Yes, Briggs Shore is her real name! A family heirloom that feels to really fit her creative personality. Briggs grew up on a farm in Iowa. People who haven't been there think Iowa is flat and boring, but she's a huge fan of her home state. It's beautiful, full of rolling hills, delicious food, and friendly people, and she misses the humid summers and far away horizons.

She received an Interior Design degree from Iowa State in 2007. She learned to make pots in high school, but focused her creative drive on a number of other outlets through college. Once she graduated, she treated her love of clay as a hobby for the next several years while she worked for an environmentally friendly home improvement store, managed a Permaculture design non-profit, designed and built a few buildings out of natural materials, taught herself graphic design, and waited tables to fill in the gaps. It wasn't until 2015 that she started taking clay seriously, when a friend encouraged her to participate in a pop-up craft show. Since then, she's been spending as much time as humanly possible in the studio. Her participation in residencies and assistantships have taught her a lot about the kind of artist she wants to be. In 2016 she moved to Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, and at the beginning of 2020 she opened her very own studio in Coupeville. The timing couldn't have been worse, but two years in, she doesn't know what she would have done without her little shop - the perfect space to make and sell her work.

Aesthetically her style is somewhere between Midcentury Modern, Scandinavian, and Contemporary West Coast. She offers work that from a distance might look machine made, but up close you can see the ridges where her fingers pulled up the walls, the slight wobble in the lines that she inlaid by hand, and the unique curve of the individually molded handle of your new favorite mug. Because her background is in design and not fine art, her instinct in the studio is to make a useful set of dishes rather than pieces of art you hesitate to pick up. All her work is durable enough to use every day. You can put them in the dishwasher or microwave. Although they are handmade, they behave and can be used just like any ceramic dishes you may have in your home now.

Technically all her work is wheel thrown, and hand decorated. She uses Laguna's ^6 Frost Porcelain, which is a fussy clay body but gives her the bright white color, translucency, and smooth texture that she loves. She uses colored slip and underglaze to decorate her work, and glazes everything in a commercially available clear glaze. All her work is fired in an electric kiln to about 2200º. ​And, as part of her regular course of business, she gives a percentage of her profits to a local organization every month.