In the heart of Linglestown, sunny Mud Queen Pottery welcomes all comers with classic jazz music and the smell of the holidays, even months later. Handmade clay pieces of all shapes, sizes and designs line the shelves, and a quick walk through leads to four potter’s wheels in the back of the studio.
On a spring-like Saturday, Beth Wagner and Deb Lytle sat over wheels with the Mud Queen herself, Audra Doughty, their hands coated with wet, gray clay. They were throwing—potter’s lingo for making clay pots on a wheel—for the first time.
“Your hands are the boss of the clay. You’re letting the clay be the boss of you!” Doughty told Wagner.
Pottery has been in Doughty’s life since childhood. Her father’s mother and mother’s grandmother both worked with clay, and Doughty remembers being mesmerized by the wheel throwers as a kid when she did slipcasting, a process where a liquid clay base, or slip, is poured into molds.
Doughty wouldn’t discover her passion for pottery until many years later, though. She inherited her grandmother’s kiln when she passed away, but it sat in her garage for 10 years. Her daughter, now a junior in college, did a project in high school about pottery, and the two took a class together for it. The first piece Doughty made sits in the studio among many of her other handmade pots, holding various tools.
Excited she finally had an excuse to use the kiln, she bought a wheel two weeks into her first class. “Grandma’s kiln was in the right place,” she said. “I knew I was going to do something like this.”
Doughty eventually acquired two more wheels and began giving lessons out of her basement. She didn’t like having to take students through her home to access her makeshift studio, so, when a like-minded friend discovered “the perfect place,” she told Doughty she had to come see it.
“This place was a mess. It was so gross and rundown,” Doughty said. “They completely gutted the whole building according to how I needed it set up.”
Two years and hundreds of students later, the Mud Queen still reigns.
Second Nature
Wagner and Lytle were attending their first of four, three-hour Saturday classes at Mud Queen, and they already had gained a newfound respect for the craft.
They completed several pots during their first lesson, each one an improvement on the previous one. Still, the retired teachers joked they had a long way to go.
Encouraging, patient and lighthearted—with just the right amount of critical—Doughty acknowledged that pottery is not as easy as the professionals make it look.
“It’s a lot of technique, and it’s a lot of awkward movements,” she said. “You don’t normally move your hands in the ways that you need to move them here. Then when you get it, it’s like second nature.”
Each piece begins as a basic cylinder, Doughty said, so her students always start there. They then learn how to move the clay into other shapes and types of pots using their hands and a number of other tools.
Doughty switched between Wagner and Lytle to give individual instruction, her hands-on approach helping them understand the subtle, unfamiliar movements. Never overbearing, she guided their hands with hers as they learned new positions and let their pieces take unique shapes as the students learned.
As a result of putting too much pressure on a section of the wall of her piece, Lytle accidentally ripped off the top half of her work-in-progress.
“At this point, I encourage you to sort of play with what’s left,” she said. “It also teaches you to see what you can get away with and what you can’t.”
At Wagner and Lytle’s second class, their pieces, having been wrapped in plastic for the week in between, will have dried to the leather-hard stage, where the clay is harder but still workable. All imperfections are smoothed out at this stage, and this is also the time when designs are made in the clay using a number of techniques.
Useful Things
The majority of the pottery for sale at Mud Queen is Doughty’s—from ivy-etched mugs to curvy vases to multicolored vessels for oil. In the kiln room, the shelves are full with her pieces waiting to be fired.
“I create what I like,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of research in looking at other potters’ pots. I don’t make anything that I want somebody to put up on a shelf. I like useful things, so I make useful things.”
Classes are offered in four-week or eight-week blocks, and more advanced potters can pay a flat monthly rate for studio time. Once a year, students can set up tents in the shop’s backyard and sell their own pieces.
As a member of the Linglestown community—she lives a mile and a half from her studio—Doughty knows Mud Queen is about more than just her passion as a potter.
“So many of the new businesses here, we’re all in the same mindset, trying to really bring a little bit more energy, a little bit more art,” she said. “And a little more interaction between people.”
Mud Queen Pottery is located at 1342 N. Mountain Rd., Linglestown. For more information, call 717-652-1000 or visit www.mudqueenpottery.com.
