The word for the day is "sgraffito"
Building a life from a hobby she loved, ceramicist Kelly Scholes runs Ritual Ceramics.
It’s hard to make a living as an artist—or so I’ve been told. That’s why I’m always impressed when I see an individual artist open a studio in town. Kelly Scholes opened Ritual Ceramics last May on South Main Street. She sells her pottery and ceramic art pieces and also runs a community clay studio there.
“Ritual ceramics is a community-based studio,” she said. “We offer memberships for people who work with clay and give them the space to come and do so. We also offer day passes for people that just want to come in and maybe work for the day, try their hands at a couple of projects. We also do classes and workshops here.”
One of her most popular classes is her Monday Mug class, where as the name suggests, you can come in a create your own coffee/tea mug.
“We just work on hand-building techniques,” she said of the class. “We don’t do any wheel-throwing lessons or anything like that. I just teach a few different ways to make mugs, and I kind of just turn the class loose.”
She also does a kind of introductory sculpture class where students learn the basics of hand-building.
Schole’s specialty is sgraffito. “It’s a surface design technique that basically involves applying a contrasting color of slip, which is a pigmented clay, to a clay body and then it’s just carving through that to reveal clay underneath. So you get this really fun high contrast look.”
Sgraffito is an Italian word that means to scratch or to carve
Scholes said, “I got my first taste of ceramics at Piner School, then when I graduated, I started going to the JC. They have a fantastic arts program there. So I took absolutely every possible art class that I could at SRJC, and that’s where I re-discovered ceramics.”
After SRJC, she moved into the work world, working as the manager of a Pet Store in Santa Rosa. “I learned a lot about retail management—customer service and managing staff. But I think everybody kind of has an expiration date when it comes to working in customer service,” she said with a laugh. She hit hers after 11 years.
“I’d kind of started pursuing my art career a little bit on the side previous to that,” she said. After leaving the pet store, she kicked it into high gear, selling glass art and then ceramics at local farmers markets and festivals. “Ever since then, I’ve just kind of been selling my art,” she said.
“It took me a couple years to get established,” she said, noting that sometimes she juggled six different jobs, mostly based around e-commerce. “I juggled all those things for a while, and eventually started paring down to just my own businesses. Stopped working for other companies and was focused on myself, and eventually became established enough that I was able to support myself solely on my art.”
The clay studio is at the front of the business, and there are several kilns, including a glass kiln, in the back room.
“It was never really my ambition to open a studio,” she said, “but I sort of came across this place—I live right up the street, so I drive by this building all the time. Curiosity got the best of me and then the gears started turning.”
Here are a few of her upcoming classes:
Ritual Ceramics is open from 12 pm to 6 pm, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday.