Charlotte potters put a new spin on tradition

A version of the following article appeared in the September 21, 2026, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.

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by Ashley Fahey

With surgical precision and a whirring sound, tiny strings of clay are layering onto a platform. It’s repetitive, almost hypnotic, to watch the machine pour stone-colored clay in tidy, precise rows. It’ll take a couple of hours, but at the end, a tile — hopefully with no bubbles or imperfections that will force a redo — will emerge.

Inside his home studio in Charlotte’s Enderly Park neighborhood in west Charlotte, this is how Thomas Schmidt uses a 3D clay printer to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of tiles for several commissioned art projects.

Schmidt is one of a growing number of people working with clay who are incorporating technology into the creative process.

“I was always drawn to the industrial design aspect of ceramics,” said Schmidt, a professor of art and interdisciplinary art at UNC Charlotte’s College of Arts + Architecture.

Schmidt is one of 55 artists selected to display his work at the Potters Market at the Mint, an annual pottery sale and museum fundraiser taking place this weekend on the lawn of The Mint Museum’s Randolph Road site in Eastover. This year is the market’s 20th anniversary.

The event uniquely includes both international, even famous, potters alongside local artists like Schmidt and Allison Neiss, who works in risk management at Wells Fargo and started taking pottery classes at the Levine Jewish Community Center only five years ago.

“It’s a great way to relieve stress at the end of the day and kind of get out of my head,” she said, adding that pottery and art have become an activity for her whole household, with her home’s bonus room now serving as the family art room.

As she started hand-rolling clay as a creative outlet outside of her corporate job, it became a goal for Neiss to show her work at The Mint’s pottery market. She applied this year and was pleasantly surprised that she was selected.

Her signature pieces are what she called “fluttery” bowls and vases. At the market, she’ll also be displaying pieces from her Drift collection, which includes pieces with “ropes” that she coils by hand. She’s making about 100 pieces for the market.

Schmidt, a ceramicist since his undergraduate years at Loyola University Chicago, knows his approach to pottery — in which he combines technology, namely his 3D printer, with more traditional hand work — might be regarded with some skepticism by pottery purists. He creates utilitarian items like mugs and vases, but many of his signature pieces involve tiles. In fact, he was recently commissioned by the Skokie Public Library in the Chicago area to create a massive art installation of tiles that’ll resemble wrinkled pages, as though they flew out of a book.

Schmidt is hoping the market will help him engage with fellow artists and market attendees on how technology like a 3D printer can be used in art — art that is still very much created by humans, he said.

“I think there's a misconception that it's a very binary thing — there's either the handmade or digitally fabricated or machine-made, but actually, it's a really gray area,” he said. “And I'm quite interested in that gray area and how digital processes can inform the handmade and vice versa.”

Beyond showing at exhibits and teaching, Schmidt has been commissioned to do several large-scale art installations. His piece “Connections” is in Duke Energy’s uptown headquarters, and he’s working on a metal piece for the Main Library, which is under construction in uptown.

One of his more sobering pieces: Alongside a UNC Charlotte colleague, Schmidt created the Remembrance Memorial metal sculpture at the university to commemorate victims and survivors of a campus shooting in April 2019.

Pottery for most is a hobby or, perhaps, a Facebook Marketplace side hustle. But Patrick Cooley made the decision this summer to step back from his job as an architect to pursue pottery full time.

Although he took pottery classes in high school, Cooley majored in architecture at the Savannah College of Art and Design — a more practical choice than majoring in clay, he felt at the time.

Cooley’s career took him to LS3P Associates, one of the most prolific architecture firms in Charlotte. There, he worked primarily on corporate design and upfits. In fact, he designed the interiors of some of Charlotte’s newest office towers.

Despite the structure that architecture provided him, Cooley said he’s reached a point in his life where he wanted to throw everything into pursuing his passion, art. He says he has no idea what even the next three months will look like, but he’s applying to shows, looking for a gallery partner and leasing space at Clayworks in east Charlotte to mold what this second career could look like.

“I think I'm in a phase where it's like, let's lean into everything,” Cooley said. “We'll sleep after the midlife crisis.”

Although his work has appeared in a couple of shows, Cooley said he was shocked to be picked for The Mint’s market, citing its prestige and noting that artists who were in his college textbooks will also be there.

Naturally, Cooley leverages his architecture background in his art: He calls that approach “anal perfectionist,” but the measurement-based precision needed to sketch buildings and spaces is similar to how he maps out his art pieces.

“But I think what's different from architecture and clay is having the maturity to say nature is still going to do its thing,” he said. “I'm not trying to control the object. I'm trying to let it be organic.”

That release and loss of control is something Neiss conveyed, too, in describing what working with clay gives her outside of her financial services job: “I look at clay and say, ‘Tell me what to do.’”

Ashley Fahey is The Ledger’s managing editor. Reach her at [email protected].