with the infinity sign and DNA because of the twist. It’s a symbol I have worked with since my twenties; it’s made me think a lot about mortality, and how when we die, we vanish and leave things behind. I’m hoping to imbue my work with what can feel alive, and that is hard. The cycle of life, which includes death and decay, and to have experienced that closeness to death for someone who has been so focused on life, it’s changed the relationship for me. It’s real, the closeness to death.”
The Leap from Low to High
During the five years before retiring from Penn State in 2018, Quackenbush felt a deep stir, a need to shift, twist, and play with new materials. Her thirty-year relationship with low-fire terra cotta and majolica surfaces was coming to an end. Majolica can be difficult, and the labor put into the work doesn’t always create satisfying and reliable results. She’d often use lusters and china paints to add details and sharpen her cobalt and copper designs, and this required multiple firings. Teaching offered the opportunity to explore alongside her students. While experimenting, she discovered she could do most of her drawing, etching, stamping, carving, and underglaze painting on greenware; the design work could happen before the bisque. Adding liner glazes and shiny accents could be added before the second and final cone-10 oxidation glaze firing. Porcelain’s brightness gave her the crisp canvas she craved, and its structure and temperament, once she developed a relationship with it, provided the kind of support she was wanting. The richness of her layered surfaces today provides what she strove for with her multiple-layered majolica ground, paint, luster, and China paints. Now Quackenbush’s pots are multidimensional. She shared, “The porcelain is the main material everything else is built on. In my old work, the presence of the red clay was subtle. All the decorations hung on the majolica. With the porcelain prominent, the user of the pot can really get to know the whole object. I want there to be enough going on in my work for people to be able to build a relationship with it over time. Bringing many elements together in a piece reminds me of the natural world. One small tidal pool can host an entire universe.”
Materials Matter
Quackenbush now works with cone-10 New Zealand porcelain from Clay Art Center in Tacoma, Washington, and fires in oxidation. She’s probably not going back to majolica, although she explains, “Cone-10 porcelain is less forgiving than many clays, but once I learned its boundaries, it began to reveal its quirks, beauties, demands, and its potential. I like to think I am in collaboration with a material. Majolica is not a friendly collaborator; it’s very moody and more finicky and demanding than cone-10 porcelain.” I’m drinking coffee from the first piece of hers I purchased as I write—a translucent porcelain hand-pinched mug. Its textured matte surface beckons me to hold it with one hand while my other hand holds the one-finger handle and I perceive its perfect weight and balance. She’ll often line her pots with a glossy turquoise glaze and, like still water, the inside surface bounces highlights. The subtle divots from where her hand pinched and shaped the clay are obvious and intentional. She wants us to see and feel her hand; her marks help us hold the piece and, in a sense, we’re holding hands with her every time we use one of her pots. The upper portion of the mug is water etched with leaves and hand-carved vertical lines, an organized mess, plus some stamps of flowers and what look like the cross-section of cells under a microscope.
Her ability to simultaneously create vast microscopic and macroscopic landscapes is uncanny given her understanding of symbolic language and a richly shaped visual vocabulary she’s been developing for decades. The bottom half of the mug reveals gradients of blue-hued underglaze decoration. She’s studied so much pottery and its history and has a great deal of respect for the lineage of ceramics. She learned from Betty Woodman at the University of Colorado as an undergrad and later from Graham Marks at the Rochester Institute of Technology during graduate school; teachers who shared their love of the history, art, and functionality of ceramics. She nods to Staffordshire pots from England; Iranian, French, and Spanish pottery from centuries past; and then creates an amalgamation of exquisite details and insights as she embeds her interpretations into her work.
Always Moving and Making Again
In the lidded vessel Turbulence, the strands of Quackenbush’s knowledge, skills, gifts, and life spiral together. The stumps began arriving before her diagnosis and at first represented dying or death engulfed in vividly carved and etched foliage. Now she shares, “The stump connects to the tree; it’s like the nurse log that falls in the forest. It floats, in a way, between life and death. I felt that limbo during my recovery and it was awful.” We discussed the word limbo—like limbs, appendages, connection, and the world of being in limbo, the space between other spaces. She states, “The stumps are the nourishment for the next generation. It’s cyclically so potent, as the dead tree—it’s alive in terms of what is living on it.” We close the interview with a few last thoughts and this quote she loves from painter Georgia O’Keeffe, “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”
We sat together sharing about the certainties and uncertainties in all life’s possible configurations. She reflected on the people in her and her husband’s life who showed up and the profound impact this had on them. “I learned what it means to show up, how meaningful it was for Tom and me to get through, and feeling much more connected to people than ever.”
In the first half of 2026, she juried the K-12 student show for the National Council on Education for Ceramic Arts (NCECA). We met in Detroit and looked at the student work together before joining one of the bus tours. After the NCECA conference, she was off to Europe for her first international travel since her diagnosis and treatment, and shortly after participated in the St. Croix Pottery Invitational in Minnesota, followed by the Women Working With Clay Symposium in Virginia.
