Laura Harris

Laura Harris is Southern. She left North Carolina after high school to pursue a forty-year career immersed in veterinary medicine. Now retired, she has returned to her roots in the Piedmont. Laura and her husband settled between Chapel Hill and Pittsboro in 2020 and she discovered ceramics. Now, her days are spent at Tall Oaks Studios LLC (which was founded in 2023) immersed in the texture and malleability of clay, working on the wheel, rolling slabs and exploring glaze formulas and applications. She has found a new passion that in many ways reminds her of previous endeavors: a combination of science, art and intuition that satisfies the need to create and accomplish individual goals in the company of like-minded friends and colleagues.

My first career was in veterinary medicine; which is necessarily a combination of science and intuition that borders on artistic expression. Now, I find that ceramics is a blend of science and artistic endeavor. Further, as a benefit of my travels, I have been inspired by the gifted artisans and crafts people that I have met across this country and around the globe. I feel fortunate that my past experiences now support me as I immerse myself in a new and evolving passion.

I work predominantly with white stoneware clay.  Most of my pieces begin on the wheel and some components of my sculptures are hand-built. Embellishments that I utilize include detailed underglaze application, tape resist and overlapping glazes. Pieces are fired cone 6 in an electric kiln. Regardless of how ceramics are decorated and fired the results are never 100% predictable and therein lies the challenge, the art and the thrill of working with clay to produce finished ceramic pieces.