Artists In Jackson: Abby Dawson
When Abby Dawson and her husband Phil decided to convert the back room of their Brooklyn, Michigan property into a ceramics studio, they ran into a minor structural reality: someone had built the room around a hot tub.
“We had to chainsaw the hot tub into four pieces,” she says, laughing, “and get it out.”
It’s a good starting point into how Abby works. To her, obstacles are just logistics.
The studio that replaced that hot tub room now sits surrounded by old spruce trees on land she describes, without irony, as divine (hence the name: Divine Pine Studios). It’s where she throws, hand-builds, glazes, fires, and occasionally drops a finished ceramic platter on the floor on purpose.
That last bit is all part of her process.
The only way out was demolition.
“I’ll have these videos of me doing slow-mos where I just take a huge platter, one where I put 10 hours into it, and I drop it and just watch it shatter,” Abby says. “You just have to be okay with things not working out.”
Sticking With Ceramics
Abby grew up in Boynton Beach, Florida, moved to Michigan as a high school junior, and eventually landed at Adrian College, where she majored in psychology and art with a focus in art therapy.
Ceramics was the medium that stuck.
“The more you learn about it, the more you feel like you don’t know anything at all. It reminds me of yoga or religion: the deeper you go, the more you realize you are really still just a beginner,” she says. “And I find that genuinely exciting.”
Her ceramics work ranges from rainbow-blended mugs that sell out in minutes, to birch bark cups made with a broom-end tool that leaves tree bark-like marks, to mushroom bowls, sculptural wall hangings, and big platters with organic edges.
“Even if I never sold anything, I will always just make art,” she says. “I just want to make as much as I can.”
In her current work, Abby is moving toward mosaic murals and textured wall pieces assembled from dozens of small individually-glazed tiles. The idea is that many tiny things get combined into one larger shape.
An Unpredictable Art
Abby found her kiln, her first wheel, and a stockpile of ceramics supplies on Craigslist around 2016. The equipment was aging, some of it barely functional, and she lost entire kiln loads of work early on before she understood what she was dealing with.
She learned the hard way that ceramics is an unpredictable art that rewards patience and experimentation.
“You totally have to be okay with failure,” she says. “That’s how it goes.”
Her family’s property hosts the Divine Pine Gathering, a small festival she and Phil started in 2017 that has grown to roughly 600 attendees, 65 classes, 25-plus music acts, a free healing tent, a vendor village, and as many art installations as they can arrange. It runs every other year on their property, the last weekend of July. This year marks the tenth year of the event.
Abby describes running the Gathering the way a curator would talk about mounting a gallery show.
“How do I want people to feel when they’re here?” she says. “How do I want the space to make people feel?”
Stages of Life
Since having two young children, Abby’s studio time has compressed. She stays up late after the kids are in bed, working by the fading light that remains.
Sometimes, she’ll go weeks without touching clay. Then she’ll spend an entire fall in a push to get items done in time for her annual holiday open studio sale.
But Abby doesn’t complain. It’s all about balance. She understands this is another, different season in her life and studio work – another obstacle to work around.
“I have like 10 things I’d love to do for myself in a day. And it’s like, okay, you can choose one of those things for like 20 minutes,” she says. “With our current stage and the kids being so young, they’re my priority. So I’ll stay up really late out here in the studio.”
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