I am encouraged and inspired by learning and listening with Liz Quackenbush, reminded of the wheels of life, like seeds sprouting and DNA spirals twisting, we are all part of a pottery continuum. Everything generates and regenerates, kind of like pottery, one turn at a time.
Quackenbush will participate in The Old Church Pottery Show in Demarest, New Jersey, in December 2026. To learn more, visit lizquackenbushclay.comor follow her on Instagram @lizquackenbush.
the author Erin Shafkind is an artist and educator living in Seattle, Washington. To learn more, visit erinshafkind.comand Instagram @eshaffy.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
Climbing up a spiral staircase, I met Liz Quackenbush in late 2019 during her Jean Griffith Fellowship residency at Pottery Northwest in Seattle, Washington. Her husband, Tom Farbanish, had built this staircase for her to access a loft in the upper region of the former PNW. I’d seen her work and owned a mug, and I felt shy meeting her. She was friendly and asked, “What do you make?” Curious from the moment we met, I was thrilled to be easily chatting away with a pillar of the clay community. She retired as Professor Emeritus from Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, in 2018, and she and Farbanish moved to West Seattle. Before Penn State, Quackenbush taught at a few universities, had been a studio potter for eight years, and had participated in numerous ceramic residencies.
Her handbuilt porcelain pieces beg to be touched and held—caressed even. Like lifting clouds, her work is elegant, charming, complex, deeply textured, and deeply storied. As a potter whose work can be sculptural, she believes in people using handmade pottery, so there’s always a considered function. While her detailed and refined pots may seem too precious to handle, she wants us to use them. The tension between the strength of the piece and its fragility is powerful. As powerful as her themes—which touch upon ancient pottery from around the globe— from her daily life of gardening and cooking, to evidence of her attention to the patterns all around us. An avid gardener, she brings the outdoors into her pieces: leaves, flowers, ground, and sky repetitions abound. The garden is in her DNA.
Pause in the Garden
Then Covid came, and everything went quiet for a while. We met again in early 2023. Rain City Clay, Deb Schwartzkopf ’s community studio in Seattle, Washington, offered a ten-week handbuilding class taught by Quackenbush, and I signed up. Schwartzkopf, a former graduate student of Quackenbush’s at Penn State from 2003–05, is now her friend and neighbor. I missed seeing Quackenbush at a few of our classes; she was dealing with fatigue and was in the early stages of learning about her blood cancer.
In 2025, we reconnected after she’d been in months of treatment, receiving chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant. I arrived at her studio for an interview as she was about to start her first glaze kiln after a two-year forced hiatus. “I feel like I’m getting myself back,” she told me enthusiastically. She’d taken a long break from clay, glaze, gardening, anything potentially connected to mold due to her cancer treatment. Cups, sculptures, pitchers, owls, and other creatures filled up her front-loading kiln, ready to be glaze fired. Quackenbush beamed with a new fervor. The blood cancer may have developed during her last few years at Penn State, where she felt her energy level dropping.
By Summer of 2023, she received a diagnosis as she tells me, “I’d wake up with a list in my head of what needed to be done that day; laundry, sprinkler, make slabs, but all I could do was brush my teeth and then head back to bed.” She shared about a “wound-upness”—a surface tension in her own life—what recedes, what comes forward, and we discussed how this comes through in her work. “How can I decorate something that is feathery, with something other than feathers?” Environments, camouflage, leaf-like pine needle structures become part of the camouflage. “As someone who likes pattern and decoration, it’s interesting to consider the stories in your own mind about the origination of the pattern. I like the idea of going back to a piece, a form, and its origin. Perhaps you see a Chinese pot and it looks like a gourd. Instead of looking at the pot, how about looking at the gourd? Then you take the gourd and turn it into a teapot, which maybe I would do anyway. Maybe even grow your own gourds!” We discussed the language of form, she continued, “Why did someone make it this way? Something in their culture suggested use.” Echoing back to history, “I’m fascinated by the origin of form and how to create work I want to live with and share with others.”
What is in the DNA?
In her studio are several shelves with pieces, some before the illness, a few current, still in progress, that didn’t make it into this firing. Textures, stumps, animals, leaves, flowers, spirals, and helixes. I’m struck by the helixes, infinity twists, and what look like DNA symbols. It’s fascinating how a symbol appears on the surface and is intertwined in her life. With her stem cell replacement, she now has a second set of DNA.
She shares, “The DNA I’ve represented as an umbilical cord and connected with the infinity sign and DNA because of the twist. It’s a symbol I have worked with since my twenties; it’s made me think a lot about mortality, and how when we die, we vanish and leave things behind. I’m hoping to imbue my work with what can feel alive, and that is hard. The cycle of life, which includes death and decay, and to have experienced that closeness to death for someone who has been so focused on life, it’s changed the relationship for me. It’s real, the closeness to death.”
