BarbaraWalchPottery.com
Title
Barbara Walch Pottery and Fire Flower Garden
Description
Barbara Walch has been making handbuilt pottery since 1973. She is one of only a few American potters who work primarily with the pinch technique. Her handcrafted stoneware dinnerware is distinctive, unusual, and appealing. Barbara and her husband, Charlie Krause, are the proprietors of Fire Flower Garden at their home located just outside the village of Thorndike, in central Maine, where her studio has been since 1989. In addition to the working pottery studio, there are extensive cottage gardens, cutting beds and a roadside plant stand.
The hands-on art form called "pinch" pottery has been the method of choice for Walch since she began making pottery full time in the early 1970's. This process involves starting with a chunk of clay and forming it patiently into a shape, either functional or fanciful, using only the artists hands and imagination. Because each piece is hand built no two are ever exactly alike. Lately Walch has been experimenting with the ancient technique of building containers using coils of clay, as well as from flat "slabs".
The pottery is stoneware, a durable clay fired at very high temperatures. A striking characteristic of her work is that the exterior is often left unglazed, allowing the natural patina and texture of the fired clay to define the form. When glazes are applied, often only to the inside, they are reminiscent of colors found in nature, such as a clear morning sky or the cherry red of maple flowers in the spring light, or a drift of snow slowly melting into a plowed furrow. Her work strongly suggests shapes and textures found in the natural world, and spring from both her intimate involvement in that world and from the nature of the clay itself.
Languages
English
