Meet Amy Joy Hosterman | Ceramic Artist & Wild Clay Hunter

We had the good fortune of connecting with Amy Joy Hosterman and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Amy, how did you come up with the idea for your business?
A lot of people ask me where I came up with the name Stinky Cheese Ceramics for my business.

My pottery is almost never finished in a single color or with a plain smooth surface. Using my own hand-carved stamps, I find great satisfaction in covering every inch of my pots in repetitive patterns that narrate complex stories with just a few simple objects.

I distill whole situations or ideas down into one or two iconic images, creating a visual language that tells the story in a humorous way. I use bright colors and a simplistic, illustrative style that gives my work a cute, happy look at first; but, when you look closer, it usually tells a story that’s funny, yet in a bit of a dark or ironic way.

I often think about our extremely absurd relationships to our natural environment. I’ll create images of alternating power-lines and trees pruned into ridiculous shapes, or a garbage truck delivering amazon packages straight into your trash can.

Sometimes my work is about our awkward relationships as humans or cultural strangeness as Americans. During the height of the pandemic lockdown, you bet I carved a toilet paper stamp, and put it right alongside a hot dog, a TV, and some stars and stripes, for the most honestly patriotic Xmas-in-July ornaments ever.

Sometimes my work reflects my own journey with depression, like sad clouds surrounded by rainbows. Even though there’s beauty all around them, the rain clouds are just gonna be sad; that’s just the way they are. Or is it? Maybe they feel better after a good rain. Either way, that pouty little cloud always makes me laugh.

If it makes me laugh, I make it. Because for me, finding the humor in painful truths is what makes living with those realities tolerable. Then maybe we can make a change, or lighten up, or save the world, or get out of bed, or whatever it is we need at that moment.

Which brings me, finally, to the cheese. The classic triangular wedge of yellow, hole-y cheese brings me back to childhood cartoons, with simplified cat-and-mouse metaphors for life’s perpetual struggles. When I’m depressed, life can feel like that; like I’m the mouse forever chasing the cheese, always worried about the cat. It’s so easy to be cynical, and it can be difficult to accept joy. I often need a reminder to focus on the successes instead of the struggles.

So I put the “cheesy” in the cheese. I make it reek with love and kindness and gratitude, by adding little red hearts wafting out, trailing those well-known wavy cartoon “stink” lines. “Stinky Cheese” is a reminder that it’s okay to be happy, or sappy, or eye-rollingly optimistic. Scrunch your nose if you need to, but remember to let go, join in, be grateful, accept joy, show love. It’s okay to be cheesy.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I’m a ceramic artist because I am obsessed with clay as a material. First of all it makes sense to me in a practical way, making functional art for daily use. Pottery serves so many purposes. It gives intention and positive energy to mundane activities. It becomes a part of our shared human experience: shared between the maker, the beholder, and the vast history of potters and beholders of pots that have been and will ever be. Pottery is part of the grand conversation, and it holds your coffee, too.

On top of that, clay is such an amazing natural material. Especially if you’re a rock hound or a soil nerd – or both, like me. I have been harvesting and using wild clays for ten years now. It began in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Even though I’d gotten my Fine Arts degree in Ceramics and had already learned how to formulate my own clay bodies and glaze recipes and the science behind it all, it still took stumbling on a huge deposit of red, sticky, smooth, pure wild clay on a friend’s property to realize that I don’t have to start with a powder from a bag in a lab, commercially mined and finely processed for industrial use.

Clay is a naturally occurring material. It’s made up of teeny tiny mineral particles, weathered down from rocks, and specially bonded with water. The science of clay is fascinating to me, and I am continually researching, testing, and learning. But you don’t even have to get that science-y about it, to dig some clay out of the ground, squish it up with a little water, and try making a pot out of it. It can be that simple. That’s the amazing thing about clay.

Since discovering the clay there, I’ve developed a summer clay program in the UP of Michigan. It’s part residency, part workshop, part summer-camp-for-adults, called the Visitor Center Artist Camp. The clay workshop is an intensive two weeks of performing the entire process from finding and identifying wild clay, harvesting, processing, mixing in additives, making pots, and firing on site, in the woods.

Once I learned how to find wild clay, I’ve found it all over the place. I travel and hunt clays and teach workshops and fire kilns across the country. I have clay from Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, and even Italy. The clays were made and deposited by rivers, glaciers, ancient lakes now dry, ancient sea bottoms now well above sea level, and even volcanoes, spewing mineral-dust that settles and becomes clay. Clay is more than a medium to me. Clay is an adventure!

