Author: Penland

Posted on by

The Core Show!!

The annual exhibition of work by Penland’s fabulous core fellows just opened at the Penland Gallery. The reception is on Friday, October 8 from 7:00 – 8:30 PM. If you are in the area, don’t miss it.

The core program provides nine artists with an opportunity to live, study, and work at Penland for two years. We get amazing, gifted, fascinating, hard-working people in the program–being around them is one of the undocumented perks of working at Penland. This show has work in books, clay, drawing, glass, metals, photography, printmaking, textiles, wood and a many pieces that cross these boundaries. Just to give a few examples, the show includes a glass diving helmet, a ceramic owl with steel wings, a small wooden crane that suspends a small steel house, and a tiny brass boat sailing on a sea of metal letters. We’ll put up a slide show of work from the exhibition in a couple of weeks.

Posted on by

Jerilyn Virden in Ceramics Monthly

Jerilyn VirdenCongratulations to Penland instructor, neighbor, and former resident artist Jerilyn Virden, whose work is on the cover of the October issue of Ceramics Monthly. The issue features a story about Jerilyn written by Penland staff member Robin Dreyer. It starts like this:

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.”

You can read the rest of the article here.

And here is Jerilyn’s website.