Carol Marians
Potter
Carol Marians is not your typical potter. When other potters couldn't explain to her how to recreate the classic Chinese glazes she most admired, she went back to school. Not to earn an MFA in a pottery program, but to earn a Ph.D. in Materials Science at MIT.
This wasn't the first time she made such a decision. She married while a mathematics graduate student at MIT. As a new bride her first demand was her own potter's wheel and a place to use it. The summer her daughter was born was spent studying ceramics with F. Carleton Ball at the University of Puget Sound. By the time she was a professor of mathematics at the University of Puerto Rico, she was also running a small pottery making hand thrown porcelain and stoneware which she fired in her own ten cubic foot gas fired kiln. (The adventure of "importing" the kiln from California to Puerto Rico is just one of her entertaining tales of life in the ceramics world.)
Her fascination with ceramics infected her teaching of mathematics as well. She was one of the earliest potters to use computers in glaze computations and taking, advantage of her understanding of matrices and linear equations she wrote a program for finding new glazes that still has not been equaled. This gave her a strikingly unique tool for showing students of mathematics (and even the general public at the university's annual open house) the wide applicability of mathematics. Eventually her interest in ceramics led her back to MIT again.
The original impulse to study the science underlying classic Chinese glazes lost out to her love of Mathematics as she wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on "A Language for the Study of Silica Networks" bringing Mathematics to bear on the study of the structure of silica glass.
For a time after that pottery took a back seat to other professional activities, most recently developing medical software used in studying electrocardiograms and heart sounds. But her love of pottery resurfaced, being stoked by a summer workshop with Tom Coleman at Sierra Nevada College.
After working for a time at the Fifth Element Pottery in Portland's Pearl District, she moved to Basic Fire, a cooperative ceramics studio associated with Georgies Ceramics & Clay in Portland. Coincident with the move to Basic Fire, Carol switched from doing cone 10 reduction firing in gas kilns to cone 6 oxidation firing in electric kilns. As she formulates all of her own glazes, this has lead to a long series of experiments to find the glazes that best compliment her own style. Which has also meant yet more work developing variations on the glaze program that she first wrote in Puerto Rico more than 15 years ago!
Just recently Carol has moved to her own studio in The Dalles, Oregon where she is continuing these glaze experiments.
Because she makes all of her glazes, Carol can be sure that no dangerous materials such as lead and cadmium are part of the glaze as well as controlling other elements which may be dangerous in high concentration. The colors on Carol's pottery primarily come from iron (producing dark chocolate browns, rust brown and even bright orange browns,) cobalt (producing strong blues and greens,) and copper (giving green.) Carol's work is primarily functional, and she is happiest when she sees her bowls and plates being used in the kitchen and dining room, vases holding flowers, or even a plate decorating a wall. The ware is all stoneware, thrown on a potter's wheel, glazed with food and microwave safe glazes, and fired to cone 6 (about 2200 degrees Fahrenheit.)