Creating Community Through Clay
Meet our Team
The Staunton Clayground Staff & Instructors
-
Cary Dahl
FOUNDER & DIRECTOR
Cary believes strongly that pottery is about community, and it has been her dream for many years to a create just such a community right here where she lives, in Staunton, Virginia. A place where people can come together to create, exchange ideas and grow as artists and as friends. Hand-building is her preferred way to play with clay. She teaches classes and workshops on this aspect of the craft.
-
Jennifer Delare
STUDIO MANAGER & CREATIVE DIRECTOR
The only thing Jennifer loves more than finding new ways to explore her craft is sharing that experience with others, so when Cary invited her to be a part of this community-focused studio, she was over the moon. She is still working to improve her skill, and focuses mainly on throwing on the wheel, though she loves experimenting with all kinds of surface decoration techniques and enjoys hand building as well. She teaches classes and workshops.
-
Abby Kiracofe
STUDIO TECHNICIAN EXTRAORDINAIRE
For as long as she can remember, Abby has had her hands in art. She is a Staunton local who has always been a creator and lover of art, frequenting the yearly Art in The Park at Gypsy Hill. She is a lover of museums and could wander galleries of art all day if she had nowhere else to be. She has a BA in Studio Art from the University of Mary Washington and has love for a variety of different mediums. It was during her university experience that she found love for sculptural work through clay.
-
Nicole Hill
INSTRUCTOR
Since taking her first college ceramics course, Nicole has been hooked on creating with clay. She truly believes ceramics gave her the courage in herself to create whatever she could think up. Through both hand building and wheel throwing, Nicole has explored, taught, and sold ceramics, and she is always ready for the next creative challenge.
-
Valya Boutenko
INSTRUCTOR
Valya Boutenko grew up in Ashland Oregon. She earned a BA in Art with an emphasis in Ceramics at Southern Oregon University. After graduating, Valya joined a collective of artists and worked as a production potter for many years. She sold her wares at art galleries, gift shops, and craft fairs. After moving to Virginia in 2021, Valya taught beginner, intermediate, and advanced ceramics at Blue Ridge Community College to students ages 7-85. Today, Valya lives in the beautiful Shenandoah valley with her husband and their miniature dachshund, Max. She continues to enjoy teaching pottery and is presently a practicing artist.
-
Mary Tuttle
INSTRUCTOR
Mary has been working as a studio potter for over 30 years, and has been teaching for 12 years. She was a member of the Great Smoky Arts and Crafts Community for 11 years in Gatlinburg, TN, and enjoyed meeting lots of new people every day in her shop/studio.
Since returning to Virginia in 2010, Mary has taught through the Staunton Recreation and Parks Department, volunteered in the art department at Buffalo Gap High School, and has taught at other local studios. She focuses on functional stoneware pottery with surprising glaze color combinations. She believes in having fun and interpreting the world's beauty through clay.
-
Brooke Fawley
INSTRUCTOR
Brooke has a rich background in teaching ceramics. She has taught art in schools for over 20 years, to all ages, including high school ceramics. She has taught art in three states, Virginia, Colorado, and New York, where she also worked creating ceramic pieces for Artyard Studio. Clay is central to her multimedia approach to creating. For Brooke, the spark and privilege of teaching is in helping others connect with the joy of creating and seeing others launch their ideas into the creative process. -
Christy Pilson
INSTRUCTOR
Christy Pilson started her journey with clay at JMU in the late 1980s, graduating with a BFA in art with a concentration in ceramics. From there she taught a variety of Artist in Residence classes in various county schools, worked for a local potter, and attended ceramics classes at BRCC. She earned an MAT from MBU in 2010, and has been teaching for Augusta County Public Schools on the elementary level since then. She currently teaches art at Wilson Elementary School, and also teaches in JMU’s Kids Go to College Programs twice a year. She lives in Augusta county with her family and cats, and is very excited to be a part of the Staunton Clayground.
