Unityville Studios
235 S. Gordner Church Road
Unityville, PA  17774-9330
570.458.4562   

 

At the time we met in 1990, Oren worked as a carpenter and Sara had started the first of three years as a student and later artist-in-residence at the Worcester (Massachusetts) Center for Crafts. In 1992, we moved into this mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse on fifteen acres in the rolling hills of north-central Pennsylvania. The previous owners, ceramic artists Dave Stabley and Deb Fleck-Stabley (www. stableys.com), had built on a thousand-square-foot clay studio only a few years before. When Sara, working in a fifty-square-foot cubicle in school, saw their classified ad in Ceramics Monthly, that much space seemed an impossible dream. But with her residency ending in a few months, and nothing tying us to Worcester (or anywhere else for that matter), we could afford to take a chance and move into unknown territory—only three hours' drive from New York and Philadelphia, however, so not too far from civilization as we knew it. On a dreary December day we drove out to meet Deb and Dave and look at the property; we liked them immediately, which made it even easier to like the house, studio, two barns, pig house (which Stableys had remodeled into primitive studio space before building the new one) and the land ~ if it looked so good in the rain, we thought, it must look really beautiful on a sunny day. We didn't notice that garden hoses made up some of the house's plumbing ~ we would have plenty of time to find all of the flaws later, and fix them.

Less than a month after we moved into the house, we got married in the back corner of the field in front of 110 friends and family members. Then we got to work: Sara had bought a 90-cubic-foot gas kiln from a potter in Rhode Island before we left Worcester; we disassembled it and trucked it out here, and in the farm's former slaughterhouse, just outside the new studio, we put the kiln back up, brick by brick. Since then Sara has fired it hundreds of times, finishing every one of her pots in it. In the house, Oren started updating the plumbing (usually when some component failed, which always happened on a Friday evening when we had weekend guests) and we began redoing rooms, usually one a year, doing all of the work ourselves, including wiring, sheetrocking, and reglazing the original windows when necessary. (Sara specializes in demolition.)

For many years Oren worked in his shop in the former pig house, coming up into Sara's studio in the winter to do gluing and finishing. During the last four months of 2001, he gutted the building and rebuilt it, saving only the roof and the post-and-beam skeleton that an unknown farmer had raised at least a hundred years before. Warm, dry and well-lighted, the renovated shop makes a much more congenial workspace — and Sara doesn't have to tiptoe around a varnished table drying in one corner of her space.

For a number of years we got together with a group of area artists for a show and sale in the month before Christmas. In 2001, with two in that group renting space in Bloomsburg, Pa., for a painting studio, we all decided to open a year-'round gallery, run as a cooperative by the fifteen of us. Artspace opened at the end of August of that year. Reopened in 2004 in a larger space across the street from the town's premier cultural enterprise, the Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble (www.bte.org), Artspace (570-784-0737; www.artspace-bloomsburg.com) itself has become a fixture in the area's cultural scene, offering work in many media by the co-op's members as well as other artists from Central Pennsylvania. Our well-attended openings feature excellent food (Sara makes the most sinfully rich brownies for miles around) as well as gallery talks by the artists.

Ever since our first child arrived, in 1997, neither of us has worked a "full-time job", but we both have full-time lives, in which work, children, household duties and friends flow, mostly smoothly, among each other. Long a recreational baker, Oren now makes all of the family's bread; Maia and Jem help out and have learned to braid challah loaves. Along with the ever-expanding group of area artists we have come to know, our circle of friends has increased immensely now that both of our children have reached school age (greenwood-friends.org). Among the pleasures of this network: trading loaves of freshly-baked bread for our friends' chickens' freshly-laid eggs, and trading dinnerware for web site design (woodmediaworks.com). Except that we must drive to do all of the things that we walked to as city kids (now we have to go seven miles to the nearest grocery store, for example), neither of us has ever regretted living in the country. We welcome visitors who would like to see our work and workspaces; contact us by phone, mail or e-mail if you have plans to travel through our neck of the woods.