For more than thirty years, the same eight wheels revved in Commonwealth’s ceramics studio, helping hundreds of students throw thousands of cups, bowls, vases, plates, and sculptures—and it showed. When Catherine Merrill saw the need to replace those well-loved wheels and renovate the studio, her response was simple: "How can I help?"

“The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand,” says ceramic artist and teacher Catherine Merrill, invoking neurologist Frank R. Wilson. This, she says, “is the key to everything,” including the impact of the technology that now occupies much (if not a majority) of our time. Catherine worries about how devices are shaping the thought patterns of today's children and thereby the human brain of the future, she says, as the simple repetitive motion of working at a computer or typing on a smartphone replaces the complex motor activity of, say, writing or drawing. Or working with clay.

“When I'm working at the wheel,” she says, “it's very grounding and very centering, because in order to center the clay and find that still point around which everything moves, you have to center yourself.” The clay then speaks to her hands, her hands speak to her brain, and her brain tells her fingers how to respond. Pinch, pull up, shift just so.  

To Catherine, the arts are one antidote to the attention-snatching, brain-altering influence of smartphones and other devices. And it’s one of many reasons why she decided to generously fund renovations in Commonwealth’s ceramics studio, a sacred space where generations of students have centered themselves and found joy in creating under the care of ceramics teacher Kyla Toomey, now, and Jean Segaloff and Bob Lucas before her.
 
The ceramics studio is almost as old as Commonwealth itself, dating back to 1966. Catherine remembers visiting the school in those days. She was performing with the radical Bread & Puppet Theater when her father, school founder Charles Merrill, invited the troupe to Commonwealth. They chose a piece called “Fire,” dedicating it to the memory of the monks who had recently died through self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War. Through dance and puppetry, they brought a monster to life in the Cafegymnatorium to the sounds of Gregorian chant. The performance ended with Catherine, a lone figure in white, silently wrapping herself in red tape. Afterwards, Catherine remembers “going upstairs and seeing a ceramic studio,” she says. “That made me really happy that he decided that was important.” To her, the studio spoke to their shared values as much as the invitation to perform did, she says. “He never said that in words to me, [but] as they say, actions speak louder.”

Decades passed between that performance and a 2022 visit with Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81 and Director of Advancement Alisha Elliott ’01, where the conversation ultimately (perhaps inevitably) turned to ceramics at Commonwealth. The trio discussed the arts and Catherine’s practice while poring over pictures of student work and the ceramics studio—well-worn with use, as well-loved places are wont to be. Impressed by Commonwealth’s ceramics curriculum and inspired by students' work, Catherine saw the need for studio upgrades. "How can I help?" she asked, sparking a conversation of what could be accomplished with an infusion of funds. Together, the three started imagining the possibilities, as Catherine pulled out ceramics catalogues with examples of optimized studio shelving and walked Jennifer and Alisha down to her studio to show them the kind of sink they might consider. When Jennifer and Alisha next met with Catherine, they had turned their imaginings into a wishlist of everything Kyla confirmed the studio needed to sustain future generations of student work. By investing in Commonwealth’s ceramics program, Catherine turned that wishlist into a reality: eight new “whisper” quiet wheels, heavy-duty steel tables, custom-built wooden shelves, and an industrial sink that can stand up to the mini mudslides after class. “It's fulfilling for me to reconnect and be so impressed with what a great school it is,” says Catherine. “It's the first time in my very long life I feel that my vision and my father's vision have merged in such a positive way.”
 
“Catherine’s engagement felt like a full-circle moment to me as well. The Merrill family has continued to nurture Commonwealth well beyond Charles Merrill’s retirement, and the arts remain centrally important to who we are,” says Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81. “I spent a lot of time in the ceramics studio when I was a student at Commonwealth. Jean Segaloff was an important role model for me: feminist, hilarious, and compassionate. My pots were usually lopsided, but I loved working with my hands and loved the mystery of the kiln. When I wander upstairs to our ceramics studio today, I see similarly entranced students mastering varied techniques and making them their own. Catherine’s generosity created a studio that’s fully worthy of their efforts.”

