About the Artist

About Me:

In 1979, with my husband at a street fair in Greenwich Village in NYC, I bought four stacking mugs from a potter. In the months and years that followed, I turned them over and around many times in my hands. The bottoms were brown clay with tiny rough bits in it, and the marks of having been wiped smooth by a fine-textured sponge while still damp clay. The mugs were glazed gray and blue, and specks of brown from the clay beneath had migrated through the glaze during the kiln firing. They were all broken long ago, but I can still see them in my mind's eye, because they made me think.

I did not see why I, too, could not make functional art. And so I began my pottery career in 1985, when I was already the mother of two children, at Kean College's ceramics studio in Union, New Jersey (now Kean University). After about a year I bought my own kickwheel and put it in my basement. A year or so later I bought my first electric kiln.

More than 37 years after beginning at Kean, I still write and draw as I always have, and now paint with watercolors as well. In the pottery studio, the old kickwheel now has a motor, and it is side by side with an electric wheel. The old electric kiln sits beside a newer one with a digital programmer on it. My day job takes place in Hillside, New Jersey. My studio workshop is still downstairs in the house, but with a small gallery adjacent to my studio. I call it The Gallery Downstairs. My work bears strong influences from the woods of my childhood. Most of the forms tend to be practical...with creative quirks. 

About the Pottery: My Philosophy

In a world of machine-made goods, especially with the advent of laser-built reproductions, those things made by the craftsman's hand skills seem even warmer and more interesting.  

I have begun to focus on Judaica alongside my wares for daily life. People also want to incorporate handmade work into their religious life. This is an ongoing exploration I am really enjoying.

MimiStadlerPottery.com is a cottage industry. I sell my work in person, or through my website. My customers want to interact personally with handmade work in their daily lives.

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