Mae Gray’s pottery is much like her life, varied and interesting. Just as her pottery does not re-flect one style, color or technique, her life has included a full spectrum of jobs and interests.

A tour of her Lookout Mountain brow property, accompanied by her two dogs Zoe and Dog, in-cludes her log cabin home and a variety of structures her late husband built. There is her studio and greenhouse full of orchids, a beer garden, Pebblehenge (a small version of Stonehenge), the shortest covered bridge in the world, a cat house and a mock graveyard. Two vacation rental properties sit on the north side of the Gray compound.

Gray says, “I like overkill” when she points out all of the variety on her property and in her pot-tery. She admits that she can’t sit still, and she says she likes “the test of something on the kiln to be excited about.”

Her studio, which she has fondly labeled “the midden” and which she describes as a house that a pack rat lives in, has shelves and shelves of containers with handwritten labels such as laguna bo-rate and barium carbonate. Although she regrets not having taken chemistry, Gray knows that chrome oxide is green but after it’s fired it’s a pretty mulberry red.

Along with learning some chemistry while making pottery, Gray says, “I’ve had to invent lots of tools.” She uses a drum stick for imprints in the clay on some of her pieces and impresses doilies into some of her trays and baskets. The midden is full of all sorts of clay work, from mugs to baskets and bird houses to earrings and bowls and trays and containers with whimsical faces.

Gray was born in Roopville, Ga., raised in Atlanta and graduated from Murphy High School. After high school, Gray says, “When I started, back in the 50’s, girls couldn’t go to college.”

Gray made her first pottery was when she was a little girl and would get mud and form it to make things and bake them in the sun. She and her husband Bob owned Delta Clay in Ellenwood, Ga., from the 1970’s to the mid 1980’s. It was a place that supplied raw materials, equipment and supplies for pottery people. Gray says that work there was “hard and heavy and dirty.”

Gray has had a variety of hobbies and careers. She was an Enduro Cross Country motorcyclist as a teenager, a furrier for Macy’s, a U.S. Census worker in 1990, and she also has a real estate license. But after all that she decided she would “rather make pots.”

Whether it’s called variety or overkill, it’s a large part of Mae Gray’s life and work. She enjoys the full spectrum of making pottery, and her excitement about creating shows in her work as well as every aspect of her very-textured life.

Gray’s pottery can be found at the Foothills Gallery in LaFayette. The gallery is on U.S. 27 at 103 Main Street across from the Marsh House. It is open Thursday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The Web address is http://www.foothillsgallery.org/zenphoto2/. Join our Facebook group Northwest Georgia Arts Guild--Foothills Art Gallery.

Article written by Krista Seckinger.