It took just one class at the Carbondale Clay Center for ceramicist Chase Carter to fall in love with the medium, a feeling she describes as a “return rather than a discovery.”

Carter grew up in the Roaring Fork Valley and had just moved back to Colorado from Los Angeles when a friend invited her to take a class at the Carbondale Clay Center in 2021. 

She had recently left her career as an art director in the film industry and was searching for a new path. Clay became her compass. 

“When I quit the film business, I was looking around like, oh my god, what am I going to do next?” Carter said. “Now there’s this whole other chapter that I didn’t plan on and I’m not prepared for. 

“Ceramics just waltzed in and was like, ‘It’s me. Let’s go. Come on,’ she added. “That was pretty unexpected and magical.”

Although Carter took a pottery class while attending Colorado Rocky Mountain School as a teenager — and later made a resolution to return to clay in 2018 — it took more than two decades for her to find her way back to the medium. 

As the daughter of Richard Carter, one of the artists who helped found the Aspen Art Museum, Carter had deep ties to the Roaring Fork Valley’s art scene from a young age, but thought of visual art as her father’s domain. 

“I felt like art was his domain and I wanted to be an actress for a long time, so I always felt more connected to performing arts,” Carter said. “Then as I got older and started doing ceramics and doing more visual arts in the film world… I started realizing, oh, I, I really do have something to say in the visual medium and I do really enjoy this.”

After that first class, her fate was sealed.

“(It was) pretty wild getting my hands dirty for that first time,” Carter said. “It was like a cosmic Lego just snapped into place.

“Ceramics is something that I really need in my life and didn’t know that I needed until that moment,” she added. “It was pretty wild.”

Carter spent the following year taking classes at the Carbondale Clay Center, carefully refining her skills and experimenting with her newfound craft. 

“The timing was right,” Carter said. “I had slowed down, I wasn’t working as much in the film business and I suddenly had time to take up what I thought was going to be a hobby. It turned into something altogether quite different.” 

Now, Carter works part-time at TACAW as the director of special projects and spends 20 to 30 hours a week molding clay in her home studio. She specializes in functional and elegant pieces like mugs, serving plates and bowls that reflect her minimalist lifestyle. 

“Having someone tell me, ‘I use your mug every morning,’ to me that’s the highest compliment,” Carter said. “It’s such a thrilling and intimate thing to hold a mug, to use a mug, to have this relationship with ceramics. It is so cool to me.”

Every aspect of the creation process appeals to her, from researching new forms to waiting with bated breath to see how a stain turns out after firing.  

“I enjoy getting muddy. I enjoy how you never really know what’s going to happen in the kiln,” Carter said. “I enjoy the fragility of it, of how it’s sort of ephemeral in that way. I enjoy carving and drawing on clay. I enjoy every single part of it. I love it.” 

She sells her work at the Aspen Farmers Market, the ArtWorks Store at the Anderson Ranch Art Center, the Art Base in Basalt, Carbondale’s Launchpad and the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies in Aspen. She’ll also be a vendor at Mountain Fair in Carbondale this summer.

One of Carter’s signature styles is a series of black serving platters, bowls, trays and vases adorned with an intricate, hand-sketched pattern of white lines. Using a process called sgraffito, Carter adds a black stain to slip, or watered down clay, and paints it on the piece. Once the piece is dried to a “leather hard stage,” she carves each line by hand, revealing the white clay beneath. 

Her most popular items are her Swearing Mugs — minimalist mugs featuring bold, black lettering with phrases like “Sh– for brains.” 

“My mother always said that I must have been raised by truck drivers because I had such a bad foul mouth,” Carter said. “I love my Swearing Mugs. They make me happy, and by gosh, if they don’t sell.”

Through her work with clay, Carter has found her ikigai. A Japanese philosophy that translates as “reason for being,” an ikigai is what brings each person joy, value and a sense of purpose.

“Being blessed enough to find something that you want to do when you wake up in the morning is such a gift,” Carter said. “Having that thing that I want to do be something that can actually make money, and that the world wants and that the world needs is an unbelievable confluence of events.

“That’s what ikigai is — what you’re good at, what the world needs, what you could be paid for,” she added. “Finding that in my adult life is an incredible gift and such a surprise.”

Customers can preorder pieces from Carter’s website, including custom mugs, at ceramicsbychase.com.