Plates as Portals: In the Studio with Salad Days Artist Torie Crouse

Torie shows me pictures of some of the first things they made out of clay: sculpted hands in the shapes of letters, a highly realistic face in terracotta. Both are accurate representations of the human body, molded with ease, and showcase Torie’s prowess for constructing objects in three dimensions. These first sculptures feel almost the opposite of the hundreds of plates now before me in the studio.

As the Salad Days Artist-in-Residence, Torie is, for all intents and purposes, a production potter, designing, fabricating, and decorating 500 plates for Watershed’s annual summer festival in the span of seven months. When Torie arrived at Watershed in September from Grand Rapids, Michigan, they spent a couple of weeks fine-tuning their process—timing out each step, finalizing design details, testing colors and glazes, and experimenting with content. Once they established a structure to work within, they began to play—stretching the content, mixing the colors, and pushing the form.

Torie’s plates are coupe plates, with wide, flat wells, gently curved rims, and tactile, hand-built feet. Torie underglazes and sgraffitos each surface, carving back into the leather-hard clay to expose lines in red, the grooves of which may later be filled with another layer of underglaze, effectively building up colorful images through a series of additive and subtractive steps.

When I ask Torie again later about their first clay experiences, they don’t refer to the figurative work I saw. Instead, they tell me about their favorite Christmas gift from childhood: an Easy-Bake oven and a set of polymer clay. “I was obsessed,” they say, and describe a family of little bears and their shoe-box house and pieces of custom furniture, including a record player. “I built entire worlds.”

Torie draws each plate’s image entirely from imagination: all-over fish, geese wearing bow ties, fanciful houses and florals, a giant squid or two, frogs and bunnies and whales—each with their own character and expression. I pick up a plate with all-over fish, and we talk about this plate as a portal, a threshold to another place. A layer of clear glaze extends just to the inside rim, rendering the plane a smooth and reflective pool of water with depth underneath, as if I could step inside at any moment and be amongst a school of fish. The back remains raw, sanded but unglazed, carved with Torie’s signature and a message stamped carefully inside the foot. “Hold me,” the plate says.

In many regards, Torie is self-taught. They were home-schooled through high school and eschewed traditional higher education in pursuit of hands-on experience and self-actualization. They began their long-term relationship with clay in a community class about nine years ago and have since worked in studios and production pottery, all while continuing to develop their artistic practice and voice. “I like the challenge of a difficult and repetitive task,” they say when I ask about their decision to come to Watershed. “I like to prove to myself I can do it.”

Torie describes the images on their plates as strange yet comforting. They are enamored with conjuring up and carving little characters and worlds—and with every part of the plate-making process, for that matter, despite the tedium, the monotony, the exhaustion. For Torie, the ceramic process is restorative: carving into a plate is dreaming, an exercise in creating agency and orienting oneself in reality. When inevitably asked about the meaning of these, Torie is firm that they don’t mean anything. The fish, the goose, the house, the squid—they are not symbols; they are not representative, they do not point to a hidden lesson. Instead, they emerge from Torie’s quotidian rhythm, each line born of and imbued with the larger and smaller arcs of emotion that come with living.