Jerilyn Virden is a very talented ceramist we had in Winter Show 2009 and her work is currently available for sale in the Shop @ Green Hill Center (www.greenhillcenter.org). I love Jerilyn’s work and have for many years now, since I first met her while working at Penland School of Crafts where she was a resident artist—from the very start, I knew she she was so talented. Below is a excerpt of an article written by Penland’s Communications Manager Robin Dryer for the October issue of Ceramics Monthly. Robin is a master in writing about art, artists and the creative process…he makes everything so accessible without losing its scholarship. Thank you Robin. For everyone else check it out…. Laura Way, Executive Director/CEO

Jerilyn Virden: The Evolution of a Form  by Robin Dreyer

Dough bowls and grinding stones: these humble, functional forms were the starting point for potter/sculptor Jerilyn Virden’s highly evolved, double-walled ceramic vessel sculptures. “I saw them in New Mexico” she says. “I was drawn to the massiveness of the forms. The dough bowls were very roughly hacked out of a solid piece of wood. The grinding stones felt as though they had just evolved into their forms through necessity. They were flat stones that became bowls over years and years of grinding grain on them. It gave the forms a gracefulness as well as a history. They seem to possess a slow movement with great power, like water moving down a river.”

She was studying with Peter Beasecker in the MFA program of Southern Methodist University and trying to follow whatever forms attracted her aesthetically. “I was looking at all this stuff,” she says, “and I didn’t know what I liked about it so I just started trying to make those forms, and I made these things that looked just like wooden dough bowls only they were made out of clay, and they were really heavy because they had a different shape on the outside than they did on the inside.” She was making the forms by building oversized forms out of thick coils and then carving back into them. “I could carve this really nice curve on the inside and spend a long time just focusing on that curve,” she remembers.

http://ceramicartsdaily.org/pottery-making-techniques/handbuilding-techniques/jerilyn-virden-the-evolution-of-a-form/?floater=99

(Source: Flickr / greenhillcenter)