(gentle music) - It was 1969, and I decided I wanted to go into art.

Cleveland Institute of Art was close by, so I applied and I got accepted, and after I was done with my freshman year, I decided to make my career in clay.

It's malleable, it's fun, and you can do a thousand different things with it.

I decided I really wanted to have my own business, and I picked Athens because of the proximity to my natural resources that I needed.

I built my first studio in Athens County in 1978 on Rock Riffle Run Road.

The state of Ohio informed me that my property was in the right of way of a road improvement.

I ended up having to sell my property to the state of Ohio.

In 1984, I found this farm that had a huge shed.

I moved to Shade and rebuilt Rock Riffle Run Pottery.

We're about 50 miles from Cedar Heights Clay Company, which is where the bulk of my materials come from.

The clay that I'm using is about 350 million years old.

That's huge.

It's an amazing thing to work every single day with a material that's 350 million years old.

Nobody gets to do that.

It's pretty cool.

It's like a living fossil.

Ohio is really, really rich in clay, and a major part of the clay industry happened here along our rivers.

It's part of Ohio history.

My pottery is sold throughout the United States, but mostly online.

We have two product lines here.

We have a functional stoneware line and a decorative terracotta gardening line.

I make a lot of garden markers.

We have about 500 different ones, and we sell them to nurseries all over the country.

The stoneware line takes weeks and weeks to make.

It's a much more durable clay.

My ingredients come from all over the world and my glaze buckets hold about 30 gallons, so everything here is dipped and not painted on with a brush.

I really like mugs and we're making logo mugs for resorts, for businesses, and I think out of all the things that I make, my mugs are actually among the most successful.

I make my pieces, and depending on the weather, it takes anywhere from three hours to five days to dry.

After it's dry, we fire it in an electric kiln to about 1,600 degrees.

That produces a piece of pottery that is porous enough to absorb the glaze, but strong enough to handle, and we wax any surface that will be touching any other surface.

That wax repels the glaze, and I dump it in a glaze that is the consistency of crepe batter.

Leave it in there through a count of 10, pull it out, and when I have a kiln load, which is around 300 pieces, then we take it out and we put it in the glaze kiln.

The glaze is made up of things like silica, which is sand, things that melt at high temperatures, the colorants come from all over the world, and we load it into the kiln, turn it on, and raise the temperature to about 2,400 degrees.

And I use these things called standard pyrometric cones that melt at certain temperatures, so I place them in, look in the spyhole of the kiln, and when they start to melt, then I know I've reached temperature.

It is weather dependent.

When it's sunny and bright and there's a little bit of wind, I get very brilliant colors.

When it's raining and there's no wind, then I end up getting kind of more muted colors.

Firing takes about nine hours to get from your ambient outdoor temperature to about 2,400 degrees.

I turn it off, I wait about three days, and then we unload.

Then it goes on, and it lives forever, as long as you don't break it.

Unloading a gorgeous glaze kiln is the most rewarding thing.

That 350 million-year-old hunk of clay is now what you're gonna be having your coffee out of tomorrow.

That's pretty amazing.

- One of the things I appreciate about Susie is her entrepreneurship, basically.

She's very hardworking.

She's got her studio and she's very generous in how she interacts with with various people.

Susie makes her studio very much available to young artists.

I mean, being that we're in a college town, young ceramicists have been able to work at Susie's studio.

The Ohio Pawpaw Festival, this is gonna be its 27th year, and it's really the first festival celebrating pawpaws.

The pawpaw is North America's largest native tree fruit, and it's related to 2,100 tropical fruits.

The Pawpaw Festival has this community marketplace, and one of the things that we do is we don't allow imported products.

We like to have a good mix of the arts.

We've been working with Susie for decades now.

- I have been making logo mugs for the Pawpaw Festival since its inception, but every year, I make logo mugs that they sell out of their merchandise store.

They're great people to deal with, and I do a lot of special events with the logo mugs, so it's kind of fun.

- Being a self-made artist is not the easiest thing.

I mean, a lot of people are great artists, but to actually be able to have a business and survive for as long as Susie has, I mean, I think her work ethic and her creativity basically have really lent to her successful business over the years.

- I've been doing this for 50 years.

I think my job is sort of to pass on the tradition that I'm part of.

We usually do camps in the summer, Girl Scout troops, just people who come in and wanna learn.

It's a very neat thing to watch, it's like magic to watch the slump of clay just turn into something beautiful.

Everybody likes that.

It's hands on.

You can be doing anything with clay at any skill level.

It's very inviting.

It's also been a privilege to be female living in America at this time because these opportunities were not available for me 100 years ago, and so this is a great time to be a potter and a female in Ohio.

It's really cool to be a part of this.