Cup o' Cartography: Cheyenne Mallo Pottery

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Cheyenne Mallo  0:02  
There is something really magical about opening the kiln and seeing the work that you just made, but from a making standpoint, I really enjoy putting maps on the pots. Suddenly they're just like ... there's a mug ... there's a mug ... there's a mug! They've all got the maps on.

Brett Barry  0:18  
Cheyenne Mallo and partner, Zac Schiff, are the makers and purveyors of Cheyenne Mallo Pottery in Olivebridge, New York. Their signature mugs feature raised topographic maps of Catskills places like Overlook Mountain, North–South Lake, Kaaterskill Falls, and West Kill. Each mug features black topographic lines transected by red dotted hiking trails and unique features like fire towers, lakes, and waterfalls. On today's Kaatscast, "Maps to Drink By: Crafted in the Catskills." Kaatscast is sponsored by the Central Catskills Chamber of Commerce. Providing services to businesses, community organizations, and local governments in the Central Catskills region. Follow the Central Catskills Chamber of Commerce on Facebook and sign up for a weekly email of local events at centralcatskills.org. Thanks also to the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call 518-763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com. If your cabinet is anything like mine, there's no shortage of mugs, but we tend to grab the same two or three every time; maybe it's the shape or size, a meaningful design, or how it feels to take a sip of coffee from that perfectly formed lip. These are all very real considerations for Cheyenne Mallo and Zac Schiff, whose carefully crafted mugs are surely favorites in many a Catskills cupboard. For more about their work and process, let's head over to their studio in Olivebridge, New York.

Zac Schiff  2:13  
We're in Olivebridge where we live, which is at the base of the Catskill Mountains, which informs a lot of our pottery because our pottery features maps of hiking trails, rivers, lakes, etc. Many of which are in the Catskills, so it's kind of an environment that we draw a lot of inspiration from and we are specifically in our studio here, where we do all our work, and yeah, this is a full-time business that we both participate in; Cheyenne is a trained potter as she may express ...

Cheyenne Mallo  2:50  
Okay, so I did my undergrad at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, which is not Madison. It's a smaller state school, but I had a really fantastic arts department while I was there, and at the time, I was more focused in a career in printmaking, but had also ... was also minoring in ceramics, and when I moved to the Hudson Valley in 2011 for an internship, the studio that I was at, which is the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale had just a phenomenal ceramics community, and through interacting with them and engaging with that community, I found myself a little more drawn to the ceramic side of thing and less drawn to the print side of thing. So, the same time, I was also hiking in the Catskill Mountains, being more invested in ceramics and pottery. I had this like a lightbulb moment of ... what if I put the hike I just did on a pot I just made and it's really evolved since then, and from that happening around 2013, there was a really busy holiday season, and Zac at the time was working in a garden center and had winters off, which was perfect. So we had the situation was ... hey, can you help me in the studio making all of these ornaments, which turned very quickly into both of us doing this full-time expanding the studio?

Brett Barry  4:11  
You know, there's a lot of crafts or products that are Catskills themed that you can buy locally, but not all of them are Catskills made, so that's really nice that this is made right here, and also, you know, it's represent the Catskills: he could have gone with a number of things; he could have gone with black bear theme or wildlife for water features, but you've really honed in on this kind of topographic subject matter. So, tell me a little bit about your adherence to that theme and how your creativity has that framework.

Cheyenne Mallo  4:44  
Well, maps were actually something that I had used previously in my printwork to sort of give my prints a sense of place, but they were really subtle element of it, and transitioning that to pottery, it felt more authentic to be representing this other aspect of my life, which is hiking and spending time in the outdoors, to tie that into the actual map to represent this sense of place. If you've been there, you've seen the map and you know what that means—you know—the places, but it has a very different meaning to you because each person's individual experience at that location is a little bit different, so then that person can apply their own experience to that piece and make it more personal?

Zac Schiff  5:29  
Yeah, I also think there's just something very aesthetically appealing about a topographic map. It's ... something about those lines and just the way they resonate with people, I think, is what we're latching on to and is what people connect with. Also, we just are very avid hikers, you know, Cheyenne loves to tell customers about how much we love hiking, and if they love hiking, we can act on that basis.

Brett Barry  5:52  
Looking at the designs on some of them where it's just the topographic lines. I would imagine that there are some people who look at it and say, "Wow, that's a really pretty design," and never connect that ... it's a map or that ... it's a map of someplace very specific. Have you come across that at all?

Cheyenne Mallo  6:08  
Every single event we do, yeah, very much, but it makes it fun for us because watching their discovery of learning that it's a map is so exciting; partially because of that, we also print the actual location of the map onto the bottom of the pot with a silkscreen detail, tying in the printmaking element of it. So, you know, once you actually pick up the pot, you wouldn't have to be told that you could see. Oh, Here's Lake Awosting within Minnewaska State Park!

