The Many Faces of Shawn Campbell

Shawn Campbell is in her sunlit garage-turned-studio in Alexandria, rolling a coil of clay and creating a circle. For Campbell, the genesis of every new sculpture is a story waiting to be told. “I like to have the clay between my fingers. It’s therapeutic. I’m thinking, I’m calculating, I’m engineering. When my hands are in clay, I’m at my calmest,” she says, rolling another coil and forming another circle on top of the first, smoothing the coils together with her fingers. “Everything transfers into the clay. Having a bad day? Pick up a piece of clay. You want to cry? Cry into the clay. The clay receives it. That’s the relationship you have with clay.”

At her feet are Maple, a Great Pyrenees, and Pippi, a yellow lab, her companions as she works, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday to Friday (and sometimes on weekends), breaking occasionally to open the studio door to let them outside.

It’s certainly a different work-a-day world for this Air Force veteran and corporate executive who once ran global operations for a talent management agency. For this, Campbell thanks her husband, Rich, who signed her up for classes at the Baum School of Art in Allentown in 2014 to give her a focus in advance of her anticipated retirement two years later.

Since Campbell had enjoyed painting throughout her life, she chose oil painting classes to sharpen her skills. Then life intervened: Later that year her younger daughter’s fiancé passed away after an illness. Devastated, Campbell found herself drawn to a ceramics class down the hall. “I had this profound grief that filled my body,” she says. “I released it into the clay. I started feeling better, like he was part of it.”

As her fingers massaged the clay, learning how to create forms, Campbell found her artistic voice. “When I painted, I would agonize over every brushstroke—I was so precious about it—but with ceramics it’s okay to make a wrong move,” she says. “If I don’t like it, I crunch it and start over or sculpt it into something that I love.”

Campbell spent five years developing her skills to the point where she felt ready to enter the Phillips’ Mill Annual Juried Art Show in 2019. “It changed my whole life,” she says. “They welcomed me with open arms.” Campbell was named the “Honored Artist” at the 2025 show. In March, for the third straight year, she was co-chair of the Mill Members Art Show. Last year, Campbell’s Tension, a speckled stoneware sculpture, won the Medal of Honor Award from the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club in New York.

Her artistic career took off in 2022 when a friend suggested she create an Instagram account to show her work. The exposure expanded the audience for Campbell’s clay sculptures, which blend human forms with nature imagery, with birds and feathers a frequent motif. “I love sculpting the feathers,” she says.

Campbell also loves her studio, a cheery sanctuary on the ten-acre farm where she and Rich live with their stable of dogs and horses. Outside the bay window, which washes the studio in natural light, three crows often congregate. “These crows talk to me all the time. They’re majestic, powerful,” she says. “Each is telling me its own story. I like to include them in my sculptures because they are helping the story to be told.”

But birds are not an exclusive theme: In Campbell’s studio and in her home, which has become a showplace for her prolific output, dogs, rabbits, and foxes also populate her oeuvre.

“I’m a storyteller, but I just present the imagery. The story is created by the observer,” she says, placing a hand on a sculpture of a girl with a rabbit on her back. “To me, the rabbit is there because it is her comfort companion. It gives her solace. But someone might have other thoughts.”

Campbell’s sculptures often start with a word—baggage, fracture, float, balance, pull, push—from which she works intuitively, coaxing stories from the wet clay. Referencing maquettes for form, she hand-builds each sculpture from the base up, primarily using stacks of coils of clay. “You want to keep the coil compressed,” she explains as she pushes down. “You do not want air bubbles, because then it will blow up in the kiln.”

For a sculpture with a head, she builds the body first, supported by a buttress, a supportive structure often of small coils or slabs that she adds inside to support the weight of the clay. Once it is firm, she attaches the neck and head. She incorporates textures, underglazes, which are clay with color, or objects like branches into the clay while it is still wet.

Campbell’s sculptures range from eight to twenty-two inches tall, the maximum height that can fit in the cavity of her kiln. A cheat board of measurements on her studio wall and a circle on her worktable help Campbell stay within the kiln’s parameters. But, she admits, “I have been known to shave down a piece or two because I got a little carried away.”

Campbell carries the sculptures—up to sixty pounds wet—to the basement, where the kiln is located, and wraps them lightly in plastic to keep them from drying too quickly. She uses a pulley system that she and Rich built to gently lower the pieces into the kiln. “Clay remembers all of the work you’ve done on it, all your seams, all the internal appendages,” she says. “If you dry clay quickly, you’re going to get a lot of cracks you’ll have to fix later.”

After drying, which can take from a few days to five weeks, depending on the size of the piece and the thickness of the clay, the sculptures are candled, a crucial technique in which the kiln is held at 200 degrees for up to forty-eight hours to allow remaining moisture to escape the sculpture safely to prevent explosions. She fires the sculpture two to four times depending on the color and surface she is trying to achieve. “I approach color on the clay as a painter, using glazes and underglazes,” she says. “I love using acrylic ink, which sits on the surface of the clay and can enhance what I’ve already accomplished. When I add texture or color, I concentrate on the eyes, because they are the soul of the world.”

Since the kiln is most efficient when filled, Campbell adds functional pieces like platters and what she calls her “big-ass salad bowls” when firing sculptures. Her collective works, which range from $100 to $2,500, can be purchased at Gallery Piquel in New Hope and The Artful Deposit in Bordentown, New Jersey. Her sculpture I Remember is part of Humans26, an exhibition at the Salmagundi Club in New York through June 5.

Campbell says one of the blessings that came from her artistic journey was being embraced by an inspiring community of female artists near and far: River Towners Tricia Zimic, Lisa Naples, and Tyree Dowrak, Jeanine Pennell of Boneyard Ceramics in Delaware Township, and her mentor, Adrian Arleo, who lives in Montana. “When I was in business, it was competitive and cutthroat,” she says. “In the art world here, everyone supports each other.”

Patti Zielinski, River Towns’ chief arts writer, studied painting in an atelier for about a decade and commiserates with Shawn Campbell over agonizing brushstrokes.