Laura Reese fired laser decals and photo transfers onto the tiles of the triptych “Monarchs in Flight.”

“From the moment I touched Play-Doh as a kid, art has always been my favorite subject,” says mixed-media artist Laura Reese. Although her calling was clear from the start, her upbringing in a family of doctors initially pushed her to explore a more “marketable” career.

Reese entered the University of North Carolina Wilmington as an art history major, transferring after two years to Tulane University in New Orleans to pursue architecture. There, she took her first courses in ceramics, but pressed on to graduate in 1998 with a master’s degree in architecture.

Reese continued her education with a move to Baltimore, where she studied computer graphics with a focus on collage at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

In 2000, she and her husband Scott moved to Asheville to escape the city scene, and Reese landed a sales position at the Southern Highland Craft Guild’s Folk Art Center. Exposure to Leah Leitson’s ceramics led her to call the artist “out of the blue,” and in 2002, Reese started an apprenticeship.

As she learned the ins and outs of working as a potter, Reese found that she “wanted to create beautiful things. Not things that might collect dust or be dated by next year, nor things that poured or held chips.”

Her first foray into mixed media was a collage that incorporated elements from her diverse education—photo transfers lent a graphic element to the ceramic tiles, and Reese “housed” the piece with a frame.

In 2005, Reese opened her own studio and started developing her current aesthetic. Today, she works primarily in porcelain, carving greenware into shapes, adding textures and characters and sending it to the kiln for a series of firings. After glazing, Reese adds decals she’s made (usually a mix of images drawn from nature and architecture) and fires the piece a final time. It’s completed once she’s added a decorative, often Asian-inspired, frame.

Her education certainly hasn’t ended, though. Reese recently took a class in glass fusing and hopes to explore it in her work. “I hesitate to ever have a plan,” she says. “I arrived at my style because I didn’t have a plan. I think the trick is to stay open and have the gumption to explore new ideas.”