Ceramic artist Averill McDowell first caught the pottery bug as a student at Peoples Academy, in Morrisville.
"Pottery sort of just fell perfectly in my lap," she said. "I learned a little bit in high school how to work with pottery on the wheel. But there wasn鈥檛, like, too much direct instruction. It was more like messing around."
At age 31, McDowell still walks the halls of her old high school. But now she鈥檚 the art teacher.
Thanks to McDowell, those halls look different than when she graduated in 2006. Student art lines the corridors. And .
Now McDowell is making sure students in her home town are getting direct art instruction, and she continues to learn right along with them.
"Being a teacher has changed my art because, on a daily basis, I have kids that come in here and they want to create something from materials I may have never used before and/or draw something I have never drawn before," she said. "And so I have to teach myself how to teach them how to do something I鈥檝e never done before."
Growing up, McDowell said her parents signed her up for private lessons with local artists around Lamoille County. More formal instruction started in college, as an art education major at the University of Vermont.
McDowell said her professors pushed her to learn advanced techniques. But her education didn't stop there.
"Once I graduated from UVM is when I said, 'I don't want to just like throw my finished pieces in a kiln with some glaze on it. I want to really, like, have a part in the process,'" McDowell said. "And so I was really intrigued by Raku and also pit firing."
McDowell sought out mentors to help her learn these primitive firing techniques. , introduced her to Raku. Then she teamed up with to discover pit firing.
"Because we were just like, 鈥楬ow do we do this? Let鈥檚 figure it out,'" McDowell said. "And she was an amazing mentor because she's a wealth of knowledge and she's done ceramics her whole life, but not necessarily pit firing. So that was something that we worked through together."
鈥� such as vases and masks. But it's the process that intrigues her, more than the final product.
Imagine baking a cake by wrapping it in aluminum foil and putting it in a campfire. Pit firing is basically the pottery version of that, except that you're also decorating the piece by putting organic materials inside the foil pouch.
Horse hair, placed on at just the right temperature, produces a black squiggly line. Other natural materials like salts, copper wire and even banana peels, produce different effects.
"It's like Christmas morning when you open these up," McDowell said of the foil pouches, called saggars. "It's just wonderful, it鈥檚 beautiful and, like, you don't necessarily know how it's gonna work. So it's an experiment. But you can have trust in science. And so science is totally incorporated into this whole process."
With an air of self-reflection, she added, "Which is interesting because my dad's a science teacher. So, I don't know, it's interesting."
McDowell encourages her students to take chances as well. Aidan Lodge graduated from Peoples Academy this month and is headed to art school in the fall. For that, he credits his art teacher.
"Really, just the space that Averill gave me to be a maker, and to be a maker on my own terms, I think was really huge for me," Lodge said. "There's like a running joke that I never did any of the projects because I always sort of stretched the boundaries a little bit. And I think that having an art teacher who really encourages that has been crucial to me."
Fellow graduate Caroline Merriam also tips her hat to McDowell for her recent successes of getting into art school and selling some of her work.
"When she heard that I got into art school, she was very, very proud of me," Merriam said. "And I don鈥檛 know if she knows that I wouldn鈥檛 have done that without her and her support."
While McDowell said making art is an integral part of her life, shaping artists is at least as important.
"It's this funky balance of, like, what's more rewarding; is it teaching or is it the final product for myself?" she said. "And I would definitely lean towards my teaching. I chose the right career because I get so much out of teaching. However, creating on the other end has been a crazy outlet for me, and it's been amazing."
Through college and grad school and her early career, McDowell has stayed in Vermont. Here, she discovered her passion. Here, she found her mentors. And she's staying here, to pass along what she's learned.
McDowell recently bought a house in Craftsbury. There are outbuildings on the property, one of which is destined to be her new studio.
"That is the plan," she said, "to get a wheel in there, to make a studio space and make it happen. Because there鈥檚 no reason that we can鈥檛 dig a hole and build a fire and fire the work. I mean, it鈥檚 right there. It鈥檚 exciting."
This story is part of our series, Young At Art. Every Monday this summer we'll hear from artists under 40 about what inspires their work and how they view the future for artists in the state. Support for Young At Art comes from
