Welcome to Carla Edstrom Pottery!

I worked as a paramedic on an ambulance service and in a trauma center for about 10 years. I often saw people during the worst day of their life after a terrible accident or major medical problem. Since several years of my working in EMS was spent in the small farm town in Illinois where I grew up, I usually cared for people I grew up with or for their loved ones. When I would see a past patient of mine around town, I found satisfaction in seeing them weeks after their wounds had time to heal and their scars were all that remained. It amazed me how a surgeon would take their battered or sick body and put it back together so it was whole again. Not without scars, but nonetheless their life saved and ready for another day.

Doctors have told me that it's not all skill and training that saves the patient. But they say a human body's ability to heal and mend is unmatchable, along with a higher power that brings people through a major accident. The doctors' focus on the details of encouraging healing, then the body takes it from there. God willing, the patient lives to see another day. Scars and little imperfections are our trademarks from human survival and are what makes us who we are.

I use many of these same principles I learned as a paramedic in my artwork. Making pottery is a process of taking a mess and making something beautiful out of it. I can take a clump of clay and form it into something completely opposite to the mess it once was. Creating a pot takes vision, patience and focus, but the clay has its own characteristics that enable it to be formed into a functional object. I know I have found success and the piece is finished when it has its own personality with little bits of myself intertwined. No pot is perfect, but instead it has a character of its own with every crease and blemish left from my hands. It has character that I merely helped form. When people buy a mug from me, every time they use that mug they will hold it in their hands and feel the lines my fingers left behind and the curve and shape of the pot I created with my hands. They see the impressions I made on the mug, and in these "scars" I leave a piece of me or my trademark for another person to be inspired by. Of this I find great satisfaction.

 Thanks For Stopping By,

Carla