Think of it as “pottery in motion.”

For local potter and artist Pam Nowell and her Mudworks Pottery Studio, located at 222 Cutter Road, Temple, the pandemic meant shifting from teaching and creating to actually building a brick kiln at her new studio.

“I packed up and moved my studio a couple of years ago, moving from Wilton,” she said. “I built my new studio here in Temple, and it took about six months or so. And I had planned on building a wood kiln, which is a very large project- somewhere around 19,000 pounds of brick.”

Nowell said when COVID-19 hit, she shutdown the production of the studio for the summer of 2020.

“The side-effect of that was that delivery lines went to hell in a hand basket,” she said with a laugh. “So, there was an awful lot of waiting.

So I took the time that I was waiting and I made things, which is lovely when you’re a potter. Because making things is pleasant and wonderful but creating like that doesn’t always get to be done on your time.”

Nowell used and shifted her schedule to build what she believes will be the next thing to come into clay art and pottery, which is woodfire work and workshops, doing more teaching and making her studio more coronavirus safe by extending the distance between wheels and by making the class sizes smaller.

“I love teaching small classes,” she said. “And I opened classes as my classes filled and because I am self-employed, I can do that. I don’t have to work on someone else’s schedule.”

Working six days a week now, Nowell is getting her gallery ready and getting Christmas shopping done.

“Ultimately, I want my customers to be safe,” she said. “So I went to having shoppers make an appointment to come into the gallery if they wanted to buy something. Then they can do their shopping, but in a safe way.”

As a one-person “pot shop,” Nowell said she doesn’t have employees but does have an apprentice. Consequently, she does a bit of everything in terms of running her studio.

Nowell said that people like purchasing and creating pottery because making clay takes two different mind sets.

“People come in and make clay for lots of different reasons,” she said. “I honestly believe that, and this may sound a little odd, but it’s really a spiritual practice. Making clay hits all of the places that deepen us as human beings. It takes dedication, it takes practice. It takes you looking at where your mind is and figuring out where your hands are going. The clay reflects that.”

Nowell said that people come to the studio for classes and to create because they think it would be a fun and easy thing to do.

“It is fun,” she said. “But to get to the fun part, you have to get through the learning part. Nd learning how to learn when you’re an adult can be tricky.”

When working on clay, it looks easy.

“It’s the mastery of it that makes it look easy,” Nowell pointed out. “It’s not the act of making the clay. So that process allows people to come in and work for long periods of time with me.

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