Good Elephant Pottery is the work of Mea Rhee. Mea is a functionally potter, her work is both wheel-thrown and slab-built. She makes lots of food-safe tableware, but also makes decorative items such as lidded jars, vases, and lanterns. Most of her pots are fired to cone 6 (about 2200 degrees Fahrenheit) in an electric kiln.

Mea’s aesthetics are guided by her Korean heritage, Maryland upbringing, and graphic design education. Her pots are minimal and rustic. Above all, they are functional. She makes them gray and brown – the colors of rocks and dirt – so they are like natural objects that have been dug out of the ground. She makes many elephant-shaped items, which are neither political nor historical. In fact, their significance is entirely mundane. But it’s a secret.

She has been practicing pottery since 1994, when she signed up for a course in wheel-thrown pottery and was unable to stop thinking about it! It challenged her physically, psychologically, and artistically, and continues to do so today. Mea is also an award-winning graphic designer. She runs both design and pottery studios from her home in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.