ARTIST: REDEFINED

{written by Terri Mackleberry for Outer Banks Milepost issue 10.1 Spring 2021}

The images started popping up on Outer Banks Instagram feeds in early 2020. Matte black coffee mugs etched with moon phases, birds and sea life. Adorable, palm-sized tumblers in abstract, southwestern color schemes. Perfectly shaped, beach inspired cereal bowls. All handcrafted and hashtagged by a mysterious newcomer: #SoundsideRoadPottery.

Somebody had been busy. Busier than you might imagine.

“I was looking for a way to find myself as a human, instead of as a business owner, mother and wife,” says Genevieve Stewart, who took her first pottery class the year before. “I wanted something just for myself, external of all my other roles.”

A wedding photographer on the Outer Banks for the past eleven years, Stewart, 36, was searching for something new when she stumbled into pottery. On a whim, she took a ceramics class with Robin York at College of the Albemarle in Manteo, and things took off from there.

It is not the first time Stewart has reinvented herself. As a student at Manteo High School, she took AP classes and hit the books hard to get into UNC Chapel Hill with the goal of being a doctor. But, once she got there and discovered art, philosophy and religion classes, she knew pre-med wasn’t for her.

“I came into the discovery that being creative is the heart of who I am,” she says.

Switching from the planned path was scary, but she followed through, transferring to the film studies program at UNC Wilmington. A few years later, with a Bachelor of Arts in hand, Stewart headed to NYC to test the waters but soon ran out of money. Back on the Outer Banks at the end of 2008, she hustled between waiting tables at Lucky 12 and videography.

She put every extra dollar into lenses and camera equipment, and by 2009 had immersed herself in wedding videography and photography, full-time. Her husband, Chad Stewart, joined the the business in 2010, and they established themselves at stalwarts in the Outer Banks marriage industry.

But in April 2019, after more than a decade of balancing the family business with mothering two young daughters, Stewart began to feel an itch to have something for herself. Hence, the pottery class.

“I just fell in love with it,” she says. “I was doing something creative and something for myself, something artistic in a totally different way.”

Jumping across artistic mediums was not a stretch for her.

“Being artistic is what makes me most fulfilled as a woman and as a human,” she says. “My need to create is deep. I’m not sure the medium matters.”

After taking several more classes and enrolling in a fifth, in December 2019 Stewart brainstormed on whether the pottery hobby could be a side gig in the quiet of winter, when the wedding biz slows down.

She scraped together her extra money and bought a kiln and wheel, fixed up the shed behind their house on Soundside Road, and got busy.

“The game plan last winter was to push myself to see where I could go with this, knowing that I would stop when the photography season started again,” she says. “But then COVID hit.”

Couples postponed their ceremonies. Families canceled summer portraits. Between remote teaching two Spanish-immersion elementary schoolers, Stewart put all her efforts toward pottery.

“For me it was a blessing in disguise,” she says. “I was really wanting to keep doing pottery anyway.”

In March 2020, she started an Etsy page, uploaded three mugs and sold them for $20 each to three friends. “That opened my eyes that maybe I could do this,” she says.

Much like her personal tattoos, her pottery designs are nature driven. Images she carves into her clay include ocean creatures, moons, birds, and waves.

“I’m not drawing arbitrarily,” she says. “Generally, there’s a lot of personal meaning in the choices I make, so I just cross my fingers and hope that someone likes it, too.”

Judging by demand, plenty do. Stewart mostly sells via Instagram, populating her feed with covetable photos of her work, then announcing a sale when she has built up enough stock to sell. At first, her clients were all locals, though now she’s selling all over the country, often to return customers.

While it still feels like a creative outlet more than a job, she says it’s not easy.

“Pottery is a very humbling art,” she explains. “I spend all last winter feeling like it was a half-step forward and five steps backward. It takes dedication and persistence. I have to remain humble and keep picking myself up. I’m learning while doing.”

Stewart admits she was unprepared for the impact this new venture would have on her. One surprise has been the relationships she’s formed with fellow female creators and entrepreneurs.

“They’ve been really important and helpful this last year,” she says. “It’s nice to be in the place as women and to feel these relationships with other women.”

But most valuable to her has been the rediscovering of self.

“As a parent, as a woman, you go into survival mode where life is all consuming,” Stewart says. “What do you do when you come out of that? I had a need to value myself and find out what matters to me and what makes me feel happy. Pottery seems like an arbitrary answer, but I can’t be that best version of myself if I’m not fulfilling myself. It took me a long time to realize that, and now that I have it, I’m not letting go.”