New pottery studio supports ‘up-and-coming’ Wareham arts scene

When Mattapoisett resident Theresa Hadley started looking to open her own pottery studio, she started looking in Wareham.

For years, she was in conversation with the town to open a studio in the former Tremont Nail Factory, Hadley said. But the town’s plans for redeveloping the building stalled, and Hadley started casting around for other locations.

Now, she’s opening up a studio on Cranberry Highway in partnership with Ellen Blomgren, the proprietor of Mudstone Studios in Warren, Rhode Island.

The studio is located at the back of a sprawling retail complex at 3065 Cranberry Highway, in the same unit that, until this year, housed Damien’s Place Food Pantry.

The studio space is a work in progress. Some of the old baby blue paint still shines through the fresh white paint on the walls, and some of the linoleum flooring still stands in rolls, waiting to be installed. But ten brand new pottery wheels are ready for creative hands, and the rest of the studio is forming into place around them.

For now, Blomgren owns the studio, and Hadley manages it. However, the plan is for Hadley to buy out Blomgren, and to own it herself. It’s Blomgren’s retirement plan, she said. For Hadley, it’s the fulfillment of a dream she’s had for years.

“She always said, ‘You should have your own,’ and I always said, ‘I should have my own,’” Hadley reminisced.

In Wareham, Hadley and Blomgren have found a natural home for that studio to come to life.

“I love Wareham,” said Blomgren. “I love it here.” She said she’s loved meeting people in Wareham, and that the community support shown in venues like the Facebook page ‘Wareham Helping Wareham’ brings her to tears.

For Hadley, she said she’s found a thriving arts scene in Wareham, one that’s only growing stronger.

“Wareham’s really up-and-coming,” she said. “You can see it up-and-coming with the arts.”

Making artists better artists

Blomgren started Mudstone Studios in 2007 as a space for communal work and learning for ceramics artists. Since then, she’s opened two more, the first in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the second now in Wareham.

She said she first picked up ceramics as a hobby when she was home with her 1-year-old child. Her husband’s boss happened to be married to a world-renowned ceramics artist, and when she saw Blomgren’s work, she took her under her wing, offering Blomgren a place in her classes in exchange for help around the studio.

Blomgren tries to encourage budding artists with the set-up and the support of her studios.

The studio offers regular classes, teaching wheel pottery, hand-sculpting and specialty hand-sculpting focused on creations like birdhouses, gargoyles and the like.

Anyone who takes a class gets to attend weekly open studio sessions for free, giving them time to practice. Additionally, anyone who signs up for a membership gets to take classes at half price, encouraging them to continue to learn new things.

“I think the goal is really just to make artists better artists,” said Blomgren. She said she encourages people to experiment, and that artists at her studios aren’t pushed toward one style, but are supported in a wide range of creative outcomes.

That was the same spirit Hadley brought to teaching her high school classes, she said. “You didn’t see the same thing over and over, that’s just awful.”

Hadley said she learned different types of art in her career as a teacher, and ended up settling on two very different forms of art to call her own: pottery and film photography.

Why those two? “It’s the hands-on,” Hadley said. “I like process.”

The process of clay creation is an involved one. Pieces are shaped, then left to dry, then fired, then glazed and fired again.

That process and the nature of the medium gives artists lots of room to experiment.

“I feel like the most fun that happens here is from new people,” Blomgren said. “Like, new people, they try something that’s really out of the box, they don’t have the experience to really know what they’re doing, so they’re going to try something crazy, and then we all learn from it.”