-
Lainie Mabbitt
GUEST INSTRUCTOR
Lainie Mabbitt has been creating original art across a wide variety of mediums for many years. From rug-hooking to mosaic work using found glass, to polymer clay and more, she never ceases to explore new outlets for her inspiration. While her career as an HR consultant, leadership trainer and executive coach keeps her very busy, Lainie always makes time to go where her curiosity leads. Realizing she loved incorporating old cast-off treasures into art, she established Second Stories Art, through which to seek a wider audience for her work. You may have seen her pieces at Staunton Art for Gifts, Basement on Byers Gallery, Art Hive, and local art festivals. She is excited to share her knowledge through workshops at Staunton Clayground.
-
Janly Jaggard
GUEST INSTRUCTOR
While Janly’s formal art training (both B.A. and M.F.A.) was in England, the Shenandoah Valley has been beneficiary of her teaching since 1993. She has taught pottery, vitreous enamel, drawing and painting, both privately and at the Beverley Street Studio School. Staunton Clayground is delighted to welcome her as an instructor of classes and workshops in coiling and slab building. Her breadth of experience and knowledge will contribute to students’ experiences and understanding of the medium.
-
Calling experienced potters and clay artists of all kinds!
We are actively growing our team! We are looking for regular teachers, guest instructors and studio technicians. We plan to offer long-running classes, one-day or weekend workshops and more. If you’re interested, please get in touch with your ideas and availability. We’d love to hear about your work and see some pictures, too! We look forward to hearing from you.
Cary Dahl
Founder & Director
Cary comes from a long line of oil painters, and indeed, portrait painting was Cary’s first love. After a handbuilding class with Janly Jaggard and Jim Hanger, however, Cary became drawn to pottery for its tactile qualities and the camaraderie of the community studio. Phil Unger and Liz Beaver at Blue Ridge Community College became her teachers over the next several years, fostering her fascination with texture and form.
Years of service at church and on nonprofit boards, both local and international (including The Community Foundation of the Central Blue Ridge, Stuart Hall School, and EVACE International) have focused Cary’s attention on Staunton as a community. She believes that the joy of creating together is a great way to foster closer connections among our residents, both new and old.
When her hands are not covered in clay, Cary loves hiking, biking, reading, traveling and learning French. She has a wonderful husband, Allen, and three children who never cease to amaze and surprise her; Hannah teaches English as a Second Language at VCU, Oliver remodels and repurposes historic buildings in Staunton, and Sophie is a budding anthropologist focusing on post-Soviet cultures.
Jennifer Delare
Studio Manager & Creative Director
Jennifer has always been interested in ceramics, taking her first slab and hand-building class in Italy when she was just a teenager. In Florence, where she went to high school, she fell in love with art and art history. She later attended art school in Milan. A few years later, while living in New York City, she expanded her skill to include the pottery wheel. After some time away from pottery, she rediscovered her passion for clay during lockdown, and she hasn’t looked back.
Jennifer has spent her adult life living on and off in the US and Italy, where she worked for many years as an English teacher. She decided to settle down on this side of the ocean several years ago. After a few years in Philadelphia, she and her husband, Ben, another former globe-trotting English teacher, decided to move somewhere with a slower pace and a lot more green, which is how they ended up in Staunton. When she’s not getting her hands dirty at the clay studio, Jennifer works as an Italian-language translator. She also enjoys cooking, reading, writing, sewing and the great outdoors.
Abby Kiracofe
Studio Tech Extraordinaire
Abby has had an interest in art ever since she was a kid. She was always excited to explore new mediums and find new ways to create. If she wasn’t creating, then she was reading, filling her brain with the imagination of new worlds and fantastical creatures. Her parents, both avid readers, nurtured this imagination and encouraged it to grow.
Abby had been briefly introduced to clay in elementary school, but would not take interest in it until her sophomore year of high school, when she took her first ceramics course. Throughout this course she discovered a love for hand building. This was her first introduction to the world of clay. When she entered college at the University of Mary Washington in 2020 as a 2024 graduate, she crammed every available clay class into her schedule as they came up. It was through these four years that Abby really developed her hand-building skills, since at the time she was unable to learn the wheel, due to the pandemic (she later learned the wheel at Staunton Clayground!). She learned how to make glazes, fire kilns, how kilns are built and the history of them. It was also during this time that Abby took a variety of other courses in other mediums, to make her well rounded as an artist. Her favorite medium other than clay is cardboard, where she creates sculptural pieces such as swords, maps, and dioramas, “A glimpse into another world, ” as she calls it. Abby believes that all art is good art as long as it was intended to be art.
