Lucy Clark walked into her first wheel-throwing lesson six years ago starry-eyed and ready to fall in love. She couldn’t wait to start the popular pottery-making process.
But the romance was over before it even really began. “I took two classes, and I was awful,” she remembers. “I left really disappointed and dejected.”
Fortunately, she didn’t wallow in her heartbreak. She felt sure that a lifelong admiration for earth and clay, formed as a child growing up in the mountains of West Virginia, combined with hands made strong yet sensitive from more than 20 years as a massage therapist, could make her a great potter. And she wasn’t about to let a wheel stand in her way.
At a friend’s suggestion, Clark began studying the coil method, which requires only the hands and small tools, with ceramic artist Worley Faver, who taught near Jacksonville, Florida, where she lived.
“The first time I rolled out a piece of clay and made my first coil and my first pot, it was like I found home again,” she says. “With coil building, you have time: You can put a coil on, you can sculpt it in, you can cover it up, you can walk away for days and think about it.”
In other words, it’s completely unlike throwing, where, she points out, “you only have a certain amount of time to get pieces up and centered on the wheel or they’re just going to go everywhere.
“Coil building,” she adds, “is a very contemplative art, and there’s time to let go and let the clay take the direction.”
It’s clay and pottery that brought Clark north: After purchasing a home in Cedar Mountain 10 years ago, she moved to the area with her husband permanently in 2014, intending to take the next step with her art.
“I wanted to go where the medium was truly understood,” she shares. “I feel like I’ve taken my guitar to Nashville. There are so many wonderful potters here of all persuasions.”
But she stands out in the sea of talent. In fact, she’s unaware of another area potter following her exact process. Her natural, coil-building approach honors the Pueblos à la legendary potter Maria Martinez.
To create a pot, Clark rolls out and adds one coil of clay at a time, careful to find the right pace — build too quickly, and it’ll collapse. Then, she carves or otherwise embellishes the piece before burnishing it with a quartz stone to create sheen sans glaze. The stone is such an important part of the process that the Pueblos traditionally handed theirs down from generation to generation.
Polishing alone can take anywhere from three to 10 hours. Once Clark has the piece as shiny as she wants, it sits for one month to dry before heading into a kiln. From the kiln, it goes to a bed of sawdust to smoke, where it can sit uncovered for as little as 30 seconds or covered for 20 minutes, depending on whether the piece is to have a gradient color or wind up entirely black. She often uses horsehair after smoking, which melts into the pot to create a pattern. For the final touch, she applies tung oil to lock in the coloration.
Clark spends between 10 and 40 total working hours on each piece — she made only 50 last year.
“The process takes a lot of time and some people say patience,” she notes. But she doesn’t quite agree. “I don’t see it as patience as much as I see it as a way to calm down. Everything else is so fast in this world. It’s nice to have something that you have to wait for.”
Although she has won awards and been invited to participate in shows, in a way she’s calmly waiting for her career to fully bloom. “There are a couple of galleries that I desperately want to know me. But I’m of the personage that there’s a flow to it.”
For the future, she hopes her work keeps flowing, moving forward and evolving. “I believe in my work, and I always know I can be better. I just want every piece to be better: to be more expressive, to be authentic.”
Yet despite her artistic ambition and evolution, Clark’s favorite piece is her very first — made right after that fateful, heartrending meeting with the wheel.
“It’s not perfect and it’s kinda wobbly, but I can still look at it and see the potential.”
Lucy Clark’s work is on view at ART MoB Studios and Marketplace (124 4th Ave. E., Hendersonville) and at Number 7 Arts Gallery in Brevard (12 Main St.). Lucyclarkpottery.com