The Power of Uniqueness with Laurie Caffery [318]

Laurie Caffery grew up in Boone, North Carolina, a small town surrounded by the peaks and valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Encouraged by her creative parents – a painter mom and a custom home designer and builder dad, Laurie spent her childhood enthusiastically exploring different mediums, primarily painting and drawing.

Laurie received her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Studio Art with an emphasis in ceramics in 2014.

Her artwork is exhibited and collected nationally and internationally.

Currently, Laurie continues to create her narrative-driven, decorative ceramics from her home studio in Asheville, North Carolina alongside her husband, son and dogs.

In this episode we talk about her creative education & journey – and how illustrating on clay happened by accident!

We discuss how she’s grown a successful independent business – and how that’s enabled her to charge what her work is worth, and grow a following of people who love to collect her work.

Laurie is launching her latest collection the day after this goes live, check out her work right here – lauriecaffery.com

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Show Notes

● Laurie started working with ceramics in high school, but this was more of a hobby, and illustrating her main creative focus. While at college, ceramics became more of a serious interest and eventually became Laurie’s career choice in 2016.
● Laurie’s mother, Debbie Arnold, is an artist, and her father a bespoke home builder so Laurie grew up in a very artistic environment. Here she naturally excelled in illustrating and painting, and with a shy, introverted personality, it was assumed that she too would choose a career within the creative arts.
● Laurie discussed how she came to switch to ceramics as her medium during a college
wheel-throwing course. She found the media incredibly challenging and was determined to better understand it. Ceramics is an art form based more on muscle memory, skill, and the products you use, than artistic talent and really keeps you engaged.
● Laurie has an added layer to her ceramics which is illustration of her products. This was something she fell into at a time when she was teaching ceramics and a scholarship came up for a course at Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, one of the best craft schools in the United States. The only course available was illustration of ceramics which Laurie almost declined, but she did go, and the course changed everything.
● During college, there was pressure to create more sculptural and academic works even th