Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

When Dia Haffar was 7, her mom, Ellen Haffar, brought her to an adult ceramics class. Dia was too young to properly center the clay, so she needed her mom’s help. Afterward, her mom, who was also inexperienced in ceramics, noticed how focused Dia was on learning the clay techniques. Decades later, Dia returned home and started a ceramics business with her mom.

“My mom is an amazing painter, and my dad is a sculptor. So ceramics has been great because it’s something different,” Dia said. “It’s my own thing that we learned together. We’re starting from the same place kind of. We’re doing it together.”

The Haffars created Smokepail Studio based out of their hometown in Pompey, NY in 2022. Ellen attended Fayetteville-Manlius High School and is now an art teacher there. Dia left central New York to teach English around the world in Greece, Botswana, Taiwan and Indonesia before returning home to practice ceramics.

When Dia was figuring out a place to study and practice ceramics, she considered moving to Albuquerque. Instead, Ellen suggested that Dia return home right outside of Syracuse to take a year to master ceramics without worrying about having to pay rent or work on anything besides pottery.

Ellen joked about creating a fake artist residency at their home called the “George Greene Winters Memorial Scholarship,” after Dia’s grandfather. Moving back home, Dia got to use a larger space to build a kiln that she wouldn’t have had elsewhere living in an apartment.

“The purpose of an artist residency is to give an artist time and space and the freedom to concentrate on their work themselves as an artist and that’s what you’ve done,” Ellen said to Dia. “I’ve just been lucky enough that I’ve been able to tag along.”

They spent the summer with a pottery wheel from Ellen’s work and a trash can to fire the ceramics. They kept increasing the resilience of the trash can so it could withstand more heat, using a steel drum for ventilation as well as pyrometers, which checks the temperature of the kiln.

“That’s kind of our origin story. That’s why we call ourselves Smokepail, sitting around the trash can kiln,” Ellen said.

“Setting the trash can on fire for a whole weekend,” Dia added.

Dia grew up in the corners of her mom’s painting studios doing her own thing, Ellen said. Even when Dia was serving in the Peace Corps or teaching English abroad, she would be sketching all the time. When Ellen asked Dia what she wanted when she was abroad it was always “sketchbooks, sketchbooks and more sketchbooks,” Ellen said.

However, Dia wouldn’t show her sketches to anyone as she never thought of her art as a career. Ellen first saw her daughter’s drawings when she visited Dallas. She was met with an apartment covered in paintings Dia drew during the peak of the pandemic.

“There are some people who just have that need to make things and so seeing that in Dia made a lot of sense,” Ellen said.

While Dia took some ceramics classes, she and her mother learned how to do it by trial and error and continued to make stuff up as they went. They created unconventional methods like their trash can kiln.

“(Other potters) are like, ‘I wouldn’t normally do it that way, but the way you’re doing it for some reason looks really interesting and cool,’” Dia said. “And we’re like ‘That’s awesome, who knew?’ So it lends us a little bit of opportunity to be a little bit more ourselves with it.”

They don’t create collections in the same style as many other ceramicists. The odd style attracted their friend Katie Gabriel, another art teacher at Fayetteville-Manlius, to buy the pair’s work.

“(Ellen) is an expert in her field and so you don’t typically see that really wonderful whimsical painting craft in combination with the craftsmanship of three-dimensional objects,” Gabriel said.

Ellen has a background in painting, having gotten her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at SUNY New Paltz, while Dia took classes during her artist residency so that she could understand the basics of ceramics while she practiced pit firing. Both of them bring different expertise to Smokepail Studios.

Ellen’s training in painting means she’s used to a more forgiving art process. When something doesn’t work out in pottery, Ellen swears and gets frustrated that she can’t paint over a mistake. Dia, on the other hand, doesn’t care if something they try doesn’t work out and is more of a risk-taker than her mom, Ellen said.

“We go back and forth between Dia pushing me to loosen up, try new things,” Ellen said. “And there are times when I’m like, ‘No, we do have to work.’”

Love these jungle cats, fingers crossed they survive the rest of the pottery process!:

A photo posted by smokepailstudios

The two will sit down and paint on the weekends without a plan. Some of their paintings haven’t always come out as expected after going through the kiln. Ellen once painted a chameleon with a bright green glaze, but once it was fired, it turned to a muddy brown. They named the chameleon “Maggie the Unwashed.” They didn’t put her in shows for a while, but once they did, a professional biologist came up to them and said that Maggie looked exactly how chameleons look in a leaf litter.

He left the show with Maggie in hand.

“It’s just those happy moments where that person actually actually connects with it, which has been really fun,” Dia said. “They connect with our weirdness. We’re here for the weirdos.”

Now, the mother-daughter duo are back home together, focusing on Smokepail. Ellen is retiring from her teaching job and devoting all her time to ceramics with Dia.

“It’s like a meeting a little crossroads kind of situation, and it works really well,” Ellen said. “We have a lot of fun together, and that’s the other way and I think we understand each other’s moods and what we like.”

Published on October 16, 2023 at 11:01 pm

Contact Rosina: [email protected]