Karen Dunster
Whimsical animal ocarinas from dunster.com, and the copy the museum keeps of the page that described them.
A note from the museum
This page is the museum’s account of a website it has preserved. It is not by the people who made it, and nothing from the site is republished here.
Karen Dunster makes ocarinas by hand — never on the wheel — in whimsical animal shapes, and she has been doing it since at least 1998. Her work was described on dunster.com, which is gone.
The site was not a maker’s site. It was the home page of the Dunster family, built in the late 1990s when a family could still be pleased at getting the domain for its own surname, and her ocarinas were one section of it among several. That distinction matters here: the museum holds a copy of the whole site, and most of the whole site is a family’s business rather than a museum’s. Only her own page is described below.
What that page records is a maker with series rather than a catalogue. There was a Fish series that began as a pun and grew into hybrids; a Lentil series, built from a shape and then decorated; and two instruments made as jokes, each with a story attached that she plainly enjoyed telling. The ocarinas were stoneware and earthenware, some worn on a cord, most with a range of an octave.
The page is also unusually honest about a problem clay makers rarely put in writing. Clay shrinks in the kiln by an amount nobody can fully predict, so an instrument tuned wet does not come out in the key it went in. Rather than pretend otherwise, she tuned each ocarina to itself, let it land where it landed, and shipped every one with a chart naming the key it had actually turned out to be.
She was part of a circle. ClayZ linked to her, Sixth Street linked to her, and Barry Jennings listed her on his artists page — and she linked back to ClayZ in turn. That web of links between a dozen American potters, most of whose sites are now dead, is much of what this museum is trying to keep.
What the museum holds
296 files, 2.9 MB.
| 59 | pages |
| 1 | pages transcribed to plain text |
| 62 | photographs and illustrations |
| 172 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
Saved from the Internet Archive in September 2026. Its captures run from December 1998 to March 2026; the copy is of the site’s earliest form.
Rights, and what is published
Nothing.
Karen Dunster is living and has not yet been asked. Preserving something and publishing it are different acts, and the museum will do the first without the second. The photographs on the site are the work of another member of the family, who would have to be asked separately.
If this is your work, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.