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Shell at work in her studio
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Tracy Shell's porcelain boxwork vase
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Porcelain vellum mugs
Who: Tracy Shell
Business: Ceramic artist
What she makes: Ceramics in every genre; currently slip-cast porcelain cups and vases
Where to find her work: Shell, who teaches at VCU Arts and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, shows new work in exhibitions at Shockoe Bottom Clay, where she is a studio artist.
How she found clay: Shell was a painting major at the University of Montevallo in Alabama when she took a required ceramics class. “I don’t remember necessarily being interested in it,” she says, “but when I discovered that I actually got to make a form and then paint the surface, that seemed a lot more rewarding, I guess. And I really enjoyed just the tactile nature of clay and its ability to record.”
Apprenticeship in Japan: She was intrigued by wazumi — a slab/coil technique used to create large hand-built vessels, historically used to store water or rice — after attending a workshop by eighth-generation Japanese potter Juroemon Fujita, hosted by the Birmingham Museum. “I really loved this technique of building and incorporated it into my own personal work,” she says. Correspondence with Fujita led to an invitation to study in Echizen, Japan. Three years later, upon her return to the U.S., she pursued her Master of Fine Arts degree at the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology.
A labor of love: Before relocating to Richmond in 2019 to be closer to family in Fredericksburg, Shell was a professor and art department chair at Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska. In 2012, she and her husband, clay artist Jesse Ross, created the Clementine Plate Project — named for their daughter — to benefit the Food Bank for the Heartland’s Backpack Program for chronically hungry kids. Since then they’ve made hundreds of clementine-shaped porcelain plates and given them to schoolchildren to decorate. The finished plates were sold online or at exhibitions, to benefit the food bank program. “It was an educational opportunity for kids to help other kids,” Shell says.
Fun fact: “Porcelain is your most durable clay,” Shell says. “It’s very strong, and it’s translucent at the same time ... I just love that opposition.”
