Collection: Marcie McGoldrick

Marcie McGoldrick

“You have to be a bit of a glutton for punishment with ceramics,” says Marcie McGoldrick, whose utility crock and footed bowls, both in white porcelain, exemplify minimalist elegance. McGoldrick began her pottery career after taking a class in ceramics while pursuing a master’s degree in industrial design at the Pratt Institute. “I loved it right away,” she says now, from her newish home studio outside Philadelphia. Ceramics would remain a hobby during her 17-year career at Martha Stewart Living in New York City; in recent years, that one-time diversion has occupied more and more of her schedule. She begins by making a plaster model on her lathe: “It’s almost horizontally thrown,” she says. With the finished mold in hand, she slip-casts each piece, preserving its refined details, and then glazes the interiors. The process of achieving the intended result, she says, is one of ceramics’ most indelible challenges. Each step in the process presents myriad opportunities for things to go wrong, or wonderfully right. “Even when you understand the process, things don't always come out the way you expected — there's so many different ways that things could go wrong,” she says. “It’s not a negative, though — it’s problem solving, and I love the process of figuring it out.”