Serving Christ With Clay
Serving Christ With Clay
An Interview with Maryfrances Carter by Caroline Greb
On Making Functional Art for a Beautiful Life
Maryfrances Carter says her dream has always been to be a place-maker; she creates work with hospitality at the very core. Every handmade piece—sculpted, painted, glazed, and fired—makes a place for others: vessels for a chef’s utensils or an artist’s brush, vases for a florist’s arrangements, or mugs for afternoon coffee. A fanatic of quotes, Maryfrances pulls out her phone to read me a quote her mother says often that is near and dear to her mission: “‘Beautify the corner wherever you are.’ I’m going to make everything around me beautiful. That will be my life. I want to try. I’m not going to say it’s going to turn out, but I want to try.”
A quick gander through her portfolio will show you that Maryfrances is anything but your typical modern potter. Her work feels otherworldly, while also brimming with evidence of ordinary moments—the flora and fauna of the season and the wonder of seeing life through the eyes of her children. She executes one creative idea after another and then presents it in an equally creative, romantic, and balletic manner (if you don’t believe me, just look at her recent and most charming “Nutcracker In Porcelain” reels). Her Instagram is true to this pure intention: a place to share her functional art for a beautiful life.
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Maryfrances’ artistic path didn’t start with clay. Her mom, a creative in her own right, set aside a booming cookie decorating business to homeschool Maryfrances and her five younger siblings. She introduced her children to the tutelage of many different teachers in their community. Through this education and beyond, Maryfrances learned tricks of the trades—to sew and do needle work, just to name a few—the principles from which now all carry over into her designs. She says, “In my work, I think the best pieces are the ones influenced by tatting, and by sewing, and multiple things coming together. I would love to do more with textiles, but that’s not where I am right now, so who knows!”
First and foremost, Maryfrances says that her mother taught her to love the Lord and seek the kingdom first, and to do whatever she did with all her might. Maryfrances champions Martin Luther’s theology of work, who believed that every kind of work, from a cobbler’s shoes to a mother’s homemaking, can be done to the glory of God when it is done in excellence, even when it is not explicitly Christian. In Maryfrances’ own work, this mindset has translated into a robust embrace of all that the delicate beauty of ceramics can be. She explains, “God has written beauty on our hearts. We all, as humans, love and desire beauty. . . those who don’t know the source of the beauty still seek it.” Maryfrances strives to show the Spirit’s fruit not only in the pottery itself, but also in her customer relations, private messages and all the dealings that running a business requires.
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Before her hands found clay and her pottery enterprise began, Maryfrances taught sewing classes and designed stationary. “When I first started my watercolor stationery business, I loved patterns and after working with fabric for a decade or more, I had seen a lot of different fabrics and patterns and leaves, but I’m also looking at what everyone else is seeing on Pinterest and things. So I’m kind of just watercoloring for fun and I asked my husband ‘what do you think of this pattern?’ and he said ‘well this one is really close to this pattern over here.’ and he said ‘I think you really need to put away Pinterest (now Instagram) and go outside and draw what you see. I remember fuming; I was so mad he didn’t like my pattern that I thought was just peachy, and we went on a hike and I remember picking up everything I saw. I don’t even like pinecones but I picked them up to draw and he encouraged me to keep going. I so much wanted to paint one piece and be done, instead of making the twenty prototypes to get to the best one.” But she persevered, even if it was out of mere creative obedience.
Her husband, Jeffrey, was the one to give Maryfrances the final push towards the wheel. Maryfrances had always told Jeffrey that if she tried pottery, she would irrevocably fall in love. Not long after their third child was born, Jeffrey gifted the opportunity to attend a ceramics class. Though she was skeptical that studio trips would be compatible with the priorities of their growing family, she went. And she did, indeed, fall in love.
Maryfrances began by making plates for her family. She laughs now at how thick those first plates were, but loved that she and her kids could use them. Her creative spirit and love for her family were found incarnate on the dinner table, however imperfectly clunky.
She kept practicing with whatever means she could find. “I found a candlemaker in town and asked if I could practice by making her a vessel.” From her former watercolor stationery days, she knew she loved painting flowers. Guided by a teacher’s advice, she started by painting solely with blue and white, limiting herself to one pigment and allowing her individual expression to shine. “I love the contrast too. Blue is a little softer than black, and I like that.”
The genesis of Maryfrances’ business followed soon after, but only because she wanted to buy Jeffrey a running watch that was truly from her own funds. As she was dabbling in Etsy and Instagram sales, Jeffrey bought her a wheel. She was floored. But then, not ungratefully, she reacted “now I need a kiln.”
In the student workshop where she was firing pieces, she was regularly losing a large amount of work in kiln disasters and making triple her outcome quantity. In clay, these disasters can be discouragingly frequent. “What if it doesn’t work? That’s how I hold all of it. Every release I get nervous, and say ‘I don’t know Lord, you’re faithful and if this is the way you want to provide for us, thank you. If not, help me be thankful. But I didn’t want to invest in a huge kiln and put that burden on our family when I didn’t know.” Nonetheless, things were selling so fast on Instagram she needed a solution. She enlisted the help of a friend to make a logo and build a website. And she made a very small batch of mugs—just 5 or 10. “And I’ve never done this, but I walked into the studio, tripped, and broke every single one of the cups.” The website was launching in an hour and, in the midst of a devastating moment, she was pressed for a solution.
While making an apology to her customers, one customer suggested a preorder. Maryfrances exclaims, “No one does pre-orders in ceramics. You don’t know if it’ll break in the kiln. But I put in a preorder and I think we sold 200. We had to shut it down!” It was a reminder to Maryfrances that beauty comes from ashes. Now other potters have started to follow suit.
