Sacred art, made by hand.

Hand-mixed clay.

The studio mixes its own clay bodies. That sounds small, but almost no one doing this work mixes their own clay anymore, it is much easier to buy a pre-bagged stoneware and move on. The reason to mix your own is that it lets you tune the body to the iconography: a warmer, more iron-bearing clay for Sacred Heart pieces; a whiter, finer clay where cobalt and tin-white need to read clean for a Marian tile. You feel the difference before you see it.

Painted by hand, from the tradition.

Every piece is painted by hand. The iconography is not invented, it is researched. The Della Robbia workshops of fifteenth-century Florence, the azulejo tile traditions of Spain and Portugal, the Eastern icon tradition with its theology of light and gold, the Romanesque tympana of rural French churches: these are the rooms the work tries to belong to. A Sacred Heart is painted with the crown of thorns, the cross, and the flame, not because they are decorative but because the Church has received them, and they teach.

Three kilns.

The studio fires in gas reduction, electric oxidation, and raku. Most liturgical work goes through the gas kiln, reduction pulls the iron out of the clay and the copper out of the glaze, and gives the deep iron-reds the Sacred Heart deserves. Electric is for the predictable pieces, like a tile series that has to match itself across a parish commission. Gold luster, where it appears on a halo or a chalice band, is a third firing at lower temperature, the way the iconographers of the East have done it for a thousand years.

Why the prices are what they are.

A handmade tile from this studio is more than a printed one because it is made differently. The clay is mixed, the form is pressed or thrown, the iconography is drawn and painted by hand from the source images, and the piece is fired two or three times, once for the bisque, once for the glaze, once more for any gold work. There are no decals, no sublimation, no screens. If you want a tile that will outlast its frame and read as sacred art a hundred years from now, that is what this is.

For parishes, schools, and religious orders.

The studio takes commissions from parishes, Catholic schools, and religious orders, tiles for an anniversary, a patronal feast, or a renovation; holy water fonts for a chapel set; baptism-set gifts for a school class. Lead times are honest and the work is the work. More on wholesale and parish commissions →

Visiting, writing, commissioning.

Pieces are listed in the collections as they leave the kiln. If a piece you'd like is sold or hasn't been made yet, the waitlist is the right place, I write personally when the next one is fired. For private commissions, parish work, or to write with a question about a particular saint or symbol, send a note. I read everything.

From the studio, Massachusetts