When Patti Bostick retired from a 27-year career as a Good Hope music teacher, she knew she’d have to find a new creative outlet — and fast.

“I guess you could say I needed another means of artistic expression,” says Bostick. “Little kids singing is the most beautiful thing in the whole wide world — and I couldn’t have that any more! I knew I wasn’t going to be able to find that with music like I’d done in the past. So pottery is what I sought out — a visual art instead of an aural art.”

If You Go

Find Bostick at this weekend’s Bernard Blue and BBQ Festival on the campus of St. Bernard Abbey.

With no pottery experience to speak of, Bostick found an invaluable early teacher in Sister Mary Adrian McLean, OSB, an expert potter and nun of the Benedictine Sisters of Cullman at Sacred Heart Monastery. “I called her up and just said, ‘Do you teach pottery?’” Bostick recalls. “Sister Adrian has been a wonderful teacher and just a treasure — at the Convent, to the community, and to me.”

Bostick describes her pottery as “functional art.” “It’s all functional: You can eat from everything I make, because it’s food safe,” she explains. But that pragmatic assessment of her locally-created (and often locally-themed) work, profoundly understates its distinctive aesthetic craft.

Bostick’s work is uniformly textured, immaculately glazed, and adorned with flourishes and thoughtfully-selected color palettes that exemplify her chosen medium’s durable-yet-delicate character. It’s also impeccably symmetrical — a craftsmanship hallmark that any experienced potter will tell you is devilishly tough to achieve.

Working from a home studio filled with pieces both finished and in the process, Bostick spends hours each day creating pottery that springs from her own imagination, whether conceived as original work or as commissioned items from clients who seek her out. “What I say is, it’s cheaper than therapy!” she teases. “I have four children — and they’re good children! — but as a way of balancing all the things that can happen in life, this is therapeutic for me.”

It helps, perhaps, that her husband — longtime local physician Dr. Gregory Bostick — also is along for the creative ride. While Patti throws pottery from wet clay indoors, Greg does the more burly work of firing glazed pieces — ornamental urns and vases that “definitely aren’t food safe!” as Patti jokes — in a purpose-built outdoor pit just steps beyond the studio.

“He tries to put me out front and make this all ‘mine,’” she says, “but he’s right there in the middle of it. Before he got his medical degree, he was a Chemistry major — and that has just sparked his imagination in a whole different way, because there’s a lot of chemistry involved in glazing. When he gets a pot, he gets to put chemicals on it…and then see it transform!”

Bostick has no trouble selling her work, though she readily confesses that pottery, for her, is a gratifying avocation rather than a business-minded second career. “I give a lot away,” she says, “like probably 100 pieces to Empty Bowls [the Cullman Caring for Kids Food Bank’s pottery-themed annual local fundraiser] every year.

“If somebody comes in here and wants something, I’m as likely as not to just give it to them, if I get to talking to someone, I’m just as likely to negotiate all the way down. and I’ve already formed a plan for how I’d handle things if I ever reach the point where my pottery isn’t selling, or if I end up making more than I can give away. I’d start leaving pieces around town for people to find — each one with a note: ‘To whomever finds this…’”

To appreciate Bostick’s work firsthand, drop by anytime at Ashley Mercantile (105 First Ave. NE in Cullman’s Warehouse District) or visit with Bostick in person at her booth at this weekend’s Bernard Blues & BBQ Festival.