By Chris Faulkner
Jessi Tucci enjoys teaching pottery to children, creating mugs and vases for clients, and crafting items just for herself.
“I also just like being up to my elbows in mud,” said Tucci, the ceramics studio manager at the Art Center of Burlington.
She also works with Hope Haven and Self Alliance students off-site, as well as at the Fort Madison Area Art Center and the Make It Place in Washington.
Tucci teaches children from third grade on up to adults, but her primary focus is on teenagers because that’s when they can start working with a pottery wheel.
Midwest Transplant
Tucci grew up in Oceanside, N.Y., on Long Island and didn’t come to Burlington until 2017.
“I followed my parents, who followed someone else, who followed somebody else,” Tucci said of her parents, Susie and Bernard Boyer.
“I found out that this area was affordable. Growing up in an apartment my whole life, I was able to buy a house here.”
Her parents moved to Mount Pleasant, but after Tucci graduated from college, “I wanted to find some kind of ceramic studio and Burlington had it,” she said.
However, Long Island has a distinct culture with numerous amenities that surpass those of Burlington.
“I think that I lost some things by leaving the city, but I gained a lot more,” Tucci said.
“There’s a balance.”
She thought she would live in Manhattan her entire life.
“But my college was in a small town,” she said of Alfred University (1,463 students) in Alfred, N.Y. (population 5,471), “and I got a really nice feel for what a small town was like.”
Getting Into Pottery
“I was doing painting and drawing for a really long time,” Tucci said of her childhood. But in high school, “I ended up in one ceramic class and just never stopped.”
Alfred University is a renowned institution for ceramic engineering.
“They taught me glazed chemistry,” Tucci said, “so I mixed my own glazes. I can tell you what each chemical or material does to the glaze. How do you get color? How do you get it to move?”
Watching a potter create a product, such as the more common pieces like mugs and vases, is a sight to see, as it’s a small amount of clay that grows into a larger-sized end product.
“When I first started making mugs,” Tucci said, “I didn’t have the skill to make the mugs, so they were eight to 10 ounces because clay shrinks significantly by the time it gets through the whole process.”
However, over time, she was able to reduce the amount of clay used to make larger mugs; a 32-ounce mug now requires only a pound and a half of clay, “because I’ve learned how to manipulate the clay thinner,” Tucci said.
Watching the clay grow on the potter’s wheel turns out to be a metaphor for Tucci as a teacher.
“The kids that I’ve been working with since 2017, when I got here, watching them grow is awesome,” Tucci said.
The high school students that she taught in wheel sessions this summer have been learning from her since second and third grades.
Hands-On Products
Besides teaching, Tucci does commission work.
Tucci creates decorative work for clients, but she enjoys the practical products the most.
“When somebody buys an expensive handmade mug, that’s going to be their go-to mug,” she said.
The same goes for plates and bowls.
“I want my stuff to be used, and I want them eventually to break on the person, because that means they’re loving it and using it because it’s around.”
She even asks people to take a selfie of themselves drinking out of the mug and send it to her.
“That makes my whole week.”
She used to have a 33 percent success rate of how much of her effort turned into a finished product.
But 16 years into her career, she’s now at a 66 percent success rate. She’ll throw away a third of her molds before she even gets it into the first firing.
“Because I’ve got 12-15 boxes of finished pottery in my garage, and so if it isn’t exactly what I want, I will just smash the clay before the firing, rehydrate it, and use that clay again,” Tucci said.
“After you do something over and over again, you start kind of perfecting and diagnosing why it may have failed,” she said.
“That’s a philosophy of life, isn’t it? I always say, I fail with grace. I put that in my pottery theory, but it’s life, too. If I fail, I just gotta try again. If I fail, I just gotta try again.”
