Perched on a ledge before a picture window in her airy Kenilworth workspace, tilemaker Diana Gillispie swings her feet and shrugs one shoulder in a youthful manner as she recalls her brick-by-brick history in the local fine-craft world.
It’s hard to believe she’s been making the scene for more than 30 years. But, for proof, there’s her son Ellis, on break from college, patiently hand-pressing tile molds in the adjoining room. Husband Michael Robinson is an architect, and the home studio, though fashionably molded, has a settled family feel. Gillispie definitely did her time in the River District; she was a warehouse-workshop fixture from 1996 through 2003. But even given her success and long local history, she seems excited to be part of Asheville’s next artsy enclave: Kenilworth had its first studio tour this past June.
She’s only been operating under the name Asheville Tileworks for 13 years, but Gillispie first came to Weaverville (from the Midwest) in 1978, attracted by area institutions Penland School of Crafts, Piedmont Craftsmen and the Southern Highland Craft Guild. Nevertheless, “you had to search for other craftspeople back then. We were pretty much the only show in town, and the locals thought we were freaks,” she recalls with ingrained wry humor. Gillispie piled in with a few other potters in a makeshift Main Street studio that is now a laundromat.
“We were all working in porcelain, and hence there was white dust everywhere, white footprints all over the place. One old guy would stop in and say, ‘What are y’all doing, making biscuits?’”
She left in the ‘80s to pursue a graduate degree at the Rhode Island School of Design. “But I kept all my [guild] memberships,” she says, and in 1991 she returned to the area, ready to make her mark.
Her raw material comes from Highwater Clays—another local mainstay—and is overlaid with her own hand-mixed glazes. Gillispie’s eye for indigenous rusticity has made her the go-to ceramist for those seeking artisanal interiors. Far from the glossy, French Country-style tilework that persists in defining so many home kitchens and restaurants, Gillispie’s relief designs mainly invoke the surrounding mountains—including fern, oak and gingko leaves; pinecones; wild hares and bears; and labyrinthine, Celtic-inspired swirls. Her favored look is a matte overlay, which complements the ruddy clay and manifests in such distinctive colors as “iron gold” and “sylvan blue”—the latter hue named by one of her assistants.
Because her homeowner clients often buy her tiles ready-made and install them on their own, Gillispie can’t say where they end up. Besides kitchens and baths, though, “I do know they have been used for bars and stair risers and patios,” she says. “Someone told me my tiles were spotted at the new Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar downtown, and sure enough, several framed tiles with the Grove Arcade gryphon are on the bar area.”
Thanks to numerous large-scale commissions, the stamp of Asheville Tileworks is as much a part of the cityscape as the Urban Trail or City Hall’s Deco roof. The North Carolina Arboretum, YMCA, Meals on Wheels, the Blue Ridge Parkway and the emerging Pack Place Conservancy are among the local nonprofits that have called on Gillispie to create installations or commemorative tiles for donors. A tiled column at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Mission Hospital is marked with whimsical etchings of toys, and, more poignantly, actual impressions of preemies’ hands and feet.
The artist is a fixture in high-profile renovation and construction projects, including the HandMade in America-sponsored HandMade House at the Ramble, for which she did various chimney tiles, the fireplace surround, and the kitchen backsplash. Gillispie admits her involvement with the HandMade House was a slower-than-expected process—but one that resulted in her own enlightenment. She designed nonfigured field tile in an uncharacteristically simple blue-themed grid.
“Most people approach me wanting custom decorative work, but the HandMade House designers wanted very little narrative tilework. I ended up having an appreciation for their need to consider all the handmade pieces working as a cohesive whole.”
The point of the house, she explains, was less about individual expression and more a collaborative attempt to “showcase the handmade so that homebuilders might choose local craftspeople for their projects over commercial products.”
Acknowledging the higher purpose bespeaks her ongoing urge to scale new trends. While she’s happy to satisfy clients with her established mountain-inspired motifs, she also craves new vistas. “I always invite people to suggest new designs, because that’s what motivates me to do new designs,” Gillispie says matter-of-factly. “I like to be pushed.”