Mary Law: Forthright

Mary Law is an urban potter who has long lived in a mixed residential-commercial neighborhood in Berkeley, California that includes a number of other ceramists. She was shaped by a workshop with Karen Karnes and an apprenticeship with production potter Byron Temple, more than a sequence of degrees and residencies. And she makes a great story of it.

Law was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1947. She has two much-older brothers. I wanted to be an architect when I was very young. When I was in junior high, I used to draw plans of houses. Of course I didn’t know what I was doing but it was really fun. My daddy was kind of a collaborator. We had a good time talking about stuff like that. My mother had a really funny almost I Love Lucy quality about her. She had no sense of direction and couldn’t read a map if her life depended on it. I think partly because I felt that was a bad role model, I loved maps. And also I think I just have more of my daddy’s ability with physical objects and use of space. Two of my very favorite things, I love packing kilns, and I actually learned to pack a car trunk because it would upset my father, he’d worry for two weeks before a vacation if he would be able to fit everything in. I think I kind of learned to do that out of defense.

I grew up in what I thought was an idyllic family. If you asked my oldest brother, oh boy, it’s a totally different thing. But we’re 13 years apart. And I was definitely spoiled rotten [Laughter] as the only girl and the baby. It was obvious to everybody else in the family that I was the apple of my daddy’s eye. My brothers were expected to earn a living. And I was not expected to. My father would let me volunteer, that was fine, but he did not want me working for money. I used to argue with him about that sometimes. The message was: after you leave home there’s going to be a man who’s going to take care of you. It was so Southern.

I was at the leading edge of real popularity of taking craft classes, and it had not yet quite gotten to the point where there was so much competition

I did a lot of drawing, I got to take some summer art classes and I also played a lot of music − we all played the piano, and I played the harp. I learned to dress a loom and do simple weaving from a friend of my mother’s who had a loom. She took me up to visit Charles Counts and Rubynell Counts who lived in Rising Faun, Georgia, which was not too far from Chattanooga. While I was there, I walked past this window where you could look in and there was Charles Counts throwing a pot. I remember standing there thinking: I bet I could do that.