BACKSTREET GALLERY

Kathy Shamey

 

Kathy Shamey’s primary medium is ceramics.  She likes using high fire clay and glazes, especially a porcelain clay body.  She uses both wheel throwing and hand building to make her decorative and functional ceramics.  Recently she has been experimenting with raku glazes and the pit fired process.  These compliment her more traditional ceramic glazing and firing methods.

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Her secondary medium is fused glass. She has been working with this medium for the past several years and has achieved some early success with the fused glass process.  Her ultimate goal is to integrate ceramics with fused glass so that her ceramic art will have a fused glass component.

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Kathy grew up in the Venice/Santa Monica area of Los Angeles County.  She received undergraduate and graduate degrees from UCLA.  Kathy was a professor of philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences at Santa Monica College in Southern California, where she had a thirty year tenure.  She taught logic, critical thinking and social ethics.   She took her first ceramics class as a college freshman and got hooked.  However, she was not able to realize her dream of becoming a full-time ceramic artist until she retired several years ago.

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She first came to Florence about thirty years ago while visiting the Central Oregon Coast.   It was love at first sight.  Ever since that first visit, her vacations were spent in Florence.  She had the long term goal of eventually retiring to Florence.  She was able to realize that goal in 2006, when she retired to a house on Lake Cleawox.

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She finds the Florence community very supportive of the arts and she loves the synergy of the Backstreet Gallery.