The Leap from Low to High
During the five years before retiring from Penn State in 2018, Quackenbush felt a deep stir, a need to shift, twist, and play with new materials. Her thirty-year relationship with low-fire terra cotta and majolica surfaces was coming to an end. Majolica can be difficult, and the labor put into the work doesn’t always create satisfying and reliable results. She’d often use lusters and china paints to add details and sharpen her cobalt and copper designs, and this required multiple firings. Teaching offered the opportunity to explore alongside her students. While experimenting, she discovered she could do most of her drawing, etching, stamping, carving, and underglaze painting on greenware; the design work could happen before the bisque. Adding liner glazes and shiny accents could be added before the second and final cone-10 oxidation glaze firing. Porcelain’s brightness gave her the crisp canvas she craved, and its structure and temperament, once she developed a relationship with it, provided the kind of support she was wanting. The richness of her layered surfaces today provides what she strove for with her multiple-layered majolica ground, paint, luster, and China paints. Now Quackenbush’s pots are multidimensional. She shared, “The porcelain is the main material everything else is built on. In my old work, the presence of the red clay was subtle. All the decorations hung on the majolica. With the porcelain prominent, the user of the pot can really get to know the whole object. I want there to be enough going on in my work for people to be able to build a relationship with it over time. Bringing many elements together in a piece reminds me of the natural world. One small tidal pool can host an entire universe.”
Materials Matter
Quackenbush now works with cone-10 New Zealand porcelain from Clay Art Center in Tacoma, Washington, and fires in oxidation. She’s probably not going back to majolica, although she explains, “Cone-10 porcelain is less forgiving than many clays, but once I learned its boundaries, it began to reveal its quirks, beauties, demands, and its potential. I like to think I am in collaboration with a material. Majolica is not a friendly collaborator; it’s very moody and more finicky and demanding than cone-10 porcelain.” I’m drinking coffee from the first piece of hers I purchased as I write—a translucent porcelain hand-pinched mug. Its textured matte surface beckons me to hold it with one hand while my other hand holds the one-finger handle and I perceive its perfect weight and balance. She’ll often line her pots with a glossy turquoise glaze and, like still water, the inside surface bounces highlights. The subtle divots from where her hand pinched and shaped the clay are obvious and intentional. She wants us to see and feel her hand; her marks help us hold the piece and, in a sense, we’re holding hands with her every time we use one of her pots. The upper portion of the mug is water etched with leaves and hand-carved vertical lines, an organized mess, plus some stamps of flowers and what look like the cross-section of cells under a microscope.
Her ability to simultaneously create vast microscopic and macroscopic landscapes is uncanny given her understanding of symbolic language and a richly shaped visual vocabulary she’s been developing for decades. The bottom half of the mug reveals gradients of blue-hued underglaze decoration. She’s studied so much pottery and its history and has a great deal of respect for the lineage of ceramics. She learned from Betty Woodman at the University of Colorado as an undergrad and later from Graham Marks at the Rochester Institute of Technology during graduate school; teachers who shared their love of the history, art, and functionality of ceramics. She nods to Staffordshire pots from England; Iranian, French, and Spanish pottery from centuries past; and then creates an amalgamation of exquisite details and insights as she embeds her interpretations into her work.
Always Moving and Making Again
In the lidded vessel Turbulence, the strands of Quackenbush’s knowledge, skills, gifts, and life spiral together. The stumps began arriving before her diagnosis and at first represented dying or death engulfed in vividly carved and etched foliage. Now she shares, “The stump connects to the tree; it’s like the nurse log that falls in the forest. It floats, in a way, between life and death. I felt that limbo during my recovery and it was awful.” We discussed the word limbo—like limbs, appendages, connection, and the world of being in limbo, the space between other spaces. She states, “The stumps are the nourishment for the next generation. It’s cyclically so potent, as the dead tree—it’s alive in terms of what is living on it.” We close the interview with a few last thoughts and this quote she loves from painter Georgia O’Keeffe, “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”
We sat together sharing about the certainties and uncertainties in all life’s possible configurations. She reflected on the people in her and her husband’s life who showed up and the profound impact this had on them. “I learned what it means to show up, how meaningful it was for Tom and me to get through, and feeling much more connected to people than ever.”
In the first half of 2026, she juried the K-12 student show for the National Council on Education for Ceramic Arts (NCECA). We met in Detroit and looked at the student work together before joining one of the bus tours. After the NCECA conference, she was off to Europe for her first international travel since her diagnosis and treatment, and shortly after participated in the St. Croix Pottery Invitational in Minnesota, followed by the Women Working With Clay Symposium in Virginia.
I am encouraged and inspired by learning and listening with Liz Quackenbush, reminded of the wheels of life, like seeds sprouting and DNA spirals twisting, we are all part of a pottery continuum. Everything generates and regenerates, kind of like pottery, one turn at a time.
Quackenbush will participate in The Old Church Pottery Show in Demarest, New Jersey, in December 2026. To learn more, visit lizquackenbushclay.com or follow her on Instagram @lizquackenbush.
the author Erin Shafkind is an artist and educator living in Seattle, Washington. To learn more, visit erinshafkind.com and Instagram @eshaffy.
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