The Penland Gallery and Visitors Center presents its seventh Focus exhibition of the year, a new body of  work in ceramics by Jerilyn Virden. This show is on view in the Focus Gallery from Friday, October 5th through Sunday, October 28th.

“Using the vernacular of the vessel and working within a narrow range of forms, I use the power of subtlety to create intimate spaces. Each form employs a language that reveals its intentions. My interest lies in the slight shifts within the arc of a bowl that determine the nature of the containment.

“Looking to primitive objects that have a contemporary relevance, I pare down forms and exaggerate isolated elements accentuating their sense of generosity and strength. Hollow construction allows for exaggeration of features, contributing a visual weight that floats above the table. A bowl that curls back on itself may seem shy and protective, while the force of a gentle upward turn of its lip invites a more active investigation of the object.

“Formed through repeated scraping and pinching, building up and finally excavating the appropriate curve, each piece retains the history of its making. Layers of glaze soften these individual marks, bringing more clarity to the form. The surface becomes a way to manipulate scale, moving from intimacy to expansion, in the way one understands a landscape by knowing both the small stone at one’s feet and the bulk of the mountain far away.”

Jerilyn Virden is a studio artist who lives in the village of Greensboro, Vermont. She creates hollow ceramic sculptural forms as well as utilitarian pottery. Before relocating to the Northeast Kingdom, she was a studio artist in Mitchell County, North Carolina for 10 years. She was a resident artist at Penland School of Crafts from 2001-2004, and received a North Carolina Arts Fellowship Grant in 2006. Jerilyn earned her MFA from Southern Methodist University in 2001. Before attending graduate school she completed a two-year assistantship at the studio of Silvie Granatelli, in Floyd, Virginia. Her work has been exhibited at the Mint Museum of Craft and Design and she has work in the permanent collection of the Asheville Art Museum and NCECA.

Click here to visit Jerilyn’s website, where you can see more of her work.

Click here to visit the Penland Gallery website.

Penland’s Focus Gallery is a space primarily dedicated to single-artist exhibitions. Focusing on individual artists over the course of the year, it presents a larger selection of their work to gallery visitors and patrons.

Click here for more information about the Focus Gallery.

The Penland Gallery and Visitors Center is pleased to present its sixth Focus exhibition of the year, Tangere, a new suite of  wearable artworks by Tucson, Arizona-based artist Charity Hall. This show is open to the public in the Focus Gallery from Friday, August 31st through Sunday, September 30th.

 

“Lumenorbis, literally meaning ‘light of the world,’ examines the complex microcosm of a tiny foreign organism.  Thousands of minute creatures remain elusive, completely unknown to science. They survive in specialized niches within the depths of deep sea vents, crevasses, or even in plain slight and will flourish or perish, irrespective of our awareness. The enamel in this piece glows in the dark.”

 

“A millipede crawling upon your hand feels halfway between barely noticeable and lightly tickling. You can feel the overall sensation of movement, but not the individual legs so delicately fragile on your callused hand. But if you existed on the same scale as a millipede and had it walking upon you, I imagine it would feel quite differently; its legs formidable, with the tips digging as it marches doggedly along.”

 

“In this body of work, I am using copper, brass, bronze, and silver along with a variety of tiny semi-precious gemstones.  The appendage-like protrusions are made individually out of brass wire, and each ‘segment’ is cut with a jeweler’s saw.  Some of the pieces glow in the dark, which is accomplished by a special firing process of fusing glow powder with enamel. This exploratory work examines tactility from the perspective of minute organisms, from radiolarians to millipedes. Tiny creatures experience and palpably digest their environment using an arsenal of appendages: antennae, flagella, legs, and tentacles. The dogged march of a millipede, the rhythmic undulation of feeding tentacles, and the quivering antennae of a lacewing each relay segments of information mechanistically necessary for survival. Although I’ve never studied entomology, I have always been an avid bug enthusiast and am fascinated by the intricate textural and mechanical details of invertebrates.  I married an entomologist, and we spend time in the field collecting millipedes in California and in the Appalachians.  We recently began keeping live millipedes, and it is fascinating to watch their rhythmic movements as they walk about.”

Charity Hall is a metalsmith and enamelist with a background in biology. She has a B.A. in  botany and conservation biology from Colorado College, where she also took jewelry classes with Dindy Reich. After college, she worked as a biological surveyor and as a botanist for the U.S. Forest Service before pursuing graduate studies in Quaternary Sciences (paleobotany). After taking a ring-making workshop at Penland, where she met many working artists, Charity knew she wanted to become a metalsmith. She left her graduate program in the sciences to pursue an M.F.A., which she received from East Carolina University in 2008.

You can click here to visit Charity’s website, where you can see more of her work.

You can click here to visit the Penland Gallery website.

Penland’s Focus Gallery is a space primarily dedicated to single-artist exhibitions. Focusing on individual artists over the course of the year, it presents a larger selection of their work to gallery visitors and patrons.

You can click here for more information about Focus Gallery artists.