While an undergrad taking classes in clay at Bennington College, Catherine Satterlee puzzled over a professor’s words. “I think ceramics for you is a safe harbor,” the adviser told her a half-century ago. In the decades since, Satterlee has tested the waters as an art teacher, graphic designer, painter and member of the Hirshhorn Museum’s exhibitions staff. Then nine years ago, she returned full-time to the career foretold.

Working only with stoneware, Satterlee constructs each object by hand. The forms are classic—oval vessels, rectangular bottles, round plates. Their simplicity creates a backdrop for expressing clay’s fundamental nature, its transformative stages from malleable through hardened. In her works, glazes are applied sparingly, sometimes only on an object’s interior. Gritty crevices might be juxtaposed with raised fragments, painted in richly hued underglazes and possibly glazed again to a silken sheen. Earthy treatments may bypass color entirely, as the clay is incised, stamped, carved out or scraped back to achieve its primal pattern. From rough surfaces to filmy sheets, each step imparts the material’s tactile essence.

“In a way,” says Satterlee, seated in her Foggy Bottom apartment where finished pieces are displayed, “the vessel is like a vehicle for texture. That’s the main thing for me.” Tenderly tracing her hand across the raw underside of a plate, she adds, “Here you can see the original source—this lovely brown clay, which I didn’t glaze because I love it!”

Satterlee builds each piece at the Alexandria Clay Co-op, a 20-minute drive away. In a shared second-floor studio, she points to a large slab roller, where the process begins. Here, slabs are rolled out from thick to paper-thin. Recently the artist started saving colorful scraps from earlier pieces, sometimes rolling them into another slab. The effect, says Satterlee, “has the spontaneous feeling that I like.”

As she transfers pieces in progress to a worktable, the potter explains, “Timing is such an important issue with hand-building. If something is too moist, it collapses. If it’s too hard, it’s not malleable.” Removing tar paper that wraps one vessel to help form its shape, she attempts to smooth out joints but decides the clay has become too dry. “I’ll try to rescue it,” Satterlee continues, spraying water on the surface.

Moving to a vessel that’s further along, she takes out a slab from the wet box in which thin slabs have been layered between damp newspapers. Earlier, these clay sheets were slathered with underglaze, a liquid clay colored pale green. Satterlee slices the slab into strips, scoring and cutting them into squarish sections. Then brushing on a liquid clay called slip as glue, she presses the sections into the solid brown form in uneven rows. The technique, resembling mosaic tiling, can take many hours to complete.

Once finished, Satterlee will dry the vessel for a week in a sturdy plastic bag, gradually opening it over another week or two. When thoroughly dry, it will be bisque-fired. The ceramist plans to coat the vessel with her own brew, a clear glaze mixed with powdered copper carbonate to produce a glossy green. The piece will be fired a second time at a higher temperature of about 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit.

The vessel underway was inspired by a photo of Varberg Fortress in Sweden. A friend sent it to her, commenting that the site’s aged stones and grassy mounds reminded her of Satterlee’s work. “That happens a lot,” notes the artist, who keeps a file of patterns and textures for future reference. Among her collected images are a brick sidewalk encountered in Old Town Alexandria, antique Persian horse covers displayed at George Washington University’s Textile Museum and floral designs sighted on utility covers in Tokyo. “Sometimes I think patterns are so great, I just have to do them,” Satterlee says.

While she typically creates objects in series, each piece is distinct. “I work on the same technique for a while, then move on,” she observes. “Starting out, I have a vague vision of something. The fun for me is figuring out how I can do it—and how far I can go with it. I always want to try something new.”

Her robust design sense may be innate: Both parents were architects. Her mother, Sarah Yerkes, was in the first class of women architecture students at Harvard Graduate School of Design, which her late father, Nicholas Satterlee, also attended. During World War II, they came to Washington, where Catherine was born and raised. “Ceramics were one of the things my mother always brought back from trips and gave to me. Somehow, she knew,” the potter muses about a journey that started in college, continued as a hobby and led to her eventual career.

Rethinking the professor’s remark about a safe harbor, she reflects, “Is it a bad thing to feel comfortable in the medium?” Her answer: “I think everything has gone into what I do now. It just feels I’m where I’m supposed to be in art-making.”

Satterlee’s ceramics will be shown from March 15 to May 31 during the Creative Crafts Council Biennial at Strathmore Mansion; creativecraftscouncil.org. Her work is also available at artfulhome.com. For more information, visit csatterleeceramics.com.