One wall of Martha Daniels' studio is lined with clear boxes just the right size to store shoes. But instead of Prada or Payless, these containers sport labels like "bentonite" and "borate."

For Daniels, a star in a ceramist- rich region, it's all about the clay, in particular the tile or raku clay she fires at low temperatures. And there's the supporting cast, such as fibers to make the clay stronger or minerals to make it smoother; the glazes, paints and gilding that make it beautiful; and the chemistry that turns basic mud into the colorful, expressive sculpture for which she's known.

"I've always been really strongly drawn to clay," said Daniels, who moved to Colorado in the 1960s and has shown here regularly since.

That includes the groundbreaking 2000 installation Grotto at the Denver Art Museum, which mixed garden elements with robotic figures as well as those representing the seasons, and a 212-foot-long ceramic mural, Currents and Eddies, commissioned by the Colorado Department of Transportation to line an underpass on Washington Street at Interstate 70.

"I've always had certain impulses that I wanted to make polychrome sculpture," Daniels said. "No one was doing that in the early '60s. To do that, I tried a lot of things."

As a child in Brooklyn, she drew and worked in the kind of clay you bake in an oven - when she wasn't working as a model. (Born in 1943, Daniels isn't the only art-oriented person in her family; her brother is New York-based curator Arthur Kirmss.)

She was accepted to the Cooper Union, where sculptor/instructor Ruben Kadish opened the door to her future.

"He attempted to introduce us to every possible type of material and every possible way of working with it," Daniels said. "Clay was not considered a serious material. Clay was beneath notice. He was one of the few people who knew clay was a serious medium for sculpture."

There it began, making tiny figures in a tiny kiln. "That was the beginning of my polychrome sculpture," Daniels said. "Ruben Kadish introduced me to clay."

But then Martha Kirmms met Willem Daniels at a farewell party, and that was the end of Cooper Union. The couple moved to Europe, lived there for three years, made art, taught and got married. When he decided he wanted to get a graduate degree in sculpture, he picked the University of Colorado.

"People were wandering through (Lindos, in Greece) saying, 'Boulder is great.' He hated it."

The move, though, gave Daniels the ability to finish work on a degree, the pursuit interrupted at Cooper Union by love and Europe. She studied art history and sculpture at CU until 1969, then earned a bachelor's degree in ceramics at Metropolitan State College of Denver in 1975 (the marriage ended). Her mentor: the late Rodger Lang, who at the time of his death in 2000 was working in sculptural forms.

When Daniels was Lang's student, though, "he taught strictly from the viewpoint of vessels," she said. "We learned how to throw. He said, 'You're going to learn the basics.' "

And though Daniels has made her share of pots - from the sophisticated Metropolitan series to sunny yellow vessels covered with grape vines - the sculptural form is something she owns. Examples of her signature works - including towers glazed dark green and gilded, in an open lattice-work style, and a red torso built of slabs in an abstracted, almost windblown human form - are part of a group ceramics show that opened last week at Sandra Phillips Gallery.

"Martha has an extraordinary ability to make me aware of the unlimited and expressive possibilities of clay," Phillips said.

"She has a great sense of art history within her work. I see the Mayans, the Sumerians, the Greeks. Her work has always been very personal for me. It's emotional, sensuous, monumental - and reminds me of why I do what I do."

If Daniels has another art, it's buying and selling old homes. Her current residence near Curtis Park began as an arson case, charred and sagging; in the decade she's lived there, she's reconstructed it, built a studio and used the home to borrow to raise the $25,000 she needed to create Grotto.

It's no surprise, then, that someone whose life revolves around clay would buy two small adobes on the outskirts of Las Vegas, N.M. She's wanted to move there for years, since it's close to the Santa Fe art scene and clay is easy to get. And though Daniels has worked in fiber, glass and bronze, clay is where she'll stay.

"These things want to fly off into space," Daniels said, standing in a studio crowded with a slab roller, partially completed work and all those boxes of ingredients.

"I want it to be so that when you look at it, you know it's clay."

Masters in Clay

• What: show of work by ceramists Paul Soldner, Martha Daniels, Carroll Hansen, Maynard Tischler, Julie McNair, Amy Chavez, Bebe Alexander and Katie Caron

• Where and when: Sandra Phillips Gallery, 744 Santa Fe Drive, through Oct. 6

• Of note: Daniels speaks on "Tales of Fire: Adventures of the Kiln in Modern & Contemporary Ceramics," 5:30 p.m. Sept. 13

• Information: 303-573-5969, thesandraphillipsgallery.com

Chandlerm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2677

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