Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (AIA) 2019
Daphne Roehr Hatcher has been a full-time studio potter for over forty years. A third-generation native Texan, Daphne established Pine Mills Pottery with her husband Gary in the woodlands of northeast Texas in 1979. The studio was begun after three years of apprenticeship training in England, France and Greece, including eighteen months with David Leach and twelve months with Michael Leach. She received a BFA degree in art from the University of North Texas School of Visual Arts and has received many awards for her work in the ceramic field, including the UNT 1999 President’s Citation and extended travel in Australia as a Rotary Scholar.
Daphne exhibits widely in invitational and juried exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. In recent years she has exhibited her ceramic art in the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts seven times, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, The South Texas Institute for the Arts, The Ohio Craft Museum, and the Houston Museum of Contemporary Craft. Daphne has work on permanent display in the American Airlines Corporate Collection, Ceramics Monthly Collection, and the personal collection of Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio and others. Images of her work have appeared in numerous books and periodicals.
She makes a point of cultivating deep relationships with colleagues throughout the world and shares her unique perceptions of life and art, through her daily adventures in her studio, through photography and commentary on living the life of a full time artist. Daphne maintains a rigorous and prolific production of ceramic works that are widely sought after by collectors. Her focus for many years has been on developing refined form, function, and a rich palette of painterly patterns, designs and layered glazed surfaces. Glazed surfaces are an abstraction of the play of light and shadow ever-present in nature.
“Control, surrender, the integration of surface and form: these are the considerations I have focused on for the last forty years as a potter. I have fired pots with glazed surfaces in various kilns, often with complex layers and patterns. The deliberate process of painting with ceramic glazes on the surface of clay provides the balance between control and surrender I seek. I pay careful attention to the skin of the pot and use judicial application of glaze to enhance whatever the kiln grants me.”
“I also savor the balance between control and surrender in the construction of my pots. Some days are spent peacefully turning out simple, familiar forms and other days are focused on the delicate assembly of complex textured teapots, jars and bottles, after carrying the clay into the forest surrounding my studio and pressing the clay against the tree bark to garner the texture. The rhythm of making pots and firing them in our kilns suits my temperament and presents a continual challenge to my abilities. Where to exert control and when to surrender to the flow? That is the primary question.”