BAT Clay Studio founder combines ceramics with sustainability

Margaret “Meg” Metzger, 41, is using her expertise to blend her passions for climate activism and ceramics. The owner and founder of BAT Clay Studio, a membership-based ceramics studio in the Brooklyn Army Terminal Annex building, Metzger will host a Brooklyn Ceramic Arts Tour event this month focused on sustainability and the permanence of ceramics.

A ceramicist since childhood, Metzger moved to South Brooklyn from Greenpoint in 2018 after originally hailing from Massachusetts. After taking a break from clay because of moving and childbirth, she began working again out of a studio in Red Hook at the advice of a friend, but still felt there was an unfilled void.

“There’s this dearth in Southern Brooklyn,” she explained. “There are no membership studios. In other parts of Brooklyn there are so many.”

Thus began the creation of BAT Clay Studio.

It did not take her too long to build, Metzger stated, especially since she already had the Brooklyn Army Terminal on her radar, though many of its available spaces were too large for what she needed.

“This is the perfect Goldilocks space for what I wanted to run,” she said of the studio, which sits on the fourth floor of 80 58th St., Suite 403, in the Brooklyn Army Terminal Annex building, with a waterfront view. “We have 16 seats for members, which feels not too big [and] not too small.”

As a membership-based studio, BAT Clay is intended for experienced ceramicists. There are three tiers of membership at her studio, and the stations, which are either small, medium or large, can be adapted depending on how many members she has in each tier, changing the capacity to suit her and her members’ needs at any given moment.

“Part of this whole process is that I’m married to an architect,” Metzger said, explaining that she and her husband built all the stations themselves and made sure they were flexible.

Along with the studio itself is the showroom, full of pieces made by BAT Clay members for both display and retail. Open weekdays from noon to 2 p.m., it showcases jewelry, homewares and art made on site, in what Metzger calls an “ongoing sample sale.”

BAT Clay Studio will also be the location of Metzger’s event Circularity in Clay, part of the Brooklyn Ceramic Arts Tour (BCAT), a borough-wide event taking place May 28 to 31.

The BAT Clay program is scheduled for Saturday, May 30, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the studio, 80 58th St., Annex, Suite 403. The event will bring together mosaic makers and ceramicists to explore mosaic processes and ways to reduce waste by repurposing discarded ceramic pieces. Participants are invited to bring a ceramic item to break or use one provided, followed by a panel discussion on sustainability and circularity with experts in raw materials, mosaics and ceramic-based construction materials. You can register here for the event.

BCAT, launched in 2023, is a free, self-guided tour that includes studios, galleries, workshops, demonstrations, artist talks, ceramic sales and other events across Brooklyn. Metzger said the tour displays “an amazing explosion of activity and clay” from across the borough.

Looking for a way to bring her love of ceramics and climate activism together, Metzger explained how the two do not necessarily go hand in hand.

“It’s a very extractive art form,” she said. “The clay itself is mined and then [goes through] a very intensive process of firing ... to get that amount of heat is a very energy intensive process. And then the clay, once it’s been fired, it can never go back to its original form.”

While there are pros to a piece that will last forever, its inability to be recycled can be a problem for someone who no longer wishes to keep it. In looking for solutions on how to turn one person’s trash into another’s treasure, she thought of mosaicists, who in many cases use ceramic pieces for their work.

“The point is to get interested parties in a room together,” Metzger said. “Can we devise a supply chain that’s viable where we’re getting our finished materials that are waste into the hands of people who can make use of them?”

Metzger’s environmentalism does not begin or end with one event. She and her husband often work together on projects, and she explained that he works on building passive houses, highly energy-efficient homes that can reduce heating and cooling energy use by up to 90%. It is one of many reasons that they, along with their two daughters, spend summers in Greece in the passive house that she and her husband renovated together on the island of Skopelos.

“It’s cheaper than paying for summer camp,” Metzger said.