Nancy Kovacs
For Nancy Kovacs, the road to becoming a working potter has stretched across four decades, two states, and more clay-dusted kitchen tables than she can count.
Today her stoneware fills the shelves at The Molly Grace in Highlands, but she still describes herself with disarming modesty as “a perpetual hobbyist.”
Kovacs first sat down at a potter’s wheel in the mid-1980s, when her daughters were young and she and her husband, Kirk, were running a commercial architectural millwork company in Ohio.
She handled engineering and bookkeeping, even teaching herself AutoCAD for woodworking design. Without a wheel of her own, she improvised, working in slabs and coils, eventually tracking down a primitive kick wheel powered by a heavy cement slab.
Later came a small kiln in the garage.
“I made things on the kitchen table,” she says. “Clay was all over the house.”
Retirement in 2019 gave her, for the first time, both time and space to commit. After visits to the Highlands-Cashiers Plateau, Nancy and her husband Kirk bought a home in Cashiers with a lower‑level room that had once been an artist’s studio. With help from Frank Vickery at The Bascom, she outfitted it with a wheel and kiln, and Muddy Owl Studio took shape. A year later, she completed her first full set of stoneware tableware and began producing in earnest.
She now spends two or three hours most afternoons at the wheel, turning out functional and decorative stoneware. The glazing, she says, has become its own endless puzzle. “Once I figured out how to throw pots, the world of glazing was a whole different challenge, figuring out how to use and combine glazes to get good results,” she says. “The possibilities are endless.”
Her work found its way to The Molly Grace through a chance connection – on a pickleball court – where she met owner Stephanie McCall. What began as a few pieces has grown into a steady presence in the shop, where Kovacs currently shows roughly 30 works. There are mugs and serving bowls, vases, pitchers (she favors pitchers for their ability to double as vases), and oversized platters that can just as easily hang on a wall. Her work is also available at Chestnut Cove in Cashiers.
Bold colors and geometric patterns run through the collection, often built up through layered glazes and tape-resist techniques. But Kovacs resists settling into a single look.
“A lot of potters have a style,” she says. “I’m still discovering mine.”
For now, that openness defines the work. It’s less about arriving at something fixed, and more about what happens while she’s still figuring it out.
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