“I think there’s something really cathartic about having your hands literally in mud, right?” asks Christina Wnek of Cee and She. We are sitting in the pottery studio she shares with her artistic partner Ashley O’Brion, sipping coffee from mugs they made from that “mud,” reflecting on their journey as ceramicists and potters. “It’s like meditation,” O’Brion muses. “When working with clay, you’re not in front of a screen. You’re using your hands. You’re turned off from everything. That long hallway outside is a portal to this meditative, creative, intuitive space that we get to inhabit when we’re just working with the material.”

O’Brion and Wnek first met a decade ago in a professional context—O’Brion is a graphic designer, Wnek is a commercial photographer—and as O’Brion recalls, “We became instant friends.” She continues, “We collaborated on some projects, and then I started working at a local college in the brand department, and I hired Christina to come and do photography for the college.” They both loved their work but were feeling a need for a different creative outlet, preferably one that wasn’t mediated by screens, and the college offered an adult education evening pottery class. On a whim, they signed up. “There was no goal other than just, let’s have a night a week where we get to go and create in a completely different medium,” says O’Brion. Wnek adds, “Also, at the time, we still had little kids. It was nice to have a ‘get out of the house, hang out with other women that are creative’ scheduled time.”

“So we took the class, and something was just unlocked in both of us,” says O’Brion, smiling widely at the memory. “Suddenly, we were messaging and talking all the time about clay and what we were making. We were going in on the weekends or during the week to do extra work.” One of the ceramics professors noticed their passion. “He became a friend and a mentor, and he just let us use the college clay studio all the time. When you’re a professor, you love to see students who are excited. He said to us, ‘Oh, you guys have the clay fever.’ That’s what he termed it,” says O’Brion. “We absolutely had clay fever! We were thinking about it all the time, even though, as Christina mentioned, it was a difficult moment to bring something new into our lives. But it definitely forced a shift in our lives to figure out where we could find the time to start working toward something new.”

Time to work toward something new was about to be in ample supply: the initial adult ed class took place in the fall of 2019, and a few short months later Wnek and O’Brion, like much of the rest of the world, found themselves stuck at home during lockdown. But while others scrambled to find new hobbies like knitting or sourdough baking, the women knew just how to fill the hours. “I was in my attic; Christina was in her basement,” recalls O’Brion. “Our mentor let us take wheels home from the college to our homes because we couldn’t be on campus at that point. We had our tools that we had amassed from being in the class, and then we got more tools. We were so productive, we were just filling up tables of things that we would then go into the empty college to fire.” That fall, they took a creative retreat together to imagine how they could expand the role of clay in both of their lives. “It felt, at that time, so much like a pipe dream. Sure, we’ll go on this creative retreat, and it will be a wonderful little amount of time, and yes, we’ll vision board. But I don’t know that at that moment we realistically felt like we were going to build something, because again, we were at max capacity with our jobs and our families,” says O’Brion. “But it was a year later that we signed the lease here in the studio, exactly a year.”

“I met Christina Watka on the shoot for a Maine Home+Design story in 2020,” says Wnek. The local installation artist had just begun looking for a studio to share when O’Brion and Wnek decided to expand their practice; it seemed fated. “She said, ‘I know you guys are thinking about starting something. Would you be willing to go in on a studio share with me?’” remembers O’Brion. “And we said yes within 24 hours. Our families were startled, to say the least!” “I went to my husband, and I said, ‘I’m just letting you know that I’m doing this,’” recalls Wnek, laughing. “I said, ‘I welcome your feedback, but I’m still doing this, no matter what.’” They found a loft in the Dana Warp Mill in Westbrook and began to set up. Sharing the space made the venture more affordable, but, as O’Brion points out slightly ruefully, “Starting a pottery studio is probably one of the most expensive artistic situations that you can get into, outside of glassblowing or metalwork.” Still, they slowly built up their equipment and materials thanks to Facebook Marketplace and other mill tenants; they bought a kiln from Campfire Pottery, for example, when Campfire moved out of the mill to a new studio.

Watka, too, moved out of their shared studio in early 2024, which precipitated some soul-searching. “Up to that point, Christina would sometimes refer to Cee and She as our business, and I would immediately correct her and say, ‘You mean our art practice?’ And she would say, ‘Yeah, of course, our art practice,’” says O’Brion. “I think we kept trying to take money concerns out of the conversation—we didn’t want to let money determine what we were making. But then, at the end of this past summer, we were thinking, okay, money does come into play here a little bit. Now we really had a decision. Are we going to be able to afford to have our studio? Do we want to keep going? Or should we pack it up and go home?”

O’Brion says that the answer to those questions was immediate: “We both had a bodily response. Our eyes got all misty, and we said no, not only has this been about producing work, but this work has also changed our lives. It has become one of the most important things and the most defining things for both of us.” Wnek concurs: “I think we have always looked to the future and known that we’re going to be doing this, in some capacity, forever. We want to be little old ladies in our little old seaside cottages with pottery wheels! So to stop now felt wrong.” “It felt like there was so much more to accomplish here,” concludes O’Brion.

O’Brion and Wnek felt they had built a good base of work in the preceding three years, with a couple of grants and some gallery shows under their belts, but as part of their soul searching they changed things up. “We said, we’re going to take no classes this year. We’re going to say no to a few shows; we’re going to just hunker down, and we’re going to strip it all back to just form. We need to take all the colors away. We need to take all the decoration away. And we need to start with just the simple structure,” says O’Brion. “Up until that point, we had just been hopping from idea to idea,” says Wnek. “But in 2024 we recommitted to using all of the experience that we had been building up.” Their current work, the Garden Series, emerged organically out of this thinking. “We asked ourselves, what’s the form that resonates without any of the decoration, if you will, apart from that that pulled from the natural world?” says O’Brion. What came to them were shapes of flowers: of vases that unfurl leaves at the necks, candlesticks that look like buds opening, and delicate porcelain flowers that dangle from botanically dyed silk ribbons. With their creamy white hue, they focus the gaze on the hand-built shapes alone. The pieces convey strength and fragility at the same time.

“The forms are representative of the natural world, and in 2025 we’re feeling very excited to layer other ways of incorporating nature into the pieces, and then also explore where this form and series can go. Because there’s so much iteration that can happen,” says O’Brion. “We just have so many ideas of direction we want to take,” says Wnek. “It excites us a lot!” “Yes, we’re madly in love with this work,” agrees O’Brion. “We feel like the Garden Series is different from what we’ve seen from other ceramicists and other potters. It feels very uniquely us.”