Leelanau resident April McLaren showed off her pottery at the Heartwood Forest Farm 2024 Herb Fest Saturday. Along with making pottery, she has a unique background that has led her all over the world and to the Leelanau Peninsula. McLaren has a blossoming pottery business from her Leelanau farm.
“I had taken a couple of pottery classes and really liked it. But then when COVID hit, my husband was like, ‘Let’s build a studio in the barn,’” McLaren said. “He built me this amazing studio. It now has my kiln, my wheel, and all my clay and everything there.”
McLaren finds this as a preferred creative outlet for her.
“I have a day job, but I’m making enough now that I’m starting to sell at small pop-ups.”
She will display her art at one of the shanties in Fishtown this summer. Every week in the summer, there’s a different artist. She will be doing that with her friend Holly Theron, who is a jeweler with the business Wandering Waters.
McLaren grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and her husband grew up downstate. They were neighbors in Milwaukee at one point and hit it off. The Wisconsin native had never experienced Pure Michigan, and Gary shipped her over.
“We would take the ferry from Milwaukee to Muskegon, and then we’d jump to Arcadia, and then we’d stay on the sailboat for the weekends, and he would always be working on the sailboat. I was exploring because I’d never been here before. I would drive up to Leland or drive to Glen Arbor, Traverse City or wherever,” she said.
For years, she would come by ferry from Wisconsin to spend weekends on their sailboat in Arcadia. McLaren and Gary married in Leland before buying a house in the area in 2015.
Her day job includes being the vice president of design at Kohl’s Department stores, which is based in Menominee Falls, Wisconsin.
McLaren leads a team of 50 people that design home products.
“If you ever go to Kohl’s and you buy anything at home, like whether it’s bedding or bath or tabletop or decor, my team designs it and then we source it all over the world,” McLaren said. “A lot of people don’t know this, but a lot of the developed things that you buy at Kohl’s or even at Target are designed by internal design teams.”
For the last two weeks, McLaren was in China and India visiting manufacturing facilities and vendors. As a textile designer by trade, McLaren is a creative person who loves the endless learning medium of pottery.
“Whether it’s learning different clay types or learning different forms, different glazes or whatever, it’s kind of like endless learning. So I find that really fun because there’s so much to learn and do and try and just explore the medium,” McLaren said.
Her hopes for pottery are to do more shows and sell more products locally and get into local boutiques. She would also like to do some classes at the home studio. Her pottery features her love of gardening by taking flowers and pressing them in clay for unique textures.
“I’m a textile designer by trade. So I have tons of vintage fabric that I’ve just collected over the years. And I use vintage crochet. Like I’ll press in for texture and things,” McLaren said.
She also loves to bake, especially pies.
“I’m pulling in elements from other interests in my life. Yeah. And combining them in my work, which is, you know, unique to you,” she said.
Growing up, McLaren was an art lover from the start.
“I really just loved art. And then I discovered textile design... I totally fell in love with that. And I fell in love with history. You can really study a culture by studying their textiles. I love the fact that it was typically women’s work and not really considered an art form, but totally was,” she said.
McLaren said she got into textiles as her major in undergraduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She then went to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City for her master’s degree.
“When this Kohl’s opportunity came about 20 years ago, I jumped at it,” she said.
McLaren recruits talent from art schools all over the country, and she believes design remains a very viable profession for creative kids.
“A lot of times people think like, ‘Oh you’re gonna be an artist or you want go into art, like what are you gonna do for a job?’ But going into product development is a very strong, viable career for people that are creatives,” she said. “I think taking advantage of internships, almost any company you can think of has a summer internship program... My suggestion to kids who are interested in this at all is to start to do research on companies and products that align with your values.”
You can find her work on Instagram @aprilazure.
