Tony Winchester

Winchester Pottery is the husband & wife team of potter Tony & self taught artist Mindy Winchester. We've been full time studio artists for 30 years now, and work out of our rural southwestern Iowa home. We have a reduction kiln & a salt kiln, and several distinct lines of pottery. We never have enough of anything at any given time, but we promise we are doing our best to keep up!
 

Tony is the potter & throws all the pots on the wheel: both his personal contemporary art pottery as well as our collaborative pieces decorated by Mindy. Tony is responsible for all the throwing, trimming, handling & altering, and loading & firing the kilns. He also works extensively with slip, whether brushing, globbing or trailing it for his own surface decorations. He's quick, abstract, loosey-goosey & creates the dragonflies, fish, flowers & vines, spirals and waves. (Oh, and those weird Skull Manny skeleton things are all him too!)

Mindy decorates full time. She use small squeeze bottles with needle tips to freehand draw her imagery. She is slow, obsessive and stubborn. For our first 20 years of collaboration, she drew horses and landscapes exclusively, but just a couple years ago something snapped, and now she finds herself exploring other subjects that are intriguing or important to her. Mythology & fairy tales are of special interest but weird new things are cropping up like ships and sea life. She also is the one mixing our many colored slips and over a dozen glazes, pugging clay, and all the photography, computer, shipping & office work behind the scenes.
 

We are both in the studio full time & these days travel to one horse expo, 2 juried art fairs, 2 pottery festivals and one 7 weekend Renaissance Festival every year to offer our work.
 

Tony is a multi national award winning potter, 4 time Grand Champion of the US Pottery Games, and has been a studio potter since 1993. He has been featured in Ceramics Monthly, and in the Smithsonian gift shop. Mindy is a self-taught artist, doodling horses on everything since childhood. She specializes in representing individual breeds & equestrian disciplines accurately and has been featured in Horsing Around magazine from the UK, and in Cowboys & Indians magazine July 2012 edition.