What’s your business name and what do you do?
We’re an artist duo, Ashley O’Brion and Christina Wnek, working collaboratively as cee and she studio. We create sculptural ceramic vessels and small batch wares.
How did you learn your craft?
We’ve come into our ceramic practice mid-life and mid-career, as a graphic designer and commercial photographer respectively.
While both contracting for a local college, we enrolled in a community ceramics class together. Clay captivated us and fulfilled a profound longing - offering us tactile expression that our digital tools couldn’t satisfy.
As we continued to hone our skills and work together in that college basement studio, we dreamed of our own collaborative studio space. In 2021, we moved into a shared studio space in the Dana Warp Mill in Westbrook and launched cee and she.
What do you enjoy most about what you do?
Playing with clay is visceral and cathartic joy and a welcome change to creating on screens. There's nothing that can compare, really.
What do you enjoy least?
There's never enough time, is that always the answer? We squeeze our studio time in between jobs and families and it's just never enough.
What’s one thing you wish people knew about your work?
Our work has sought to echo the natural world that surrounds us. Maine’s rocks and barnacles, lichen and bone - elements of our local landscape - inform our materials, knowledge, and inspiration.
We've created natural glazes made from seaweed, moss and fern and Maine-foraged wild clay.
What’s one artist you look up to?
Alison Hildreth. In 2023, we were commissioned to create The Speedwell Prize, given by Speedwell Contemporary for a lifetime achievement in the arts that was presented to Hildreth that year. We were inspired by her commitment to her practice in a time that wasn't the most accommodating to women and mothers who pursued something outside of family life. And she was both a woman and mother who did that, and did it exceedingly well. At her retrospective event, when she was asked how often she considered the viewer of her work, she replied, "Never. The work is for me. It's what I'm working out." That has lingered with us.
Another artist and researcher that wildly inspires us is Bonnie Hvillum of Natural Materials Studio. Using only natural, circular, biodegradable components, her Copenhagen-based creative design studio undergoes in-depth research with clients to turn what would be waste into living, breathing materials that respond to their environment. We took a course with her called "Natural Materials in Ceramics" which inspired our natural materials glaze research.
What do you do when you’re not creating?
You can find us either with our families (Christina has two kiddos and I (Ash) have three!) or photographing or designing. In the sliver of time that may exist outside of that we try and swim all year long- you may catch us plunging at Ferry Beach in January.
Night owl or early bird?
Christina is a night owl and I'm (Ash) an early bird.
What's your favorite place in Maine?
There's a summer cabin that Christina rents on Panther Pond every summer and I'd have to say is our shared favorite place in Maine. And second to that, I'd say the Panther Run swimming hole in Raymond.