The arts in schools make for “more complete and fully rounded people,” Catherine says. “The contrast makes the whole experience richer, complementing traditional academic studies with this sense of personal exploration and working through problems. That happens when a person is working with clay.” When you mold clay with your hands and then see how an 800-degree kiln fundamentally reconfigures its molecules, “you understand how the world works on the physical, chemical level,” Catherine says. “It's real.” Still, for all its scientific underpinnings, “there’s a magic [to ceramics], because you're working with the earth, and then you add water, then air, and then fire, and your lump of dirt has been turned into an object that's beautiful and shiny and maybe even useful,” she says. “There's really a feeling of the miraculous.” 

Though she’d always had an affinity from the arts, it took some time for Catherine to find ceramics (or for ceramics to find her). “I was mostly in my head,” she says of her high school and early college days. Taking modern dance classes in New York in the mid-1960s pulled her out of it: “I discovered the thinking body, and I also discovered the beauty of the human form.” she says. Training her body as a dancer allowed her to more fully participate in the world, she says—and connect with her hands. 

She attended Harvard’s Radcliffe College for a number of years, simultaneously taking painting classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, before moving to Europe and then New York. Living in the artist mecca of the East Village, Catherine studied at The Art Students League of New York, where “they taught you how to paint…like they did.” When she finally found herself in a studio of her own, in the late ’60s, “I couldn't find myself. I couldn't find my own style,” she says. “So that's how I turned to clay,” learning from the likes of potter Judy Baldwin.

After moving to San Francisco in 1967 and the Big Island of Hawaii in 1981, Catherine found herself at the Kansas City Art Institute earning a B.F.A. in ceramics in 1988—“finally,” she says. There the faculty fantastically contradicted what she’d heard before: “‘We are not training you to make work like us. We want to teach you how to find your own vision and your own style.’” She carried those lessons into her own classrooms. Like Commonwealth’s art faculty, Catherine is a working artist and teacher. For forty years she’s taught sculpture and drawing from the live model, as well as handbuilding and throwing functional pottery on the wheel. (“I teach what I love.”)

Catherine taps into the physicality and power of presence she learned as a modern dancer while making her own art as well, primarily figurative drawings and sculpture, often working with live nude models. (Unsurprisingly, Commonwealth’s Life Drawing class, a rarity at the high-school level, piqued her interest.) Her pottery practice focuses on accessible dinnerware that's “beautiful to look at but also fulfilling to use,” she hopes, because it’s handmade. “I like the idea of making useful work,” Catherine says, because an invisible current connects the hand of the maker to the hand of the person using that plate or cup or bowl. You won’t find that in a machine-made pot. 

While Catherine’s pottery comes in a few standard styles, her sculptures and drawings are one of a kind. “I want to convey the beauty of the human form,” she says, tapping into traditions as ancient as the “Aphrodite of Knidos.” Catherine’s most recent show, Drawn from Life, hosted by the Sausalito Center for the Arts, which she also curated, includes "I'll Fly Away,” a life-size female torso with Monarch Butterfly wings and a delicate tattoo of a rose blooming from the otherwise pure white marble hip, atop a matching pedestal. This and other sculptures celebrate the Bay Area figurative movement—a movement Catherine and her co-curator, Susan Kirschenbaum, have been working to revive.

“Sometimes, the longer you work over the years, the harder it is to stay inspired,” Catherine says. But each model is unique and worthy of capturing in the medium at hand. Some even become muses. “It's rediscovering the beauty of the human form and the human connection.” Catherine’s work has also become more narrative in recent years. “I hope as I'm telling my story through my sculptures that the viewer will see themselves.”

Centered around the wheel, engaged in making, Catherine finds mental calm and a reprieve from the daily news that often shocks and troubles her. “We need to find joy during times of darkness, so that we can go on living,” she says. “Making and sharing art is one of the best ways of finding joy. And we need art. Everybody needs art.” 

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