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Throwing pots
over 30 years
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| Malcolm Davis at a pottery
wheel during the workshop he led last weekend at John Bryan Community
Pottery. |
When Mary Chapman and her husband, Gordan, were considering
moving to Yellow Springs from Washington, D.C., 10 years ago, Mary, a
professional potter, was delighted to find that this tiny Ohio village
is home to a pottery studio that contains everything she needs to do her
work.
“It’s a remarkable community facility.
We’re lucky to have such a place in Yellow Springs,” Mary said
recently of John Bryan Community Pottery. “It was one reason we decided
to move here.”
A resource to local potters and aspiring potters
for more than 30 years, the “pot shop,” as it’s often
called, recently expanded its reach. Last weekend 40 potters from Ohio,
Indiana and West Virginia converged on Yellow Springs to attend a workshop
featuring well-known potter Malcolm Davis of West Virginia.
Davis, known for his work in porcelain and with
shino glazes, is “the most prestigious visiting artist the JBCP has
seen in its history,” the pottery’s manager, Shannon Crothers,
said. Davis’s ceramic artistry has been included in the Smithsonian
Craft Show and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, and he’s
the recipient of many prizes and grants.
“My goal is to make fresh, graceful spirited
pots for daily use, searching for fluidity and clarity of form within the
context of function,” he said in his artist statement.
The workshop was a great success, both in attracting
as many potters as the pot shop could hold and in offering useful information,
according to organizers. And now potters from a tri-state area may be more
familiar with a local resource than are many in Yellow Springs.
“It’s truly an amazing facility,”
said Lisa Goldberg, a local potter and Community Pottery member. “I’m
always surprised how many people don’t know about this resource.”
Pot shop organizers don’t have a lot of spare
cash to throw around, so until recently they spent little money publicizing
the organization, Crothers said. But for about 30 years the small building
behind the Bryan Community Center, painted with penguins, has been the place
where many people in town first experience the miraculous process of turning
a lump of clay into a beautiful and functional cup or bowl.
Goldberg remembers standing on a cement block as
a child for her first pottery class at the pot shop. For local potter Janet
Murie, the pot shop was “where 99 percent of my education came from.”
Murie, a longtime member of Yellow Springs Pottery who sometimes teaches
at the pot shop, made her first sales at the Community Pottery’s biannual
Sidewalk Sale. Until she had her own home studio Murie, like many local
potters such as Mary Chapman, used pot shop facilities to create her work.
Most people aren’t aware of the range of facilities
the pot shop offers, Murie said. Outside the shop is a gas-fired reduction
kiln and a salt soda kiln, and inside are several electric kilns. The variety
of kilns offers potters the opportunity to do raku firing, salt firing,
pit firing and oxidation firing, among others, according to Murie.
“You can do anything here,” she said.
The pot shop offers area artists and schools the
only reduction kiln in the Miami Valley that is available for rent, according
to Goldberg, who said the kilns are regularly used by the Yellow Springs
public schools as well as art teachers from the Stivers School for the Arts
and the University of Dayton. While electric kilns are considered more reliable,
the reduction, or gas-fired kiln, allows the potter to achieve “more
variety and intensity” in effect, Goldberg said.
The pot shop also provides its members with a really
good deal, Goldberg said. While most area pottery studios charge at least
$200 a month for use of facilities, the pot shop charges its members $60
for 24-hour-a-day access to its kilns and wheels. While Community Pottery
receives some funding from the Yellow Springs Arts Council and free space
from the Village, it produces most of its own income from class fees and
sales at Yellow Springs Street Fairs.
The pot shop offers regular classes that attract
about 50 to 60 people per season, according to Crothers. Beginning this
week, the shop offers spring classes in beginning throwing for adults, taught
by Stephanie Beiser; intermediate throwing for adults, taught by Jason Dryden;
and beginning clay sculpture for adults, taught by Crothers. It also sponsors
a Tuesday afternoon class for children, taught by Beth Holyoke, and a Thursday
afternoon class for teens, taught by Kate Meinke. Cost for the classes is
about $90.
The pottery classes for adults are filled this spring,
Crothers said, although she still has several openings in the adult sculpture
class.
Offering a sculpture class is new to the pot shop,
said Goldberg, noting that the class grew from Crothers’s interest
and background.
“It’s exciting for the studio. We’ve
never had anyone doing sculpture before,” said Goldberg.
Crothers, who has a BA in fine arts from Bowling
Green State University, comes by her love for ceramics honestly, since her
mother is a potter as well. As studio manager, Crothers is in charge of
ordering materials, scheduling classes, obtaining teachers and overseeing
the studio’s operations. She is also present during the studio’s
weekly open times, on Fridays from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and
on Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. During those hours, students and community
members may stop in to work on their projects, she said.
Crothers said she finds teaching pottery classes
rewarding because most students seem to get so much out of them, especially
the sensory aspect of working with clay.
“Almost everyone loves to cut the clay apart,
then smash it together, to push it with their hands,” she said.
While learning to throw pots can be “humbling,”
and the process is more difficult than it looks, Crothers said, those who
stick with clay find the process worth their effort.
“Once you get the hang of it, it’s exciting,”
she said. “The possibilities of what you can do with clay are endless.
It reopens the world for you.”
For more information about John Bryan Community
Pottery, call 767-9022.
—Diane Chiddister |
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