Marie-Luce Van Asten was born in Belgium and lived there for 40 years.  Her parents had a home in the country side where they were growing fruit and vegetables but also chickens, pigeons and rabbits, all in an organic and sustainable way.  In High School, she decided to take Art Classes as her main focus and then she went to college to become an Art teacher.  At that time, we were exposed to a lot of different art disciplines: painting, ceramics, drawing, photography, sculpture, print making as well as scientific design.  For her year-end project, she chooses to focus on Print Making, a discipline she kept practicing through the early years of her married life.  She graduated from Belgium as an Art teacher in 1983.  When she arrived in the US in 2001, she found Chastain Art Center in Atlanta where she took wheel classes for 2 years.  About that period, she got a full-time job at the Atlanta International School, her new professional life did not allow her to attend the day classes at Chastain anymore so she switched to the evening hand building clay class.  She taught in French at the Atlanta International School in kindergarten and elementary for 15 years and retired in 2016.  During summer time, Luce has been attending workshops at Arrowmont School of Art in Tennessee and at John C Campbell Folk school where she has been developing and fine tuning her style.  She took classes to improve her figurative sculpture techniques and discovered different way of surfaces decoration. Furthermore, with the help of her husband, Dominicus, she is fusing her ceramic pieces with wood. All pieces are hand crafted in Blue Ridge and are one of a kind!  She hand-builds the clay pieces using different types of clay depending of the finished piece she wants to create; for each of them they discuss which wood components to use trying to tell a story through their integration. The wood is used to enhance the piece and to finish it.