Mark pharis pottery

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Mark Pharis is a Professor Emeritus and Former Chair, Department of Art University of Minnesota, Mark makes earthenware pottery at a studio shared with Wayne.

I was in the area visiting artists connected with the St. Croix Valley Potters Tour, of which he has been a regular participant for many years. Known for his striking geometric vessels, Pharis has developed a system for slab-building soft forms using templates and computer-aided drafting. In addition to his studio practice, Pharis is an art professor at the University of Minnesota, where he has been teaching since Ben Carter: Would you talk about why you started to hand-build, in terms of developing an individual voice?

They were pots that were all about outsides and form, not necessarily decoration or surface or painting. I very gradually started to work with slabs and tried to figure out a way of measuring and holding form. That led to making things with patterns or using patterns as a means of making shape and volume. BC: Can you describe, very basically, those early processes of working with a flat pattern, then animating the object around a volume?

MP: I had been throwing some — if you look at them from the top — diamond-shaped vases. They were two-sided, wider and flatter than they were deep. I made one quarter of that shape into a pattern that, if I had four of those, could make this volumetric, diamond-shaped vase. I had the thrown objects already, so it was a matter of just figuring out how to make a flat shape that would make the volumetric shape.

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