Barbara King

Artist's Statement:

Clay has been part of my life for as long as I can remember and I can’t imagine it any other way.  Working with such a malleable material is invigorating, inspiring, energizing but also relaxing, and brings out many different facets of my personality.  On the one hand, I’m very organized and disciplined and love the rhythm and repetition of working on the wheel. For many years I produced limited edition functional ware for my own gallery.

More and more I have a big inner desire to break free and let the clay speak to me more abstractly and intuitively.  I sometimes can do that with some altering of the thrown shapes as well as combining thrown and hand built parts.  Mostly I glaze in a very loose way using overlapping glazes and wax resist designs.  Firing to cone 10 in a gas reduction kiln also contributes to the spontaneity. 

Lately I’ve given myself the time and the luxury to explore and experiment more with these sculptural desires and I find that I’m bursting at the seams with ideas.  Sometimes pieces are purely spontaneous and decorative, but more often they are based on a functional idea.  I’ve been using paper and fiber clays to build the larger pieces, or I throw and hand build in removable sections

.   I like to think of most of these larger pieces as garden objects.