Preorders are central to the Carter’s family life and Maryfrances’ artistic flourishing. “It’s helpful as a mom because I know exactly what I need to make, exactly what I need to do,” she explains. “I can budget out my time and cap the time and amount I can make to what I have.” When she said she wishes she could cut down the production time from order to delivery, I tell her she shouldn’t. Sometimes she hand builds a collection, forming the piece by hand instead of throwing it on a wheel. Each kind of clay responds differently to color or glazes. The four-to-six-week period adds to the value of her creations—a customer doesn’t press a button and receive her package the next day. Each piece is marked by her fingerprint. Maryfrances’ hands are hard at work on each absolutely unique vessel until it reaches your doorstep (prettily and perfectly wrapped, I might add).
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Maryfrances meditates often on the abundance of prayers and little lessons to be learned in clay. Clay is strongest after it’s been tested and fired. We are the work of the Great Potter, formed by his hands. “There are vessels for honor and dishonor,” she says. “Terracotta flower pots are a more humble use than a porcelain vase in the type of clay itself. Neither is bad, but they have different purposes. Porcelain is the strongest, but the most persnickety.”
“The Lord even used ceramics to [help me] recover,” Maryfrances recalls, regarding her family’s move to Hickory, North Carolina after a tumultuous church split. “Again, beauty from ashes. Even when a piece is perfectly formed, it’s already trimmed, you would think the cutting away was the hard sanctifying part. But really, it can be perfectly formed and dry but if you tap it right, it will crumble. It has to pass through the fire. That crucible of faith is what makes it solid. It was a testing point, and I think of Pilgrim’s Progress. Coming to Hickory was like coming to ‘House Beautiful’ and it was a place of rest.”
Faith, like the pottery that is found centuries later by archaeologists, withstands the tests of fire and time. “One very underrated thing in life, in the Christian life especially, is perseverance and pressing on in obedience. My favorite verse is probably that in Philippians, pressing toward the prize of the high calling of Christ. That’s how we have to keep going. The pot breaks? Throw it again,” Maryfrances reminds us. “It’s not glamorous. It’s really just kind of sad sometimes. I will just pray while I open the kiln and then when it does come out, you just say ‘wow, thank you, Lord!’ And if they don’t turn out, give me grace and patience to be thankful for this lesson and move on.”
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Maryfrances’ stream of inspiration comes not only from her inward humility and spiritual awareness, but also from her keen observation. Even as we sit together in a generic Starbucks halfway between my house and hers, she notices: “I’m looking at the counter. . . and I really love how there’s a curve along with a line. It’s very. . . opposite. So I might just do a random three lines with a curve and think, this is something I may put into my work. It’s a lot of random disjointed things. I think it’s good to have a place to do something that I can toss. . . so I always keep a sketchbook with me. . . but sometimes they come back in a design.”
Maryfrances’ originality comes from a fervor to constantly learn. “The beautiful thing is, like Augustine says, ‘he commands what he wills, and gives what he commands.’ He gives you the tools that you need to press on. Also, I think reading widely, seeking widely, listening widely, taking any class, going to the library and looking for books helps. If I’m not working with clay or painting, I’m painting. Or sketching. Or doing embroidery.” She takes online courses, listens to podcasts, talks with her husband (a writer and pastor), and creates little challenges for herself, like sketching from botanical books by a two minute timer before bedtime. “I think so often in our culture, that we want results immediately—that we take one class or do one thing and think we are ready. I don’t have to rush because I will be an artist for my whole life, however many years the Lord chooses to give me. Even if you’re making terrible art, keep making more.”
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As her guiding wisdom, Maryfrances quotes the command from Psalm 34 to seek peace and pursue it. “And therefore, I like very quiet things,” she says with a laugh. Since her studio is in her home, her kids wander in and out. Though ceramics is her act of placemaking, it’s far from perfectly quiet. Nonetheless, she welcomes her children into her work, talking while she sculpts, and pursuing faithfulness with whatever is before her. “I think we so discredit and push away those small moments in the in-between and the margin. . . those are like Ruth gathering the sheaves, they are the moments we can glean. They can be used too.”
Early this year, Maryfrances, a devotee of all things history and pattern, taught a class on patterning in San Miguel, Mexico. She instructed her students to walk around the city, ripe with old cathedrals, and draw whatever caught their eye. Even if you don’t recognize it, and even if you aren’t someone “artistic’ something you see is probably something you are going to like. “You can look at a house that is poorly designed and recognize it’s not good,” she says. “I think that’s why I like these quotes from other people, because they recognize the beauty regardless of whether or not they want to credit it to God. We do recognize patterns; so taking what we see and drawing those elements over and over and over and over again, and two or three elements will emerge, and those are your hand and brain working together, and then meld those elements together and make your pattern. And then it will be really yours, because you drew those leaves a hundred thousand times. And nobody else can draw a leaf the same way.”
“Even though we’re not trying to be like everyone else, we are trying to be like Christ. He is forming us in His image, like the potter,” she chuckles. Maryfrances’ prayer is that her corner of creation—her place—shines and shows Christ to anyone who sees it.
Caroline Greb
Fine Artist & Writer
Caroline is a Fine Artist, Features Editor for Ekstasis Magazine, Aesthetics teacher, mother, and writer. Caroline currently resides in North Carolina with her husband, Ethan, a graduate student at Reformed Theological Seminary. You can see Caroline’s work at carolinegreb.com.