Potter found life in the making

Editor’s Note: Mary Nyburg, a well-known potter and owner of The Blue Heron gallery on Deer Isle, died on April 5 in Fredricksburg, Texas. Stuart Kestenbaum, director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, wrote this remembrance.

REMEMBRANCE

When Mary Nyburg was 40 years old, she discovered clay for the first time, and fell in love with it. As a potter, she shaped the clay and the clay shaped who she was. From the moment she began working in the late 1950s until her death at 87, she was passionate about pots. After she had been making pots for 30 years, she wrote to some friends: “The magic of taking a lump of cold, wet, slippery earth, and with a developed manual and body skill, watching it grow into a useful vessel with permanence, never ceases to amaze me. Adding a glaze made from earth materials and consigning the work to the will of the fire gives pots a life of their own … yes, even a memory.”

While pottery is certainly one of our most ancient human endeavors, the practical aspects of making a living in a culture that no longer uses the hand-made object can be a challenge. Soon after she began making pots, Mary began the work of finding a market and audience for her work and the work of others. She was a trustee of the American Craft Council and one of the founders of American Craft Enterprises, an organization that developed the first large wholesale fairs for craftspeople to exhibit their work. This, in turn, strengthened the gallery system, which made it possible for potters, jewelers, weavers and other makers to sell their art.

Mary also saw that the craft community was one that extended beyond borders, and was active as a delegate to the World Crafts Council in the 1960s and ’70s, meeting and working with artisans from throughout the world. She had a profound belief that craft can tell the long history of a culture and that humans can understand each other through the objects that they make.

She also had a profound belief in community, a belief that came both from her work among other potters, but also from her Maine heritage. She was born in Dixfield and raised in Albion, and her sense of how people in small towns shape and are shaped by each other, and how they are responsible for each other, never left her.

After living in Baltimore for most of her adult life, she returned to Maine in 1988. She settled in Deer Isle, where she previously had been a student, teacher and trustee at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. She opened a gallery, The Blue Heron, which quickly established a national reputation, and helped support many makers in that way. But she also became involved in the life of the community – she served on the boards of the Island Medical Center, the Healthy Island Project, the Island Nursing Home, the Blue Hill Memorial Hospital, and was an honorary trustee at Haystack. Beyond these official roles, she also nurtured the future, bringing young people into her studio to make pots, and equally as important, encouraging them to live a creative life. Pablo Soto, her adopted grandson and a leading glassblower of his generation, is among them.

Long before “creative economy” was a part of the vocabulary of economists and government officials, Mary’s life was a manifestation of it – combining a love of making, a Maine sense of ingenuity, and an abiding belief in sustaining communities.