Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts is pleased to announce a partnership with the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay to host Watershed's 2012 Summer Artists Speaker Series.

Speaker Series presentations will be held Tuesdays, 5 to 6:30 p.m., July 31, Aug. 14 and Aug. 28 in the Bosarge Family Education Center. The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens is located at 132 Botanical Gardens Dr., Boothbay.

Throughout the summer, nationally recognized ceramic artists will speak about their work, influences, travels and more. This is a great chance to meet working artists and discover firsthand what goes into the work they create. Each artist speaker will be in residence at Watershed at the time of their presentation; visitors are welcome at the Watershed studios, 19 Brick Hill Rd., Newcastle.

July 31 speakers are Josephine Burr, David S. East and Firth MacMillan.

Burr's ceramic sculpture incorporates minimalist forms with richly layered surfaces, using traditional ceramic processes as well as other media such as wax encaustic, graphite, and print transfers. She focuses on layering imagery and texture to evoke a sense of memory and time in her pieces.

East's work is framed by his own cultural perspective, utilizing the iconographic markers of culture, running from the inhuman split-level to the incessant pastels of Martha Stewart, he seeks the science of the mundane, a tension between the generic and the highly personal.

MacMillan works in photography and sculpture; her work fueled by the integration of herself with her external environment. Using the power of chroma and scale to evoke a physical and emotional experience, she invites you to inhabit her visual and sensory landscape.

For more information, call 882-6075 or go to www.watershedceramics.org.