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Susy O’Donnell

Susy and her husband Randy moved to Brown County in 2002, creating a colonial style salt box house and cape studio, which suited their traditional style. In her new studio, she makes pottery with slip trail and sgraffito designs using red clay.

Susy’s journey with pottery began in the early 1980’s. Acquiring the essential equipment: wheel, kilns, pug mill, slab roller etc…, she began taking private lessons and auditing classes at Indiana University. Then, in the early 1990’s, she attended traditional craft shows with her husband, on the east coast, selling their early American furniture and pottery. During this period, Susy developed a line of pottery called Spongeware, made with stoneware clay and decorated with a cobalt blue glaze, which was sold in stores in several states and also through the Wilton Historical Society craft shows, at Hancock Shaker Village, in Pittsfield, MA, and Wilton, Ct. Her interest in historic ceramic forms and exposure to collections of historic redware, as those of the Pennsylvania Dutch potters in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, provided a natural evolution into her next chapter of pottery making. In 1998, she was approached by a collector of Brown County fine art to make a new line of Brown County Pottery (A redware pottery originated by the Griffith family, Wisconsin natives, who moved to Brown County in the 1930’s) for their new shop in Nashville. Inspired by their collection and the desire to revive the style, Susy developed a body of work using, red clay, cream colored slip, and a sgraffito decoration. (The cutting away of the surface layer to expose a different colored ground) The pieces are then hand painted with motifs that are common to the Brown County area. They consist of: flowers (Cornflowers, Black Eyed Susan’s, Daisies, & Tulips) acorns, persimmons, birds, deer, etc. More recently, the pieces were displayed on the tables of the Artist’s Colony Inn and sold in their Colonial Craft Shop. And her ‘Brown County Historic Redware’ is currently being sold at Madeline’s in Nashville, Indiana.

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