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
On any given day I like to walk my dog Yoko around downtown Loveland. If you were visiting I’d walk you past all the cool murals and public art sculptures and painted electrical boxes. I’d show you the historic buildings like the Feed & Grain, which is now being renovated for residential and creative use. This big, rustic beauty shares a campus with the Artspace artist lofts, and the old Light & Power Co building, just down the tracks from the old train depot.

We’d walk to Dark Heart Coffee for the best latte in town, and stop by the record shop, Downtown Sound, to scour their vinyl for new albums. For a walking breakfast we’d grab a breakfast burrito at Vatos, or for a dinner on-the-go we’d grab a giant slice of pizza at Slice n’ Roll, or one of the many food trucks that hang out in front of the micro-breweries in town. We’d grab a beer at Aleworks, Verboten, or my favorite in nice weather, the Backyard Tap.

Plan ahead as many of my friends do, and you can set up an appointment for a tattoo with my husband, Joshua, at his shop downtown, Bronze Eye Tattoo. He does excellent work in a variety of styles, but particularly loves creating geometric patterns and highly detailed flowers and flora. His shop is a comfortable and clean space with a chill vibe, garnished with colorful abstract paintings (by a local favorite artist of mine, Holly Kirkman), and succulents sunning in the front window.

When friends come to visit us in Loveland, they are usually from non-mountainous places in the Midwest, so a trip to the mountains is always one of the key things on our itinerary. If we can plan ahead and get into Rocky Mountain National Park, we often take visitors hiking there. Sometimes just a drive up the canyon is all you need in colder weather, and we might stop in Estes Park at Ye Olde Ore Cart rock shop to crack open a geode or pick up a little pocket gem. A little closer to home is Round Mountain. I really like to hike there, especially with visitors from lower altitudes, because it’s a pretty easy hike, you can bring dogs, you don’t need a reservation, and you can make it to the little nature trail summit with the cool little stone shelter at the top in under an hour.

If you’re feeling sleepy on the way down the mountain as we often do after a day of exploring and elk-watching and rock collecting, we’ll stop at Jamoka Joe’s Coffee on I-34; it’s an adorable little house that’s a drive-through coffee shop. The woman who runs it is great, and her dirty chai lattes are a deliciously spicy slap in the face.

Back in Loveland, my favorite sit-down dinner spot is Durbar Nepali & Indian restaurant, where I’m happy to fill up on appetizers, but I always order a main dish too, and have leftovers for breakfast; it’s all amazing.

You’d definitely want to visit Loveland during the second Friday of the month, for Night On The Town, when art galleries have new show opening receptions, and businesses downtown stay open late and have special events and offerings. We’d walk around and check out Artworks, Artspace, the Museum, Lincoln Gallery, and more. The Valentine Flea sets up a pop-up Artisan Market at the “pocket park,” and musicians and artists perform on the sidewalks around downtown.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Maybe it’s cheesy, but I want to dedicate my shoutout to my parents, who have always been encouraging and supportive of me. My dad passed away a year ago, and I’ve spent the year thinking about how much he did for me, and also how much I am like him, for better or worse. I’m so grateful for him, and for my mom, and the time I’ve spent with her this year, walking our dogs and getting coffee and staying positive with a little forward momentum.

I’ve always been into art, and my parents have always been encouraging. When I got into creative writing in highschool, my parents got me a typewriter. Remember those? It was the 90’s, so it was an electronic one with a delete key that would White-Out your mistakes. That thing was so fun to use.

When I first fell in love with pottery in college, that Christmas my dad made a “potter’s wheel” for me as a gag-gift. He bolted flower pots to either side of my brother’s old BMX bicycle wheel. One flower pot was upside down as a base at the bottom, and the other was the actual “pot” on top of the wheel, which sat horizontally in the middle, and actually spun! Shortly after that, my parents also gave me my first real potter’s wheel, which I still use today.

So, shoutout to my mom and dad who’ve taught me about generosity, integrity, and hard work. They’ve taught me to not take myself too seriously, despite our shared family trait of analyzing every detail of every problem. They’ve taught me to do what I love, and to do it wholeheartedly.

Website: https://stinkycheeseceramics.square.site/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stinkycheeseceramics/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stinkycheeseceramics

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@stinkycheeseceramics

Other: Director and Wild Clay Workshop instructor at: www.visitorcenterartistcamp.org

Image Credits
Katherine Jean