Michael Merritt and Luna Eve, the current ceramic artists in residence at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, are sharing a large, open studio space. Drawings line the walls, and their ceramic projects sit on tables among tools, sketchbooks, and bags of clay. What makes their work possible is Castle Hill’s large collection of kilns. “We have every kind of kiln there is,” says Cherie Mittenthal, Castle Hill’s artistic executive director.
Castle Hill is unique among artists residencies for the opportunities it provides ceramicists. Since the residency was established, artists have traveled great distances to take part in the three-month program. This year, for the first time, the artists in residence both have local ties.
Working with clay has been a central part of Castle Hill since it began offering art classes in 1972. Doris Harris, a ceramics teacher from Binghamton, N.Y. who spent her summers in Wellfleet and Ruth Hollander worked with Joyce Johnson, Castle Hill’s founder, to develop its first ceramics classes.
The program has grown substantially since those early days. Currently, four classes are running, and during the summer, students have more than two dozen classes to choose from, including hand building, raku, and techniques using 3D printers.
When Castle Hill acquired additional space for housing in 2012, establishing a residency seemed like a logical next step. Artists now pay $500 a month for housing and a studio and have unlimited access to the communal ceramics space and kilns. They can buy materials at a discount. “It’s a unique opportunity to have your own dedicated space for three whole months where you can do what you want 24/7,” says Mittenthal.
“It’s great to have a large space, support, and just be around people,” says Merritt. “Being in a basement is not conducive to having a good work-life balance.”
Merritt, 54, has worked with clay for decades, ever since giving up on plans to earn a degree in architecture. In Austin, Texas, where he lived for 24 years, Merritt had jobs producing stoneware for Sunset Canyon Pottery and making clay. He also managed the kilns in the art department at the University of Texas.
He came to the Cape in 2020 to be his mother’s caretaker at their family home in Orleans. That responsibility, coupled with health issues from failed hip replacements, limited his ability to throw on the wheel. Once his health improved, Castle Hill afforded him a chance to get his artistic life back on track.
One of Merritt’s projects is a group of figurative pots he calls “pedestrian pods.” Each piece is held upright on two or more legs. The work, he says, is a remnant of his architecture studies: he is sculpting the human figures that typically appear in architectural drawings to indicate scale. Merritt makes them out of stoneware or raku clay with grog, a raw material that adds a rustic texture to the pieces and helps prevent shrinking and cracking during firing.
He begins with drawings in his notebook or on brown butcher paper tacked to the wall. Once he decides on the form and scale, he throws each piece on the wheel and then removes it to pinch the clay and make the appendages.
Merritt is passionate about firing his pieces in a wood kiln. He helped build Castle Hill’s wood kiln, which operates only in the summer because of the time and labor needed to run it. He holds up one of his wood-fired pots, explaining how at high temperature ash melts into a shiny glaze.
“What I like about wood firing is how it makes visible the interaction with the flame and the history of the firing,” he says. “Because it’s wood, you get a lot of residual flame interaction and ash deposits that decorate your ware.”
Across the studio, Eve, 22, is working on the second in a series of lifelike animal sculptures built from white porcelain clay. She uses a tiny chisel to carve teardrops onto a dreamlike mask of a human face that will be tucked into the neck of a rabbit. The rabbit’s animal face — unusually menacing, with pinned-back ears and bared teeth — will be suspended with wire over the human mask, allowing both to remain visible.
“My rabbit sculpture is my way of exploring the interconnectedness of fear, anger, and grief,” she says. “Defensive rage masks deeper wounds.”
In another work, Eve sculpted a fawn lying with its front legs tucked under its body. Unlike Merritt, who describes his work style as “scattershot, doing lots of things at once,” Eve works on one piece at a time and will be happy to finish three sculptures in time for their joint show at Castle Hill on March 27.
To make the fawn, her first sculptural work since high school, Eve started with coil-building, layering coils of clay into the desired shape. She grew up in Brooklyn and attended the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art but made only one ceramic sculpture there. For this one, she sketched a kidney bean shape that guided her construction of the fawn’s torso. Three flat panels placed inside the torso hold it erect. After making the body, she added the neck and head, using a slab roller to thin the clay to an even consistency. Eve’s work in illustration informs her design process: considering ideas, lots of sketching, choosing images, and drawing them over and over before the hand building begins.
A sign above Eve’s work station reads, “Don’t Give Them Your Fear.” Both the rabbit and fawn show the vulnerability of small, defenseless creatures in need of protection. Eve says the emotional content of her work reflects her own experience and the current political moment.
Eve works as a freelance illustrator and digital designer. She dropped out of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor last year because she felt she was losing touch with herself as an artist.
“I felt stunted, held back, and bored,” she says. She felt she had lost her motivation to “make art that felt personal or that I even liked.” Returning to her family’s home in Wellfleet, she took a ceramics class at Castle Hill and was encouraged to apply for the residency.
“I’m finding my way back to my art by re-engaging with the tactile arts,” she says.
