Bayou Artist | Audrey McCumber

Article April C. Doughty
Photography by Kelly Moore Clark

After leaving a career in finance, Audrey McCumber returned to ceramics and built Red Bear Pottery into a full-time business, applying her business background to produce and sell functional pottery.

Audrey McCumber’s path to ceramics was shaped as much by intuition as by intention. After first discovering her natural ability for working with clay in high school, McCumber set pottery aside to pursue a Bachelor of Science in business and finance. Upon finishing her degree, she stepped into the corporate world with the expectation of building a stable career. Still, the level of fulfillment she experienced in the corporate world never matched what she experienced at the wheel. In 2021, an empty spare bedroom that needed a purpose reignited her interest and quickly became the foundation for a growing production pottery business, prompting her to fully commit to the creative career she had long felt drawn toward. 

Today, as owner of Red Bear Pottery, McCumber focuses on developing a recognizable personal style while producing functional pieces meant to be handled, used, and woven into everyday routines. Through her work, she aims to create objects that bring people together in simple but meaningful ways, while demonstrating that pursuing a creative livelihood can be both practical and deeply rewarding.

McCumber, whose mother was a stained glass artist, grew up loving art and feeling drawn to creative activities throughout her childhood. In high school at Caddo Magnet in Shreveport, she took two years of ceramics with Curtis Bias. This experience awakened a passion in her that lingered and yearned to be reignited long after graduating from the halls of high school. 

When McCumber enrolled at Louisiana Tech University, she was set on pursuing a degree in business finance and embarked on this path thinking she’d be able to continue exploring her passion for ceramics through electives. Unfortunately, her plans were quickly thwarted when she discovered there were many hoops to jump though, including multiple prerequisite courses that barred her access. Consequently, she gave up on pursuing college credits in ceramics and went on with her original plan.

In keeping with that plan, McCumber gained work experience related to business and finance. She worked in banking and later in private equity as a financial analyst. While trying to make good on her plan to build a career in business, she found herself continually thinking about how she could get out of the corporate world and focus on pottery. “I was thinking about pottery all the time,” she said. 

At the same time, she found the male-dominated corporate world was more stifling than she’d imagined, and she craved being able to express herself more openly. She’d seen artists on social media who were building successful, self-sustaining businesses as full-time potters, so she took their experiences as proof she could find the same success and fulfillment. She was right, and now that she’s beginning to experience that fulfillment, she said, “I would never go back. It’s fantastic, and I’m so much happier. Allowing myself to do this as a woman is a lot more empowering than the corporate world.”

But when she first started having these inklings that she wanted to pursue ceramics full time, McCumber knew she couldn’t do it all at once. After all, she hadn’t really practiced ceramics since high school. To help her delve back into that world, McCumber asked her parents for a pottery wheel for her birthday in 2021. At the time, she was living alone in a four-bedroom house, so she had plenty of rooms to designate one as a pottery studio. Although she wasn’t sure whether rediscovering her former hobby would lead to more, she was ready to explore the creative outlet that had once brought so much joy.

IN HIGH SCHOOL, McCumber had first encountered ceramics at an impressionable time. When Mr. Bias introduced the art of wheel throwing to his students, McCumber recalls being one of only a couple students to successfully create something that first day at the wheel. With that initial confidence boost, she was hooked, and with two years of his support, she had enough experience and trust in herself to begin refining her skills on her own through experimentation, trial and error, and the use of models she liked for inspiration. She even found that Bias was willing to offer support and answer questions years later when she was starting her own studio. 

It’s now been more than four years since she decided to take up ceramics again. In the beginning, there were challenges. Creating pottery requires more than just a wheel. There are a variety of tools needed. Fortunately, McCumber’s parents were willing to invest in the most substantial necessity—a decent wheel. That wheel has proven durable and continues to serve her well. Along the way, she acquired most of the other tools herself, some of them secondhand, and she started paying for kiln space at a local shop in Shreveport since she didn’t have a kiln of her own. When she was able, she bought a small kiln to have greater control over her pieces and when they were fired. She continues to use that kiln today but has also continued to grow and scale her business with more equipment. 

Since March 2024, she’s become a full-time production potter, spending her time creating a high volume of functional pottery for various markets and events. Around that time, she said something shifted in her. She decided it was time to use her business degree to do something she really wanted to be doing. She started Red Bear and by June 2024, she was selling her work at the Ruston Farmer’s Market, which she continues to do. Since leaving her corporate job and moving to the woods of Ruston, Louisiana, her success has grown not only locally, but also online through collection drops on her website and custom work sold on Etsy. Using inventory drops allows her to come up with ideas and then create a cohesive collection that she releases to the public for sale all at once on a chosen day. She believes using drops decreases stress and confusion both for her and buyers. 

When McCumber first imagines a piece, she thinks through all the creative aspects from how it will function to the shape and glaze, but the business side of her is also at work, and she’s thinking about it from a product development angle. She’s considering whether the idea is one that might only appeal to her or one she thinks other people would genuinely be interested in and want to buy. Then she really digs in and considers things like profit margins, what her projected income will be, and how she will market it. “At the end of the day,” she said, “you can have a passion, but it’s great to also make a great living off of it. You can be really good, but if people don’t know you exist, that can be hard. So you really have to add logic to the art that’s being produced.”

