Project: Cup took a road trip outside of the city to meet with Momoko Usami-Cotter at her studio and home. Momoko, her husband Josh Cotter (artist/cartoonist), their two kids and two goats live on family land in a rural area about 20 minutes from Marysville, Mo. Her inspirations are wide reaching and her practice includes making work of all different scales. We spent time walking a recently established path from the studio that she often walks to gather inspiration (and objects!) for her work and discussing the risks, rewards, and reasons for making sculptural and functional work with such complex and precise drawings and surfaces. During our conversation with fellow Project: Cup Artist, Veronica Watkins, Momoko shared:
“One thing that I do more, since I had children, is cook. Before when I was living alone, I could just eat ramen noodles. I just needed one bowl, but now I cook for my family. If you cook Japanese food (I am Japanese), you need lots of ceramics: a rice bowl and soup bowl and plates for the vegetables, there is a big bowl of food in the center. Because of this, I started making a lot more ceramics for my everyday life.
For our next studio visit, Project: Cup took a field trip to visit Veronica Watkins at her studio at Northwest Missouri State University in Marysville, Missouri. Veronica teaches at Northwest Missouri State University, is mother of three, and she lives on a 100 acre cattle ranch. Her awareness of the way these different aspects of her life (place, family, food, and community) come together in the ceramics studio and with her body of work were central to our conversation. We got to talk a little about her surfaces (take a look at that lovely test-tile board) and their relationships to the colors and textures of the Missouri landscape. Veronica’s use of terra sigillata as a surface treatment is perfect for creating custom colors and sensual surfaces. Using terra sigillata to build surface imagery also met her need to have a more flexible schedule in the studio in order to focus on other important aspects of her life at different times - including spending more time with her family while her children were young.
In addition to her studio work, Veronica shared her impressive ceramics collections from school and from home with us. In her words:
“We’ve always had handmade ceramic utilitarian ware and our children are surrounded by beautiful objects and that helps form them and develop their ideas about aesthetics and elevates their experience. During Covid we remodeled the kitchen and were there together so much. I mean, we always have shared meals, but it was even more of a concentrated experience. I think that is the beauty of pots - they facilitate these interactions and our rituals whether they are special or just daily things, like, “which cup are we going to use?”