When Abby is not making art, she can often be found reading books and writing stories in worlds that only she knows the full scope of.
Nicole Hill
Instructor
Nicole’s ceramics journey started at the University of Northern Colorado. Through the Art Education program she centered her focus around ceramics and took a total of seven ceramic courses. Following university she dove head first into teaching art, starting with being an elementary school art teacher for four years in Colorado, and then an upper elementary school art teacher for three years in Charlottesville. Nicole is currently working part time at Stuart Hall Schools as a dorm parent, sub, and study hall proctor as she creates ceramics to sell at local fairs. Her professional art career is just getting started. She is very proud of her accomplishments of participating in her first fair, Staunton’s Art in the Park, in 2023, and completing her first commissioned set of work for local Trinity Church.
When Nicole is not teaching or creating, she spends time with her husband Justin and their three dogs Halo, Paisley, and Cal. She loves to rollerblade around Gypsy Hill Park, to read fantasy adventure novels, and finding great food to eat and cook.
Valya Boutenko
Instructor
Valya Boutenko first took up working with clay as a young child. By age 5, a pound of clay was the only item on her wish list for Santa. She pursued hand building into young adulthood and began learning to throw on the wheel at age 15. While attending University, Valya practiced many art forms including drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, pastels, ink pen, fiber art, only to find that her secret heart was truly buried in world of ceramics. It appealed to her that functional pottery was artwork one couldn’t help but interact with daily. It was not just something to look at, but something to pick up and handle. To her, it seemed that handmade pottery enhanced the richness of life, bringing a sense of joie de vivre to ordinary daily mealtimes and special occasions alike.
All the while, Valya never neglected the art of handbuilding and routinely practiced sculpting hollow dragons and other sculptural forms to hone her craft. She believes that throwing and hand building are both challenging, equally valuable skills that greatly enhance one another. From the masterfully thrown mug crafted with extra finesse, to a coil-made vessel that demonstrates the full emotional potential of hand-built work, Valya believes in the importance of developing throwing and hand building skills side by side.
Valya is an avid gardener who enjoys growing fruit trees and English roses in her backyard. She also enjoys hand-knitting sweaters with natural fibers such as wool and alpaca. Having a deep appreciation for the natural world, Valya’s pottery often features organic, asymmetrical qualities. She believes that mastery in ceramics is being able to highlight the unparalleled beauty of clay’s inherent nature.
Mary Tuttle
Instructor
Mary Tuttle first encountered clay at Mary Washington College (now UMW) in 1982, and promptly fell in love. She took five semesters of studio ceramics and an independent study while graduating with the extremely useful bachelor's in Sociology.
Having been raised to believe that art was, at best, a diverting hobby, and at worst, an impediment to real work, pottery took a further 8 years to become a vocation.
Mary worked for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of the National Capitol Area, sold high-end furniture, and had a blast waitressing and bartending before being divinely inspired to take a pottery apprenticeship in 1993, and from there she hung out a shingle and began selling her work at shows and shops near Charlottesville and Staunton.
Her big break in clay arrived with a move to Gatlinburg, where she was able to open a shop, and fall helplessly in love with the University of Tennessee football program--go Vols!
In 2010, Mary moved back to Virginia to help her father, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but instead of opening another shop, decided to sell through other shops in Staunton and teach pottery.
Mary hopes one day to have taught the entire world the joys of making pottery, but also realizes that might be a stretch.
Christy Pilson
Instructor
Christy Pilson started her journey with clay at JMU in the late 1980s, when she took her first clay class and was hooked. After graduating with a BFA in art with a concentration in ceramics, where she mostly created handbuilt pieces, she then worked for a year for Jim Hanger, a Staunton potter, where she learned much more about throwing on the wheel, faceting, pulling handles, and glazing. During this time, she also wedged clay, did most of the bisque firings, and tested glazes. She was greatly influenced by Mr. Hanger, potters Terry Porter and Karis Berry, and metalsmith Kyle Leister.
