Donni Webber hadn’t found her calling until she saw a pamphlet for a Waldorf-hosted needlepoint class and signed up.
“I picked up the needle and the wool, and it was like this incredible feeling of, ‘Oh my gosh, I can do this,’” Donni said.
After that, she started a fiber arts business in California and eventually took up ceramics when the Webber family moved to the Granite State 10 years ago.
Today, Webber and her daughter, Kate Webber, operate The Gratitude Farm, a Dublin-based studio and business that combines Donni’s nature-inspired pottery with Kate’s landscape paintings.
The family moved to Keene in 2016 before settling on a secluded, wooded property in Dublin three years later.
While Kate splits her time between their Dublin home and studio and her music career in Nashville, both mother and daughter are influenced by the New England nature around them.
“I’ve lived in lots of places: South Africa, Ireland, England, New Zealand, California and I would not want to be anywhere else,” Donni said. “This is just the most magical place to live.”
Importance of nature
From a long line of artists, including her great-grandmother and mother, Donni said that exploring the surrounding forests, plants, and mushrooms inspires her clay creations.
“I’m just obsessed with clay. It’s like I’m completely compelled to it,” she said. “I go on my walk, and I see something, and I have to turn around and run back so I can make it.”
From both their upbringings and the influence of the Waldorf school, Donni and Kate have cultivated a love for nature.
“They just really instill it in you. It’s something to kind of lean on as you grew up and take inspiration from and everything,” Kate said.
‘Healthy balance’
Kate developed her painting technique under a mentor in California and spent hours a day studying color theory and light as a teenager. After graduating from the Monadnock Waldorf School in Keene, she pivoted toward music and now balances her painting career with her work as a country-folk singer-songwriter based in Nashville, Tennessee.
“I get to do both art forms that I love so much just freely,” she said. “I have to come back here and just really fall into the art brain and then go to the music. It’s like a healthy balance between those two lives.”
Her first album is Catalyst: A Collection of Demos by Sophia and Kate.
Family business
The pair founded The Gratitude Farm in 2024 to market their work and fund Kate’s musical pursuits. Though separated by distance for part of the year, the duo collaborates on joint projects like last year’s “Moon Magic,” which paired pottery and artwork with writing and seasonal rituals.
“I always think that when I write songs, like the song comes to you and then it just flows through you,” Kate said. “There are just ideas floating around and when they’re ready to find you, they do.”
In addition to selling original ceramics and paintings online, The Gratitude Farm hosts pottery workshops in Dublin that include making mugs, spoons and bowls. Kate also takes commissions for paintings.