BETHEL —  Tim Kavanaugh was Martha Grover’s art teacher at Telstar Regional High School and was the first to teach her how to throw.

“I absolutely loved it,” she said, “but, I didn’t know that you could go to college for ceramics.”

When the time came, she opted for architecture at Bennington College. Halfway through she switched to Bennington’s clay program. “By the time I graduated, I knew that’s where my heart was,” she said.

The West Bethel potter has been invited to demonstrate her work at the Israeli Ceramic Symposium in December. The ceramic artists of Israel gather for a symposium annually and invite one artist from the United States and one from Europe. Grover will present her work process through demonstrations, give a lecture about her work, and judge an exhibition.

“This is a big stage . . . It’s pretty exciting,” she said.

Grover has received prestigious invitations in the past, like the one to be a resident potter at the Archie Bray Foundation, where she met her husband, Joshua David Rysted. He is a potter and does tech support for a kiln manufacturing company. Maggie, their gentle “studio dog,” sleeps while Rysted troubleshoots calls from kiln owners here and abroad.

The technical description of her work is that it is “thrown and altered porcelain, cone 10 oxidation.” Porcelain describes the type of clay used, one of many varieties. Earthenware is fired at low temperatures, next hottest is stoneware, last is (most) porcelains. “You’re losing iron as you go. There is no iron in the work I do. The porcelain I do is fired at the highest temperature,” she said.

Grover’s work is described by her and others as floral and curvy, like the pots are dancing. And they are functional. “For me that’s always been important. For me the function is why it exists in the world . . . Why can’t it be both? . . . Something that is thought provoking as well as you can have your morning coffee out of it.”

Grover’s father built a branch of Grover Gundrilling — now Grover Precision, a machine shop — in the large warehouse space the ceramists use as their workspace.

Grover Gundrilling was a company that machined holes in metal while the ceramists of today create holes, too, but in clay.

At the front of the building are four or five small work rooms. The farthest room down the hall is a glaze kitchen where they make all their glazes in-house. Glaze ingredients circle three walls: flux, silica, clays and oxides.

“If you think of a glaze recipe as a cookie recipe and the base recipe as a sugar cookie,” Grover said. “These are your nuts and chips,” she said, gesturing toward the smaller tubs filled with oxides. “These are the things that give the glaze character, whether it’s opaque or transparent, blue or green or purple ”

The last small room is for airbrushing ceramics; airbrushing is part of what gives Grover’s porcelain pieces their signature look.

A set of stairs in the large teaching space leads to Grover’s and Rysted’s home. She and her father, Dan Grover of Mason Township, cut down trees on the property to build the wood ceilings, doors and shelves. “He was a carpenter before he became a machinist,” she said.

The kitchen is filled with a colorful collection of ceramic plates, pots and bowls. The wood-shelved cubbies along the hall are filled with several dozen mugs. None of this pottery was made by Grover or Rysted. “It’s collecting art, but it’s functional art. So you also get to eat your salad in it,” Grover explained.

“For me experiencing a different mug everyday is a different experience,” she said. “It’s not just the cup of coffee. It’s the way the handle feels, the way the bottom feels. How it transmits warmth. I find it fascinating.”

Downstairs on the first level is a wood shop in the back of the large building. Grover’s father and her uncle, Rupert Grover of Bethel, made all of the shelving in the clay studio in their wood shop. The shelves house students’ projects and work tools.

Grover calls their large, teaching space their “community studio.”

In Helena, Montana, where she and Rysted met, there is a clay community the couple have been emulating here. About seven years ago they bought four wheels and taught four students.

“We built it slowly,” Grover said.

These days they have 43 students who come once or twice a week to use several wheels. “Though this is an income stream for us, it’s much more about sharing our love of clay with other people,” she said.

“We live in such a digital world that we don’t actually get to get in it . . . The conversations that happen in here,” Grover said. “They can step outside of themselves for a minute and find joy and connect with the other people in the room. It’s a magical thing. There’s something really special and transformative about clay.”

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