Christina Hellyer is a Fort Collins artist that creates sculptural clay cottages. Her artistic journey has been unconventional, altough she has always been creating things and working on projects. Over twenty years ago while living in Raleigh, NC Christina took a clay cottage workshop where she learned the basic hand building techniques that is used to create her cottages.

Each cottage is entirely handmade from slabs of white paper clay. She begins by using her own pattern designs to cut the basic cottage design from clay. The walls are textured, doors and windows cut out and decorated, and then the house goes up one wall at a time. After Bisque firing a wash of iron oxide is applied to give the cottage an aged patina while design details are highlighted with glaze. Christina takes great care in crafting every detail, while at the same time letting each cottage take on its own personality which is the part that is hard for her to describe because it just happens, but it means that no two houses will ever be the same.