Penland Again

We're headed to Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina tomorrow. We'll be assisting photographer David Ramsey as he takes pictures for the Annual Benefit Auction catalog. Our first chance to see and handle the wonderful work that will be auctioned in August. Penland is always inspiring to me, even when I'm not in a class. Creative people, compassionate people, makers, mountains, oh and good food..... Check it out at www.penland.org.

Tooth Fairy Revisited

I want more magic than they tell me exists, more sparkling enchanted moments, more mysterious circumstances of good fortune and wishes coming true. And I want this right now and happily ever after. Don't you?

I want peace. Don't you?

Here she is photographed by the wonderful David Ramsey! (Thank you, David!)
Four and twenty blackbirds. Can you imagine?

Reserve Your Eggs!!

Celebrating hope and rebirth, celebrating Easter.....
Following our annual tradition, I am making ostrich-size ceramic Easter eggs which can be any color or style and have special details such as names, birthdays, messages....

Order by March 5th, then come to an Easter Egg Showing in our gallery on March 20th to retrieve your egg and to see every one else's.....$45.00 each.

Call or email to reserve yours TODAY!!

February Open House

On February 8th, we invited local friends over to see hearts, birds, vases and other work. It's always nice to clean the studio and focus on the more gallery-like attributes of our quaint storefront. Now, the bags of clay are out again and I'm working toward an Easter Egg show in March. I'm sure I'll make a few dresses, too, while on the Egg roll....
Last Summer we had a very interesting visitor:

Living creatures appear and remind me that the objects I make can never compare to their beauty and vitality and importance.

That said, I am making eggs. The unmistakable reference to nature is a big part of their power, the metaphor of rebirth.
Their decoration and ornamentation is a celebration of fancy and Springtime, which after a long, cold winter will be WONDERful! The decoration also celebrates another aspect of my artistic heritage. My mother was the absolute Easter Egg Queen, sometimes spending more than an hour on one little boiled or hollowed-out chicken egg, painting, resisting, and forgetting all about time as she showed me in yet another way how to be.

Water Weights

I came to this image last Summer. Sending a weight or projecting my own gravity into a bottomless ocean.
The little shelter afloat. (Someone asked me, "Are they outhouses?" I answered, "No. The people who live in these don't even have outhouses." Like: what could be outside; the experience is in here. Or is it?

I like the way the OM sounds so much like "home".

The red tile is 4in x 4in. The salt-fired tile is 8.25 sq in. The charcoal drawing is 5 x 7.

A Dainty Dish

The antique shoe buttons really belonged here; 'good thing I saved them.








They were my great-grandmother's.


"Four and twenty blackbirds"....The finished piece is part of a show at Beet Gallery in Charlotte, NC through January. It's 18" high.

In the 1700s there were recipes for baking live birds into pies so that they would fly out when opened. Maybe that's like purgatory?? The Mother Goose rhyme might also have something to do with one of the wives of Henry the Eighth. Nobody knows for sure, but it's a haunting little ditty nonetheless.