Today we’d like to introduce you to Kimberly White.
Hi Kimberly, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Sisters Clay Collective started with a little jealousy, actually. Not my proudest moment, but it’s true!
I’d been trying to find a space to open a community pottery studio in Sisters for about a year and a half, with one false start after another. Eventually, I’d gotten so discouraged that I’d pretty much shelved the idea. Then a friend casually mentioned that he’d met another woman who was looking for space to open a pottery studio in town.
My immediate reaction? Absolutely not. This town is WAY too small for two community clay studios, and I’d better beat her to it! (Ever the ambitious one, apparently.)
Thankfully, I came to my senses pretty quickly and thought, well, maybe I should just meet her. She might be great.
Stef Seibold and I met for coffee a few days later, and I think within about ten minutes we both knew we’d be doing this together. We had exactly the same vision for what a community clay studio could be, and why a little town like Sisters needed one.
Ceramics is an incredibly expensive hobby to pursue on your own. Between kilns, wheels, electrical work, ventilation, glazes, tools, and enough space to actually make things, the barriers to entry are pretty substantial. But when you share those resources, suddenly it becomes much more accessible.
More importantly, though, we both understood the magic that happens when people make art together. There’s a particular energy in a room full of people creating, even when everyone is quietly working on their own thing. It’s hard to explain until you’ve experienced it, but it’s something neither of us wanted to keep to ourselves.
And then the funniest thing happened. After a year and a half of struggling to make this dream happen on my own, everything started falling into place almost immediately once Stef and I teamed up.
Within a week or so, we’d found a beautiful space with an incredible rental rate that needed virtually no renovations. I already had pottery wheels from my previous attempts to get things going, and Stef brought an amazing network of community connections and a willingness to jump in and make things happen. Friends and neighbors rallied around us. A local woodworker and his crew built all our shelving and enormous hand-building tables for free. We met a ceramicist with a background in glaze chemistry who helped us learn to make our own glazes. Even a hard-to-find piece of equipment we’d been hoping for suddenly showed up at exactly the right price.
It felt like the universe had been waiting for us to find each other.
About eight weeks after signing our lease, we opened the doors to Sisters Clay Collective.
Today we’re building the kind of place we’d both been dreaming about: a welcoming, well-equipped studio where experienced potters and total beginners can create alongside one another, learn from each other, and find community in the process.
I still laugh about my initial reaction to hearing about Stef. Turns out, the woman I thought I needed to beat to the punch was the person I needed to meet all along.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The road to opening was almost suspiciously smooth once Stef and I found each other. Actually running the studio, though? That’s been a learning experience!
Some lessons were pretty immediate. For example, those beautiful shelves our community helped us build? Turns out they were about two inches too tall to meet fire safety requirements. TWO INCHES! They were just high enough to interfere with the ceiling sprinklers, which meant we had to modify a perfectly finished shelving system. Not exactly a catastrophe, but one of those moments where you realize how many little things you don’t know until you’re actually doing it.
The bigger learning curve has been understanding the rhythms of our community. Our grand opening was wildly successful. It felt like the whole town showed up to see the space, and our first classes sold out within an hour or two. It was incredible, and honestly, a little intoxicating! But we’ve learned that the enthusiasm of a grand opening doesn’t necessarily translate into predictable, ongoing demand.
Sisters is an incredibly outdoorsy town, and when summer arrives, people want to be outside. And who can blame them? We live in one of the most beautiful places in Oregon. Our six-week adult classes were much harder to fill over the summer, even though they’d been selling out earlier in the year. We knew seasonality would be a factor, but we underestimated just how dramatic it would be. Now that fall has arrived, we’re seeing interest pick back up, and we’re learning how to adapt our programming to the natural rhythms of life here.
And then there are the thousand tiny expenses and tasks that nobody really warns you about. Another set of glaze containers, more brushes for students, another tool you didn’t realize you’d need. None of it seems significant individually, but it adds up quickly. We also discovered that our glazes don’t last nearly as long as we’d anticipated. Mixing them from scratch saves us money, but it’s a surprisingly time-consuming process, and we haven’t quite perfected that rhythm yet.
I think the biggest lesson has been that opening a studio and operating one sustainably are two very different things. We’re still figuring things out, adjusting, and occasionally laughing at ourselves along the way. But we’re getting better at it, and every lesson is helping us build something that can be here for the long haul.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
At its heart, Sisters Clay Collective is a community ceramics studio. We’re a place for people to get their hands dirty, make things they’re proud of (and occasionally things they’re not!), and spend time creating alongside other people.
We wanted to build something that could meet people wherever they are in their creative journey. If you’ve never touched clay before, you can come take a workshop and make your very first mug or bowl. If you’re curious to learn more, we offer multi-week classes in wheel throwing and hand-building, where you can really start developing your skills. And if you’re already a potter, we have studio memberships and day passes that give you access to a fully equipped workspace without having to invest thousands of dollars in equipment of your own.
We also offer programming for teenagers, which is especially meaningful in a small town where there aren’t always a lot of places for young people to gather and explore something creative.
One thing we’re particularly proud of is that this is a true working ceramics studio. We’ve invested in pottery wheels, a slab roller, a pug mill, kilns, glazes, and all the tools that make it possible for someone to develop a serious ceramics practice. We want people to feel like the studio is theirs to use, whether they’re learning to center clay for the first time or working on something they’ve been dreaming up for months.
But we also don’t want pottery to feel precious or intimidating. Clay is messy, unpredictable, and sometimes downright humbling. Things collapse, handles fall off, and occasionally the kiln has opinions of its own. We want people to feel comfortable experimenting, asking questions, making mistakes, and learning from each other.
And that’s where the real magic happens. We’ve watched unexpected friendships form between people who might never have met otherwise. We’ve seen artists discover one another and begin collaborating on projects. There’s a generosity that develops when creative people share a space, and it’s been really wonderful to watch.
But if I’m being completely honest, the thing that makes me proudest is much simpler than any of that.
Sometimes I’ll be working in the back of the studio, doing some mundane task, and I’ll hear a table full of people just absolutely cracking up together. That sound makes me happier than just about anything else we’ve accomplished.
Because that’s what we hoped this place would become. Somewhere people want to be, where they feel comfortable and connected, and where making art is just part of the reason they keep coming back.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
I’d just encourage people to PLAY more. As adults, I think we forget how important it is to do something purely for the joy of doing it, without worrying so much about the outcome. Not everything has to be productive, or beautiful, or even particularly good!
There’s something really freeing about being willing to be a beginner again. To be bad at something, laugh about it, and keep going anyway. I think that’s part of what keeps us young at heart. And it’s incredibly good for the soul.
I remember reading something from Martha Beck about how creativity can interrupt anxiety, and how when you’re truly absorbed in making something, your brain gets a break from all the worrying and overthinking it normally does. How amazing is that? We could all use a little more of that in our lives.
I’d also love to give some credit to the town of Sisters. So many people contributed their time, skills, encouragement, and resources to help us get this studio off the ground. We’re incredibly lucky to live in a place where people show up for each other like that, and we hope Sisters Clay Collective can return that generosity for many years to come.
Pricing:
- $150/month for half shelf membership
- $200/month for full-shelf membership
- around $300 for a 6 week series, includes extra mentor hours during open studio
- $25 day pass for folks who are familiar with the space. [Student alumni or folks who have had at least 10 hrs instructions in the past]
Contact Info:
