Meet the teacher!

Hi hi!

I’m Kay, the owner and potter behind The Groggy Rabbit. I was born and raised in Aroostook County, Maine, but went to college in Ohio. Life got funky after college with my mom’s terminal diagnosis and over the next year and a half of her life, I had a dramatic shift in how I saw the world.

I worked hard. Like, so many of you. I ground myself into dust for a paycheck over and over again. I was unhappy. I was tired. And when my mom died at the age of 55, I felt so deeply sad that she hadn’t been able to dream a new dream.

So I challenged myself to find one of my own.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I think we so often fall into the trap of tomorrows. Well, yeah, I’ve always wanted to travel to Spain, but we’re going to do that for our fifth anniversary. And then: well, money got tight, so we’ll wait until year 10. And then you just can’t go. It’s life. And while I’m not saying that anyone should make decisions that put them in financially precarious situations, I am saying that following doors that open can lead to cool places. If we’re so stuck in the blinders life gives us, we might miss them.

I didn’t want to miss them.

So for the last two, nearly three years, I’ve been pursuing art as a full-time job. This has included leaving my high school teaching position (scary!) and re-teaching myself the joy of learning like a child. It turns out learning things you’re bad at involves offering yourself a lot of grace.

Now I’m fully obsessed with pottery and have spent my time in San Diego taking courses, immersing myself into clay play, and teaching others how to get started. While I’m primarily self-taught, I’ve also invested time in collegiate ceramics courses and an extensive amount of learning, both formally and informally. I’m also a member of the NH Potter’s Guild, jury applicant for the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, and gallery artist at both Jackson Art and Wren.

Here’s my more formal bio from Jackson Art, where you can also shop for my work:

Kay is a lifelong artist. In her childhood, she could be found digging up clay along the lake shores of Northern Maine, crafting with her grandmother, and weaving novels through many a college-ruled notebook. After graduating college in 2017 with a BFA in creative writing, she began pursuing art while teaching high school. Her first official medium was photography (she still has a love for imperfect film photographs), but her creative spirit eventually brought her to ceramics and print-making.

Now she lives in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and spends her days teaching pottery lessons and crafting her own forms. Kay’s work is a multi-step process that involves using a personal memory or family story to translate into ceramic, woodland form. She herself is often viewed as a rabbit while the others in her life take different forms: pine martens, foxes, grouse. Her larger, illustrative pieces start as linocuts before being replicated on clay. Bits of these larger works (birch branches, blooms, butterflies) are featured on her smaller, more traditionally functional pieces. It’s a full circle moment as she can still be found digging up clay, crafting with her partner, and etching stories into form.