Loose Leaf Notes

I realized just how small our house is when during the Saturday 16 Hands Studio Tour our two downstairs rooms-turned-galleries were as full as a crowded dance floor that I couldn’t turn or spin on.

I also noticed that people and pots look good together.

The day was filled with visits from friends and collectors and with a mixing and meeting of interesting people.

The ones who I asked said they came from, North Carolina, Richmond, Blacksburg, Roanoke, Salem, Stuart, and of course Floyd.

I overheard my Asheville Potter son Josh say to a friend, “All the new work comes from looking at rocks, studying their shapes and being interested in the influence of the natural world.”

“This new body of work is about stones but it’s also about gesture. I like that the pieces have a stance and are animated that way.”

I got a chance to study some of the work made by Josh’s guest artist, Catherine White.  She incorporates Asemic writing into her work, which is a mix of something like pictograph-like markings and letters than only suggest meaning.  As a lover of alphabets, anthropology and archaeology, I find the wordless scrawl draws me in, like old typewriter font that’s become too old to decipher but still holds a story.

Catherine writes, “Seeking a poetic language of material, curve and surface, my work abstractly refers to the landscape.”

We were happy to spend time with Josh’s girlfriend Emily, pictured (right) with Catherine and admiring one of her pots.  Emily, Joe and I slipped out in the afternoon to catch a performance of Alice’s Restaurant at the Floyd Country Store. We showed Emily some downtown spots, strolled around thinking ‘what a great place to live.”