Susan Shaffer

Exploration and evolution has been the strength of Susan’s creative works since her beginning as a ceramic art student in high school.  The daughter of a painter and physicist, she learned to think about things out of the box and view the world from different perspectives at an early age.

Chicago-born, she attended secondary school near New York City, where she crossed paths with clay in an elective course.  It was love at first touch, and when college and her future called, it was clear that art would lead the way for her.

In 1973 she was accepted into one of the foremost ceramic art institutions in the country, Alfred University College of Ceramics in upstate New York, where the foundation program opened her eyes beyond painting and clay, into drawing, photography and multimedia.  But it was also here that she solidified her knowledge about the technical and creative aspects of clay, in both its functional and more abstract forms.

Susan’s life took a turn after college into more real-world experiences – marriage to Tom Shaffer and a move to Captiva, Florida.  It was here that her first studio was built, and her pottery sales supplemented her bread-and-butter employment in the business world.

Like stepping stones, job offers led the couple from Captiva Island to Useppa Island to Boca Grande, where in 1980 Susan was hired by a local sculptor to set up a pottery studio and shop on the island.  When this project was completed, she and Tom purchased a small home on the island.  A son and daughter, Patrick and Kelsey, soon followed.

Clay work requires long sequences of time, hard to achieve when young ones are on board, so Susan turned to papermaking, creating large, wall-hung pieces, and photo image transfers, creating small, delicate scenarios.  This coincided with another birth, of an island organization now known as the Boca Grande Art Alliance.  It was 1987, and the island was entering a time of change, welcoming a new wave of inhabitants who brought with them a broad range of support for the arts.  Susan found a niche of patrons who encouraged her paperwork and photo explorations for many years.

With children grown, clay was still there, calling her from the past.  In 2001 a new studio was built, and Susan was back to her original passion.  The view was different this time, however – working in other mediums had left its mark, and her work today is evolving in a direction that often departs from the traditional to the experimental, combining photos, paper, printing, paint and other mediums with clay.

In parallel, Susan still loves to make functional stoneware, however.  For a potter, there’s nothing as pleasurable as seeing a familiar mug in a friend’s hands, or a vase on a neighbor’s table.  It reminds her of the timelessness of clay, its connection with the earth, and with the spiritual evolution of our culture.

top