There’s a photo of Maisy Woods at about 5 years old inside the Figge Art Museum.
She’s there with a troop of Girl Scouts, wearing her dad’s old Green Bay Packers T-shirt splattered with paint from childhood art projects. In the photo, she’s pointing toward a vase and smiling.
Years later, Woods is back at the Figge, and she’s not just looking at art. One of her own ceramic pieces is on display there.
The second-year Eastern Iowa Community Colleges (EICC) student was selected by art faculty to exhibit “Honey and Cream,” a glazed stoneware teapot and set of teacups, in the museum’s 2026 College Invitational. The exhibition features student work chosen by faculty from participating colleges and universities, then displayed in the Mary Waterman Gildehaus Community Gallery and juried for awards. The exhibition runs through Jan. 17.
Always making
Woods has always liked making things.
Her grandfather was a woodworker, and she’d make birdhouses with him, then paint them with her grandmother. Girl Scouts meant more projects. There was always something to create.
“I always needed a craft,” she said.
Ceramics came later, during her junior year of high school. Woods took two ceramics classes, followed by an AP art class focused on sculpture her senior year. Something about working with clay clicked.
“A lot of it is with my hands, and I think that’s what I like the most about it. It’s such a physical thing," she said.
Woods said the appeal goes beyond the feel of clay in her hands. “I think it’s a way to express yourself. Expressing yourself is hard nowadays sometimes, and I feel like art’s a fun way to do it, too.”
Before starting classes on the Scott campus, Woods took a pottery class at Dubuque Pottery Studio. Now she teaches there twice a week.
“In high school, I was like, ‘Oh, I would love to open a pottery studio,’ and now I at least work at one,” she said. “So that’s pretty crazy.”
Try it and see what happens
“Honey and Cream” began as an assignment in a ceramics class with Robert Lipnick, an art instructor at the Scott campus.
Woods had made a teapot once before in high school. It cracked. This time, she wanted another shot.
Inspired in part by ancient Japanese and Chinese teapots, Woods experimented with the form, cutting clay away while it was still on the wheel and successfully making a style of handle she hadn’t been able to pull off before.
“Every part of it was kind of an experiment. I was like, ‘I just hope it works,’” Woods said.
At one point, while carving the surface, she could see the piece beginning to match what she had pictured. “I was like, ‘OK, this is working. This is doing what I wanted it to do," Woods said.
Then she had to give up some control. Ceramic glaze can change as it fires, producing results the artist can’t completely predict. Woods jokes that she had to give her work over to the 'kiln gods.'
Afterward, she noticed small drips had developed in the glaze. “I was not expecting them, but I’m very happy with them,” she said.
That freedom to experiment is something Woods said EICC art faculty Lipnick and Nicole Davis encourage. Davis’ advice to students often comes down to a few words: “Just try stuff out.”
Woods has started saying much the same thing to beginners she teaches in Dubuque. If something doesn’t turn out perfectly, there’s more clay. Try something else. Keep going.
“I’ve learned that perfection is a scam. You can’t be perfect at everything. You really can’t,” Woods said.
Instead, doing her best is a more useful standard than chasing perfection.
Trying so many unfamiliar things with “Honey and Cream,” and watching them work, expanded her confidence. “It validated that I should try new things instead of just doing the same things I do all the time,” she said.
Woods is on track to graduate with her associate's in May 2027, and isn’t exactly sure where art will take her. She wants to keep working at the pottery studio, continue taking ceramics classes, and, in her words, “make more cool stuff.”
For now, growth is enough.
“I think as you grow, your art grows,” Woods said, “and as your art grows, you grow.”
The 5-year-old in the paint-splattered Packers shirt probably didn’t know where any of it was headed. By high school, though, Woods had found ceramics. She said that version of herself would be proud of where she is now.
"High school me would be like, 'You go girl,'" she said.