December 2011. First you make a bowl...

Denise Austin is a potter living in Hammond who discovered that the best way to survive the upheaval Hurricane Katrina created in her life was to rely on her art.

Like most of us, Austin had endured her share of loss. Getting in on the ground floor of the coffee bean craze, she once owned the popular True Brew Café coffee shops, a five-store mini-chain in New Orleans. Business fell off after competition from national chains entered the Crescent City market, and by the time Katrina hit, she had closed four of the shops. The coup de grace occurred when Katrina destroyed her last location.

The storm also destroyed her home and the new pottery studio, the one she had only just built in July 2005.

“We lost everything in Katrina so we moved to the Northshore,” Austin said. “We didn’t know anyone. I didn’t even know where the grocery store was.”

The first order of business? Build a new pottery studio.

“The thing that was my salvation was the fact that I knew how to make a bowl; that was my anchor,” Austin said. “I drew a lot of strength from my art.”

Bowl begat plate, which begat saucer, and soon Austin had placed her imaginative and functional pottery pieces in Northshore coffee shops and interior design stores. She began teaching pottery five days a week at the Art Station in Ponchatoula last March.

Eager to give back, Austin donated one of her pieces to Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s “Art and Travel Auction.” The piece was selected for the “People’s Choice Award” by LPB viewers.

She took up the craft in 1995 and apprenticed under Debbie Kraemer of Magazine Street fame. After fifteen years of practicing her craft, Austin has an interesting view of her work.

“I still consider myself as a novice although other people don’t,” she said. “It’s hard to recognize your own work and it’s still hard for me to call myself an artist. I look at myself as a craftsperson. It’s a craft, but some people look at it as art.”

Art or not, all of her work is functional. Her blue pitcher featured on our table is a “built” piece, not a work thrown on the pottery wheel.
“I used a technique called slip and score,” she said. “You slip and score and push the pieces together.”

Fired in a kiln at 2,000 degrees, the pitcher is, as are all of her pieces, food-safe, dishwasher-safe and microwavable.

“I chose to put this glaze over raku, a different clay body than what was suggested by the glaze manufacturer,” Austin said. “That’s why it looks a little different. The glaze picked up different tones and hues and nuances.”

Austin is a regular at the Baton Rouge Arts Market and will have her booth set up for the market’s special showing the first three weekends of December.
She’ll also have her first bona-fide art opening at the Henry Hood Gallery in Covington through December 10.

Details. Details. Details.

Austin accepts commissions and can be reached via email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Henry Hood Gallery
325 E. Lockwood St.
Covington
(985) 789-1832

Art Station
146 West Oak Street  
Ponchatoula
(985) 386-8815
www.theartstationllc.com

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