Zac Schiff  6:38  
Or, you know, some people are map lovers like us and they come up in immediately now. As I mentioned earlier, Cheyenne is more of the trained potter. I'm more of the novice, but one of the artistic contributions I like to think I make is I do the map designs, which comes down to basically just tracing on a piece of paper, so it's sort of a thing a kindergartener could do, but there's a little bit of aesthetics that go into it because we choose which map looks cool, which lines to represent. Because of course, if you've seen a real topographic map, that lines are extremely dense and we can't include quite that density of line on to the pottery, so it's fun to kind of pick and choose which lines to apply and how to make it look and there's certain maps that just look really cool and we people seem to like them and we like making them like the Devil's Path, for instance, or even like Minnewaska ... certain local staples that also have really, really great maps.

Brett Barry  7:35  
And Cheyenne, would you say that ... that would have been a very, very talented kindergartener to be able to do what he does on that?

Cheyenne Mallo  7:40  
Not any kindergartener, yeah.

Brett Barry  7:44  
Tracing the map is one step in a long process that then involves piping liquid clay onto those lines: kiln firing, glazing, sanding, and a number of other steps that Cheyenne and Zac went into in quite some detail. Suffice it to say this is no factory stamped mug. I asked about the clay itself, which is sourced just down the road from a Kingston supply shop.

Cheyenne Mallo  8:09  
The clay that we're using now is called 213 porcelain. It's made by Standard Clay Company. Conveniently, Bailey Pottery Equipment is in Kingston and they're one of the largest U.S. suppliers for ceramic materials and clay. So, it's a half an hour drive for us to go and pick up our clay, which is very convenient, but we're choosing this clay body. Primarily because it fires a really nice bright white. Unfortunately, the cost of this clay has just about doubled since we started using that. So we're actually exploring different clay bodies right now. I'm pretty excited about is a clay body that can handle a little more thermal shock ... mean that you could put it in the oven, so we're hoping to expand our line to be able to do like baking dishes, which is really the fun and the creativity in it is creating like new forms for me.

Brett Barry  9:01  
And because I like to put everything in the dishwasher, I asked whether these mugs would be an exception to that convenience.

Cheyenne Mallo  9:08  
Totally fine in the dishwasher. It's totally fine in the microwave. We actually have some pieces that we do bake in; it's just slightly riskier to put it in the oven, so we don't recommend that. People do that just in case.

Brett Barry  9:21  
And these pieces are not well. They're not cheap, but watching some of these Instagram posts that your reels that you do that show the process, it's like ... oh, yeah, that's why. Every step is pretty intense. You know, I watched a piece where you hand drill the holes into a salt and pepper shaker and it's just that's one small component of that piece, which I assume. It takes a long time from start to finish.

Cheyenne Mallo  9:49  
Yeah, handmade pottery ... it's not like fast fashion. You're not going to buy something cheap. Use it, throw it out, get something new. You might spend more money on that one mug that a real person has made, but you're going to use that mug every single day. You're going to cherish that mug. It's going to be really special. It's going to bring back memories and you're also supporting a person who loves the job that they're doing with ... with any handmade thing, not just with artwork, as opposed to someone who pressed a button in a factory and there's, you know, a million mugs that look exactly the same like each one is unique and that reflects your journey with the mug also.

Zac Schiff  10:30  
Pricing our work is a continual struggle for us and sort of figuring out how much is fair to charge while not wanting to price out a big portion of the population, but knowing we need to sustain ourselves and knowing ... we need to reckon with just how long it takes to make these pieces. I mean, I ... we calculated it before. I think it can be about like six hours or three hours for each of us to make a mug ... that would be like a $9 an hour wage for the both of us, which is obviously a little bit lower than we would want with Cheyenne having six years of college and all kinds of ... there's a lot of overhead, of course, but it's something that we're continually wrestling with and trying to figure out and we feel like we've balanced it fairly well, but it's ... it's tricky. It's a little bit tricky.

Cheyenne Mallo  11:21  
I think one of the challenges with our work is that normally you'd find the type of pottery that we make; you would find in a gallery, and it would be among similarly priced work, but our target audience and the people that we want to enjoy and have our pottery is not necessarily that demographic. It's that your average person who goes out hiking, who goes to a craft fair.

Brett Barry  11:44  
What capacity do you think you're working at? Where do you see this going in terms of capacity and how much you're getting out into the world?

Cheyenne Mallo  11:50  
We've kind of talked about that a lot as far as the two of us working in our studio, we can't make any more work. We're kind of at what that capacity is ... I feel like the work has a potential to take it to another level and add staff and expand at the national parks, but at that point we're managing people instead of making the work ourselves, and for me, it's more important and more enjoyable to have our hands in it and to be doing it and the reason I got into ceramics in the first place was to make pottery, not to design a line and manage people making that work?

Zac Schiff  12:28  
If we expand it in terms of personnel, it does feel like we would have more of those administrative tasks to do and we wouldn't ... we wouldn't be able to be making the pottery as much, which is again why we're ... why we're doing this.

Cheyenne Mallo  12:41  
It could be a retirement plan.

