From Clay to a Work of Art

A Walk Remembered..... In the fall of 2005 while visiting Highwaterclays in Asheville, NC, my husband Roger and I stopped to walk our 2 dogs along the railroad tracks, near the river. On this walk I noticed a tree that had obviously sprung up from some wild seed, flung by a pod to a destination unknown. On this tree were clusters of little empty brown pods that looked like two little dimensional heart shapes that were open at one end and attached at the other. I snapped off two or three clusters and took them home to my studio in Greenville, SC. There they joined the company of many other forms collected on walks. I loved these forms, shared them with others as I often do when I am teaching but did nothing but admire these special forms for several years. A call to the Clemson Botanical Gardens about this tree revealed that it was in fact a Royal Paulownia Tree (Paulownia tomentosa), an invasive tree that made its way from its native habitat in China. All this time, I was bonding with these little pod forms as my ideas for future form(s) to be made in clay percolated..... The Wall Pod series eventually became the result of this lengthy but rich process.