These aren’t your grandmother’s teapots.

Kathleen Royster, who came to Metro last year to head the ceramics program, creates sculptural vessels—teapots in some cases, non-functional works in others—that have been acquired by the National Gallery of American Art-Smithsonian Institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Arizona State Art Museum, as well as by other institutions and private collectors. Challenging and confrontational, her work tends to combine spiny organic shapes with recognizable forms. For example, in the piece, “Client Teapot,” Royster has deconstructed the pretty porcelain teapot, juxtaposing it with dark angry thorns. In an artist statement from a past exhibition, she writes, "The strongest work for me embodies contradiction, which allows for emotional tension and the ability to contain opposed ideas.”

Though her vitae is filled with teaching experience (Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., the University of Utah, Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif.) and the requisite M.F.A. in ceramics from the University of Utah, her trajectory to Metro State is hardly typical.

"My junior year in college, I was bored,” she says. “I wanted an adventure.” That summer, she bought a one-way ticket to Alaska and began her career in commercial fishing, working in the summer and traveling the world during the winter. One year it was New Zealand and Australia, another India and Nepal, or Scotland for fly fishing

About the time she turned 30, Royster decided there “was more to life than climbing and fishing” and she returned to school at the University of Utah. Initially majoring in graphic design, Royster found herself captivated by ceramics after taking a basic class. “I liked the blue-collar end of working with your hands,” she says. “I also liked the intellectual part of ceramics; there’s a technical side to clay that painting doesn’t have. There are a lot of problems to solve.” Since arriving on campus this past fall, Royster has busied herself with reinventing a ceramics program that for the last several years has been led by temporary faculty. Today, Royster oversees about 15 to 18 ceramics majors as well as teaching; she particularly enjoys the beginning classes, where students can apply their newly acquired visual vocabulary to the medium of clay.

And though she misses the fresh salmon and swears she won’t let another winter pass without skiing, “I really enjoy what I’m doing now. I enjoy the challenge of learning and I’m still learning. This is a really good time for me.”