Through the years, Christy also taught a variety of Artist in Residence classes in various county schools, and attended a number of ceramics classes at BRCC under Phill Unger, and raku workshops with Lynn Hilton-Conyers. Deciding to go back to school, she earned an MAT from MBU in 2010, and has been teaching for Augusta County Public Schools on the elementary level since then. She has participated in several shows such as the ACPS teacher show at Bridgewater College and an annual ACPS teacher show that travels from school to school.
Christy currently teaches art at Wilson Elementary School, where every student does a ceramic project each year. She also teaches in JMU’s Kids Go to College Programs twice a year. She still loves handbuilding, as well as throwing and carving/altering the thrown forms. She lives in Augusta county with her family and cats, and is very excited to be a part of the Staunton Clayground.
Brooke Fawley
Instructor
“Seeing a mug being used every day by a loved one who lives far away during a Zoom call or a bowl that I made full of beautiful berries at a gathering for the community is such a wonderful feeling. I can be there for loved ones in some way.”
Creating functional pottery has been a wonderful experience for Brooke, but she also enjoys using clay sculpture in whimsical multimedia projects. She loves how messy, transformative and long the process of working with clay can be. Each piece has an extra-long relationship with its artist from start to finish. Like so many of the things in life we spend time with, the relationship and time creating a ceramic work of art creates opportunities for experiencing transformation, building friendships, healing, wonderful excitement, and is always a journey, from blob of clay to sparkling vessel.
“As far as hobbies go, I am very dedicated to teaching and looking forward to creating a mural at my school this summer. Traveling, gardening and good food all delight me.”
Lainie Mabbitt
Guest Instructor
Lainie's love of creating began with a pile of old T-shirts her father left when he passed away. Wanting to save them in some meaningful way, she created a style of rug-hooking using wide strips of the shirts that left their logos intact. She became "hooked" on this and began using vintage fabrics of all types to create rug-hooked wall hangings and included the story of the old clothes along with them. Realizing she loved incorporating old cast-offs into art, Lainie established Second Stories Art and widened her mediums to include old glass, buttons, wood and metal items. You may have seen her work at Staunton Art for Gifts, Basement on Byers Gallery, Art Hive, and local art festivals. Her latest passion is polymer clay, which she enjoys for its versatility and the ability to easily incorporate her repurposed treasures. The common denominator in Lainie's clay pieces is figurative - she loves creating expressive faces and watching those characters come to life.
In between assignments doing HR consulting, leadership training and executive coaching, Lainie enjoys hiking, traveling, reading, mushroom foraging, acting in local theatre, and volunteering. Lainie grew up in Woodstock, Virginia and she graduated from JMU. After living various places around the US, she moved to Charlotte, NC, where she met her husband, Jason. They and their dog Zeke now live near her family in Staunton.
Janly Jaggard
Guest Instructor
Janly was born in Suffolk, England. Art college for Foundation Studies in Ipswich prepared her for a Diploma of Art & Design, 3D Studies: Ceramics, at West of England College of Art, Bristol. She later earned a Master’s Degree in Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts. She has been teaching various mediums, including pottery, vitreous enamel, drawing and painting, since moving to the Shenandoah Valley in 1993. Janly exhibits her painting and enamel work both nationally and internationally and has worked as a judge at several regional art exhibitions. She has regularly been accepted to participate in artist residency programs, including at the prestigious Pocosin Art Center in North Carolina and the Virginia Center of Creative Arts.
Janly has taught ceramics, painting and vitreous enameling at the Beverley Street Studio School. Staunton Clayground is delighted to welcome her as an instructor of classes and workshops in hand building, focusing on coiling and slab building techniques. She adds a depth and breadth of art understanding and technique that will benefit students and other teachers alike. Likewise, Janly appreciates her role as a teacher in making her a better student, learning from so many different sources about the significance and importance of the Arts in this increasingly de-personalized world.
While practicing her art, Janly investigates the technical differences that occur between the mediums she uses. Creative processes and materiality are the focus of her work. You can visit her website here.