Deborah Buco
I love Louisiana and feel that it is a charming and unique place to live. Louisiana’s flora and fauna are main focus of my pottery designs — featuring images of pelicans, herons, honeybees, dragonflies, redfish, and alligators in habitats of palmetto, cat tails, and Louisiana irises and flowers. My goal is to create well-crafted pottery forms and then use them as canvases for beautiful sgraffito carving. I hope that my work conveys my keen appreciation of Louisiana’s environment and encourages other to value and protect it.
My work is both functional and decorative, created on the potter’s wheel or hand built from white stoneware or porcelain clay. Most of my work utilizes a sgraffito technique with various colored underglazes. The partially dried pottery is painted with underglaze and a sgraffito tool is used to carve away the background, leaving a unique and original design. The process is like drawing in reverse as I am taking away the background and adding finely carved detail lines. Next the pottery is bisque fired, then glazed, and given a final firing in the kiln. All work is fired to cone 5. The glazes are lead free and food safe.
Baton Rouge has been my home for my entire life. I grew up, married, and raised children here. After the Buco boys “flew the coop” and I retired from teaching, I started throwing pottery again and Empty Nest Pottery was born. I have no formal training in ceramics– it is truly a passion of mine and I have taken many classes and workshops over the past ten years to expand my skills. I feel that I am constantly learning and challenging myself while having a great time doing it!
