Colleen Garland is a Bay Area potter and was introduced to ceramics in community college. Now she makes pots, teaches ceramics and drawing classes, and hopes to inspire others to get messy and connect with their creative selves.
Colleen took her first ceramics class over a decade ago with Mary Law at Contra Costa College and later studied ceramics at Diablo Valley College.
Since then, she has joined Mary Law’s firing team and participates in group firings throughout the year at Mary’s Berkeley studio. She has worked as a studio tech, production artist, and art educator around the San Francisco Bay Area.
Colleen in her former studio with a favorite pot.
A model of Mary Law’s soda kiln, in which most pots shown on this website were fired.
Colleen teaches community classes at the Richmond Art Center. Colleen’s focus in teaching is on fundamental skill-building, and she uses the container of the classroom to create an intentional space which invites playfulness, creativity and healing the inner critic.
“Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
“Parts/Work”, handbuilt porcelain, glazed. 2022.
A pot about therapy, inner children and giving thanks to the Internal Family Systems therapeutic model.
Colleen researches and shares the history of ceramics, featuring the stories of women ceramicists and people of marginalized genders (i.e. trans and nonbinary people). She shares this learning in the workshop “Women in Ceramics,” part slideshow, part experimental handbuilding class. Women in Ceramics is offered a couple times a year through the Richmond Art Center.
An offering for my pottery ancestors: ware board with pots over a dry-thrown bowl (Ayumi Horie method).
Project from a past session of Women in Ceramics, an historical and contemporary pottery workshop. 2023.
In her own work, Colleen focuses on functionality, form and surface decoration. She loves color and illustration, and especially drawing self portraits and animals on paper and on pots.
Colleen is a fourth-generation Richmond resident and is an avid reader, enjoys amateur bird watching, day hikes, and loves cooking and food as much as she loves clay.
Find her avoiding Instagram @colleenandclay