In the process of growing her business, McCumber has encountered doubts and scary moments, but she hasn’t had to look very far to find the support she’s needed to push through. Her mother Gena White, who is an experienced artist and business owner, has always been there for her to provide inspiration and encouragement. Her husband Bill has also been a continual source of support, being by her side through everything she does and even when she’s in what she called “pottery mode” all the time. 

When McCumber is creating a batch, she works with the pieces for two or three weeks. “So I become very close with these pieces,” she said. When she’s glazing the pieces, she’s noticing their little eccentricities, and sometimes the glaze may go on a little thinner or thicker for some pieces. When the pieces come out of the kiln, there’s always an element of surprise. “I really like looking at pieces up close,” she said, “and seeing how the glazes melted with one another in the kiln because it kind of tells a story to me.” 

McCumber specifically likes combining blues, greens, and reds and seeing how they transform in the kiln. When she puts the pieces in, it’s like she’s relinquishing control and letting them become what they are meant to be, almost like a parent watching their child go out on their own for the first time. “When I pull it out of the kiln, I’m like, ‘Oh, I know what you did in there because I can see it.’” In her mind’s eye, she sees all the moments that led to this final piece. “When I see how the glaze reacts, it just feels like the pot is alive,” she said. In a sense, each piece takes on a life of its own in the kiln.

As McCumber’s business has grown, her kiln use has changed as well. She’s gone from renting kiln space to acquiring a small kiln of her own to being the lucky recipient of a gifted kiln that came with a unique history and the ability to change her production potential. The story of this kiln begins at the Ruston Farmer’s Market. McCumber is soaking in the vibes as children pick out bud vases for their moms and husbands pick mugs to share coffee with their wives. In these moments, she’s glimpsing the connection she’s hoped her pieces would inspire since she conceived them. 

At the same time, she begins to notice that a certain name has popped up in conversations with her customers more than a few times, and it’s Kent Follette. People are saying her work is reminiscent of his. She’s never heard of Follette, but gets curious and learns that he was a long-time resident of the area and a production potter whose mark on the community runs deep. If people were comparing her to this man, she decided she was in good company and, in a way, she began to feel like she knew Follette, even though they’d never met. She said she was even beginning to feel the urge to reach out to him.

Around this time, McCumber also began to feel like her business was growing to the point she would need a larger kiln soon. In answer to her need, a woman named Emma Melville approached McCumber at the market one day in the summer of 2025. Melville was a fellow ceramicist and actually had one of Kent Follette’s old kilns in storage, and she was willing to give it to McCumber. “What a crazy opportunity,” she said. The offer couldn’t have come at a more perfect time, and it only served to strengthen the connection she was already feeling to Follette. 

A couple months later, McCumber had been busy putting the new kiln to use when, at the Annual Ruston Peach Festival, a classic summer community event became the site of a beautiful synchronicity. McCumber was in her booth, going about her usual business of engaging with customers and answering questions, when one of them began to ask very specific questions. “You must be a potter,” McCumber said, and he answered, “‘I am. My name’s Kent Follette.’” Meeting Follette in person was surreal.  McCumber pulled him aside and said, “Look, I have your kiln, and I feel like I know you.” She acknowledged that approaching him in this way might have seemed a little weird, but at the same time, she couldn’t help but share how awesome it felt to meet him in person. “I feel like you’ve passed the torch down,” she said, “and you’re still very much alive in this community.” Although their encounter was brief, McCumber said he became an important figure in her development for a time.

Now that McCumber is well on her way to realizing her dream of sustaining herself as an artist, she’s focusing more on refining her work, looking for ways to add flair or simple details that really heighten the work. She’s also been thinking more about how different glazes can complement the form of a piece. She considers her work earthy and finds herself drawn to glazes that have a certain depth to them and mirror colors found in nature. These are aspects of her work that she feels committed to while at the same time acknowledging that it can take years to develop a personal style. That’s where she is right now, discovering what she’s really driven towards and what aspects she wants to define her work and separate her from other potters. “I’m in that space now,” she said, “where I want somebody to look at a mug and say, that’s a Red Bear Pottery mug.”

She also wants to preserve the joy that comes with sitting at the wheel and throwing. It’s actually the fastest part of the process, she said, taking maybe two to three minutes to make a coffee mug. Although it can be easy to let these moments get overshadowed by more administrative tasks, McCumber is determined to keep the joy alive. She said, “I really like throwing. I like putting on headphones (and it’s mostly been classical music lately), and I really like having the clay just run through my hands. It’s really satisfying.” 

Another really satisfying thing for McCumber is shipping items to their new owners. She loves seeing the names and where the pieces are going and writing the personal thank you notes that she encloses with each item. “As an artist,” she said, “my work has become a language for me to take up space unapologetically. It is something tangible and evidence of ownership that holds my vision and perspective.” Knowing that she’s sharing her vision and perspective with people as far away as Hawaii or Alaska is really cool to her. “I’m in the relationship business,” she said. 

Because the work she creates is primarily functional kitchenware, it’s meant to be used in the kitchen where people gather to cook and connect and share meals and quality time together. Connection and gathering are really important to McCumber. “We’re social human beings,” she said, “so that’s how I’d like to have my work change people’s lives. I also like to think that my presence might inspire or help someone else see that a creative life is entirely possible for them too.”