Brett Barry  12:43  
After the break, it's not just mugs. Find out what else Cheyenne and Zac are creating and where to find them locally. Also, a candid chat about the most and least enjoyable moments of the pottery workflow.

Audio  12:59  
[Music]

Brett Barry  12:59  
And if you'd like to pair a good book with that cup of coffee in the Cheyenne Mallo Pottery mug, check out Briars & Brambles Books. The go to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call 518-750-8599. Thanks also to our listener-supporters. If you'd like to join their ranks, please click the "Donate" button at kaatscast.com. You can also help us by leaving a review on the podcast app of your choice and telling your podcast listening friends that there's a great Catskills podcast with a new episode every two weeks and it's called "Kaatscast" and everything's archived at kaatscast.com and well, we'd certainly appreciate it. And now, back to Olivebridge, New York, where Cheyenne Mallo took me through their mug sizes and some other offerings of the non-mug variety.

Cheyenne Mallo  14:03  
Well, I ... so I have an instinct to make lots of really small pieces because I have kind of small hands [laughs] I'm little, and we've gotten quite a few requests for larger mugs. People like a lot of coffee, so we've started scaling up our mugs a little bit and it's actually been really fun. They're pretty standardized, so we have a double espresso. We have a roughly 8-10 oz mug, we have a 12-14 oz mug, and then a 16-18, which is our new ... newest addition that we're working with.

Brett Barry  14:35  
Aside from mugs, what are you making?

Cheyenne Mallo  14:36  
Something that we added within the last couple of years, our ... our trays, which we have maybe five different sizes of ... my favorite is a charcuterie board like a personal charcuterie board. We don't make a lot of plates partially because that raised line can be, I think, kind of like annoying when you're trying to cut something with a knife, so these sort of function as our plates like they'd be good with the sandwich. You could also put like oil and vinegar on it. The newest thing we've been making are these salt and pepper shakers, which are a redesign. We used to make these as extruded tubes and they were handbuilt and they were really a pain in the ass to make. You take a really long time. They just like they weren't quite ... they weren't quite it yet. They were cool, but they took too long for what we felt like we could charge for a price point on them, so we started throwing them on the wheel instead and they were so fun to make. They're a lot faster and I just think they're adorable, so I'm looking forward to making more. We've only done one round so far.

Brett Barry  15:39  
And it's got like a little cork filling station on the bottom of it.

Cheyenne Mallo  15:44  
So there's a hole on the side that has a cork that you can remove to refill with salt. We have about nine different Hudson Valley locations that carrier work and their businesses and organizations and people that we really believe in the mission of what they're doing like Opus 40, for example, carries our work.

Brett Barry  16:08  
Also, the Byrdcliffe Shop in Woodstock, Green Cottage in High Falls, Cabin Fever Outfitters in Rhinebeck, Circle W Market in Palenville, and where I originally saw the mugs, the Catskills Visitor Center in Mt. Tremper, New York. Cheyenne Mallo Pottery is also on Etsy for mail order. You can find that through cheyennemallo.com. Before I left the studio, I had one more question for Cheyenne and Zac. What's your ... your favorite part of this whole process and what's one part of it that you would just be happy to outsource to someone else?

Zac Schiff  16:46  
I think my favorite part is opening the glaze kiln. When everything's done, you know, it's like you're baking this big thing. It takes about 12 hours to fire our glaze kiln, and then it takes another 18-24 hours for it to cool and you open it up and there's just a whole batch of new pots in there. They look great. They're ... they're shining. Their interior colors look amazing and it's just wonderful to unload everything, and then again, we have to sand it, but you've got all this new work and it's really fun. That's ... I think that's the ... that's the best part. The worst part for me is probably ... I don't like messiness, which makes me not a great candidate to be a full-time potter, but the messiness of glazing and the dust that gets everywhere and they, you know, I don't love that part, I would be okay outsourcing that part.

Cheyenne Mallo  17:37  
There is something really magical about opening the kiln and seeing the work that you just made, but from a making standpoint, I really enjoy when we hit the part where we're putting maps on the pots. I think they look really beautiful when they're in that leather-hard stage. Suddenly they're just like ... there's a mug ... there's a mug ... there's a mug! They've all got the maps on and I hate taxes. I hate doing taxes, so like the administrative side of things. When you imagine a potter, you imagine somebody in a studio making work and that's maybe only 50% of what it is. There's so much administrative work that goes into it and like social media is part of that, but I really enjoy ... I enjoy social media. I love sharing our process and sharing how we make ... make the work. Yeah, but if we could not have to like do taxes, that'd be great.

Brett Barry  18:31  
To see those social media posts though, check out Cheyenne Mallo on Instagram and if you want to see some pictures from our session of the studio, including a shot of their space-aged kiln, sign up for our newsletter. There's a link in the show notes. Kaatscast is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. Production Intern: Mollie Zoldan. Transcripts by Jerome Kazlauskas. Many thanks to the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation for their generous support of this podcast. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.