Visiting Artists
Spring 2026-
Floyd Potter’s Market
Since 2006, 16 Hands has had the honor of presenting the work of fine craftsmen
from around the country in our biannual studio tour.
Alysha Baier
Since beginning her journey in clay in 2006, Alysha Baier has developed a distinctive voice in contemporary ceramics. Currently working from her private studio and home in Atlanta, New York and testing boundaries with clay. She began her studies at Western Carolina University and later continued at Southwestern Community College, where she deepened her experience with atmospheric firings, including wood and reduction kilns. Influenced early on by her time at Treehouse Pottery under potter Joe Frank McKee, she explored processes ranging from raku to horsehair firing before ultimately embracing electric oxidation as the foundation of her current practice. This shift allowed her to cultivate the soft, painterly surfaces that define her work today.
Working primarily with stained porcelain slips over dark stoneware, Alysha uses sgraffito to carve through layered color, creating delicate, atmospheric imagery rooted in landscape, line and color. She has exhibited widely at pottery festivals throughout the eastern United States and remains deeply engaged in her ceramics community as the organizer of the Western New York Pottery Festival, an instructor at Studio Sales Pottery, and a private teacher.
Candice Hensley
Candice Hensley grew up in rural Kentucky in the Appalachian foothills. She discovered making pots in the art barn at Centre College, after the death of her father led her to seek out something that put her mind at ease. Surprised by the joy in making an object with her own hands that could be used, she has been making pots ever since. Now Candice lives just outside Asheville, North Carolina with her husband and daughter, often listening to music and playing in the dirt of her garden or clay in her studio.
Candice’s influences in ceramics mainly come from her community. She is fortunate to interact with some of her favorite maker’s pots on a daily basis. That leads her to consider physical aspects of someone else’s work (such as handle placement, balance and weight, intended purpose, etc.) and try to understand how it may benefit or change her own making practice.
Shanti Yard
I am a second generational wood worker, raised in the forests of Floyd County, Virginia. I have been producing art professionally for 20 years, selling at juried art shows nationwide. I exclusively work with sustainably harvested, local hardwood burl to create one of a kind sculptural vessels. The pieces are initially prepared into rough, workable shapes with a chainsaw. For certain pieces, I mount them onto a lathe to be turned, using long-handled bowl gouges and various other chisels. For other pieces, I use grinders to sculpt organic forms by hand. Each piece is then finely sanded and hand rubbed with a urethane based oil to an immaculate finish. I often incorporate crushed stone, mineral specimens, antler, silver and copper powder inlay for dimensional artistic purposes. Burl wood lends itself to unique bark inclusions and distinct grain patterns, no two pieces are alike. I focus on form over function, transforming the diseased part of a tree into art.
Julie Covington
Over the last several years I have been lucky enough to find myself surrounded by some pretty interesting folks here in the sweet old mountains of western North Carolina, who manage to fill their days doing such things as felting tiny baby shoes, hand stitching buckskin skirts, hunting for wild foods and mushrooms, building hand-hewn log cabins and straw bale cottages, growing heirloom vegetables and flowers, whittling adorable little wooden spoons, waltzing in the moonlight, making bamboo fences, and a thousand other things that I am daily fascinated and humbled by.
When I make pots it is with the hope that they will nestle comfortably into the lives of the wild and wonderful artists and farmers and musicians all around me and beyond, who seem to be forever raising the bar of what it means to walk around on this earth in a good way. I aim to create simple, sturdy tableware that feels and looks pretty good, and is equally at home on an intimate dinner table or on the floor of an old pick-up truck.