Little did she know the stories that little girl would grow up to tell or the pottery studio she would start to create a space of creativity and community.
Melanie McKinney was that five-year-old little girl, and in 2012, she opened the Pink Pig Pottery Studio in downtown Morristown.
Inspired by her Aunt Dawn, Melanie’s main goal has been to provide a place for the community to hang out with friends and family.
“Art—pottery—was just the canvas to use,” she explains. “Everybody always asks me, ‘Have you always loved the ceramic world?’”
She smiles a bit as she confesses, “No.”
The answer lies in the slightly-cracked but still perfectly pink piggy bank Melanie displays above the paint bar.
She remembers her Aunt Dawn as “the person in my life as a kid that showed me what it looked like to feel special and to make other people feel special.”
While Melanie and her two sisters grew up in Indiana, Aunt Dawn “poured into us girls more than anyone other than our parents.
“She always had goodie bags for us, the cutest put-together goodie bags with candies that we were not allowed to have. She would also do crafts with us.
“She was a crafter, so that’s what got me to see that that was fun. We would paint sunflowers, and she would go to her shows and craft and sell her stuff. She would play games with us, and I’m not talking about a game of Uno a couple of times. I’m talking hours of playing board games with five, seven, and nine year olds. And she did this for years.
“Press-on nails were our favorite. She would put press-on nails on us. It was the best. She was snazzy. She was fun.”
Aunt Dawn also painted a pig for each kid, plus a tea set, and she let them paint pottery on their own.
“I still have the Mickey Mouse I painted,” Melanie remembers.
When the studio first opened, Melanie offered pottery painting only, slowly incorporating glass art, canvas paintings, and wood boards.
“It looked different than it looks today,” she says.
Now in addition to pottery, people sign-up for classes to paint door hangers and canvases, and fairly recently, try their hands at wheel throwing.
But the growth hasn’t just included various crafts and art forms.
It means kids growing up celebrating birthdays at the Pink Pig and businesses treating employees for Christmas through fellowship and hands-on creativity.
People come to commemorate anniversaries and even remember lost loved ones. And the community impact and involvement has remained the same.
Each year Melanie and the team visit schools and nursing homes to do projects with children and seniors, and they also partner with local high schools so that students in the special education program can volunteer weekly at the studio and learn job skills.
After nearly eleven years of growing the business, creating memories, and nurturing the community around her, Melanie decided it was time for change.
During the pandemic, she taught herself wheel throwing and fell in love with the process. She knew she had to share this with her customers, whom she regularly greets as friends.
A new location on one level could provide more open space and better accessibility for pottery wheels.
In the original location, wheel throwing had to be done upstairs in a rather small room that was sweltering in summer and freezing in winter.
The lack of visibility meant that many customers were unaware of the opportunity to learn how to throw their own pottery.
She didn’t have to look far for a new studio home—just right across the street. Not only did the new location next to East Tennessee Diamond provide the much-needed space for wheels (incentive No. 1, as Melanie would say), but it also boasted a back door leading to downtown parking, making accessibility easier for customers, many of whom have multiple small children or limited mobility. It also provides a perfect pick-up location located near the bagging station and kiln room—which now has a window so that customers can watch the magic that happens when they leave their freshly painted pieces behind for glazing and firing.
“It’s like a museum,” Melanie says. “I’m so excited because it is like a fresh start, clean slate, bigger space, and it’s honestly like my dream store.”
After months of planning, weeks of remodeling, and several days of moving pottery, wheels, kilns, furniture and much more across the street, the Pink Pig hosted its grand reopening with an evening party the first of November.
Bing Crosby played in the background as over 65 customers painted Christmas trees, ornaments, and stoneware. Jersey Girl catered along with Beth Amos-Wisecarver (Bumble and Brie), who provided a beautiful and delicious charcuterie board.
Names were drawn semi-white elephant style for door prizes ranging from cleaning supplies to long-time orphaned pottery.
Longtime customer and friend Shannon Key demonstrated on the pottery wheel.
Her own journey with wheel-throwing began with a mini class after years of wanting to learn the art but never being able to find a place that offered the opportunity. “I loved it so much that I came back and started the four week class with Stan.”
“She then took another four week class and continued to practice her new and beloved craft. “It’s a stress reliever, and it makes you slow down. You can’t go fast, or you mess it up. You have to focus on what you’re doing.”
Such a stress reliever and reminder to slow down and focus on creating something beautiful might just be what’s needed in people’s lives year-round, but especially during the holidays.
Christmas is usually a busy time as people plan parties, sign up for door hanger classes, and create clay ornaments featuring feet and handprints turned into angels, gingerbread boys and girls, Santa Clauses, and more, so the timing of the grand opening couldn’t have been better for celebrating nearly eleven years of making memories in community.
The past several weekends the studio has been packed with families and friends celebrating birthdays, visiting for the holidays from out-of-town, and creating Christmas presents in a beautifully lit room with the classic exposed brick and hardwood floors, bursts of color, and much laughter and peace amidst the bustle.
And yes, even more are trying out the pottery wheels.
Opportunities to try the wheels are posted regularly on the Pink Pig website and social media pages, where customers may sign up for mini classes (one session lasting an hour and a half) or book several sessions.
Recently, available hours have been posted for Sundays and Wednesdays where people can walk in and take a quick teaser course for $10 to see if they would be interested in one of the longer, more involved classes.
Customers and friends aren’t the only ones influenced by Aunt Dawn’s legacy through Melanie.
For example, Kendyl Kowalksi started working at the Pink Pig at fifteen, left for college, and then came back in February 2022.
Her primary job is in the kiln room, where a lot of behind-the-scenes magic happens.
She spends many hours a week glazing, loading and unloading the kilns, making sure items are bagged, as well as finishing custom orders.
Her focus, she says, is to ensure that people’s pottery “comes out nice and pretty and safe for people to use.”
Her roots at the Pink Pig are deep, not only for the business, but for her personally.
“When I started here,” Kendyl says, “I wasn’t a painter. My handwriting in fact looked like chicken scratch. Over the course of all of high school and coming back for holidays, I just really fell in love with painting and the process of painting. And I really love Melanie.
“She has basically helped raise me, gave me my first job, and so she was the reason I wanted to come back. I love this studio, I’ve always loved this studio, and I always will. It’s like a home away from home in my kiln room, so I was more than happy to come back and especially now that we’re in the new space.”
Fellow employee Isabella Abdullayeva echoes the positive community fostered at the pottery studio, “I love the atmosphere of the Pink Pig. It just makes me happy. I love that it is so family oriented, and it’s geared towards being creative… It’s like a very positive atmosphere, and I love Melanie. She’s amazing. I love working with all of my coworkers. Everyone’s great.”
Although Isabella has only been employed for a little over six months, the Pink Pig has been part of her life since the opening when she was a little girl and started attending birthday parties and stopping by for walk-in projects.
Over the years, she and a friend would meet at the Timeless Elegance Tea Room, and afterwards, they would walk over to the studio and paint for hours. Isabella fondly remembers that whenever Melanie would come in she would talk with them, and then one day she gave them a little tour of the kiln room.
The old Pink Pig has a lot of memories attached to it, “But it’s not like it’s gone, there are still memories, we can make new ones here,” Isabella says with the same bright, genuine smile that she is known for by both customers and coworkers.
Despite the joy and peace that often form the atmosphere of the studio, growing a business and moving after eleven years doesn’t come without challenges.
The biggest challenge was logistically getting it all put together. “It has been a whirlwind. But we’re here, and we survived it, and we birthed something beautiful,” Melanie reflects. Her husband, John, who spent many hours alongside his wife helping remodel the new location, says, “I’m just proud of her. I’m proud to be her husband, proud to be a part of what she does as an entrepreneur, and I’m just excited to be along for the ride.”
The beauty Melanie mentioned is couched in a proper sense of place. Her vision for the business and the community was the kind of care her Aunt Dawn demonstrated each time she opened her home and shared life with Melanie and her sisters. She wanted to create a place where people could experience “that kind of feeling that you’re wanted, needed with your friends and family, not just from the staff, but from everyone around you.”
Perhaps her vision and its ongoing fulfillment could be summarized by the words of poet and farmer Wendell Berry:
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness: we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers who hands are joined in dance and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.
(from “Healing” in What Are People For? Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010, p. 10)