Glass instructor Aya Oki had a heart-stopping moment near the end of her recent, six-week fall workshop. It was, she told us later, the second time she had screamed in the Penland glass studio. The first time was in 2019, and it involved a large spider. Aya’s second scream came when a large glass sculpture she and her students had been working on for many hours fell off the pipe and hit the concrete floor.
“The piece was large and heavy,” she said, “and it rolled around causing scratches and cracks. One of my students and I put a wooden paddle under it to protect it from thermal shock as we waited for another student in a heat-resistant suit and gloves to grab it to put it in the annealing oven.”
Seeing the piece fall was a shock, but she added, “it gave me, my students, and the audience watching an opportunity to think a bit about what is important in education, learning, and life.” She explained that she had planned this demonstration as a way to bring the eight students in her workshop together as a team, working with each other to create a large, complex piece under her direction.
Aya and some of her crew, about four hours earlier
“It’s physically demanding, and it’s different from working solo or with one or two assistants,” she explained. “There are things you can only learn by working on a team. Despite the difficulty, the work went so smoothly that it was hard to believe that we were a new team.” Then, just before the piece was to be moved into the annealer (a heated box that slowly cools the glass to room temperature), it fell off the pipe. “The fall added an unexpected dimension and more learning for us.”
There were a number of factors that led to this moment. The first was that the finished piece was at the outer limit of what the punty would hold—the punty being the piece of glass that bridges the piece and the pipe. There’s a lot of heating that has to happen just before the piece is finished. The timing on this is tricky, Aya explained, and the piece got a little off center, creating additional stress on the punty. And, as part of the teaching, she had the students trade roles throughout the process rather than having each person specialize. “Working with a new team,” she said, “I should have been more careful in everything I did as a supervisor. It was a great learning experience for me in that area.”
“It also helped me understand the frustration students feel when things don’t go well, and I believe that taking care of their feelings is an important role for an instructor. This kind of accident also teaches us that it’s OK to make mistakes. We can face them without fear, learn from them, and try not to make the same mistake twice. This is how we grow. And we always thank everyone for their hard work and praise their unity. So I hugged each person after the piece was in the oven.”
Failure Teaches Success
As Aya was hugging everyone in the room, the final outcome was unknown. Remarkably, the piece survived, although she had to spend several days polishing out the scratches. “There is a Japanese proverb that says, ‘Failure teaches success.’ I think this is an essential aspect of human nature. What remains as a result of failure is accumulated skills and wisdom, which are great assets that you cannot buy. Penland encourages us to learn from our mistakes in this way, and so people want to come back again to to learn and to teach.”
Aya was a warm and welcoming presence during her two months in the Penland glass studio. We are grateful to her for her teaching and for sharing this story. Our program is built on learning by doing, and we couldn’t do this without generous instructors who show our students what it looks like to succeed and also how to pick up and move on (sometimes literally) when things go wrong.
–Special thanks to metals instructor Hiroko Yamada for the video.
Bill Ford with the mail in 2008. Photo by Ellen Denker.
The Penland community lost a bit of its heart and one of its last direct connections to the school’s early days when Bill Ford died on March 21 at age 87. Bill grew up at Penland, and his mother and father played integral parts in the school’s history. For most of his adult life, he lived adjacent to the school in a house he shared with his wife, Suzanne Ford, who was co-director of the Penland Gallery for many years.
In 1993, Robin Dreyer (who is now Penland’s communications manager) wrote an article about Bill for the school’s newsletter, which appears in its entirety below. At that time, Bill had recently recovered from a stroke and had just retired from a long career as a teacher—with all of his summers spent working in various capacities at Penland.
In the 30 years since this story was written, Bill had the daily task of bringing the mail up from the Penland Post Office (Suzanne took over for him a few years ago). He also conducted history-filled tours of the school, built the stone wall behind the Dye Shed, and repaired the stone walls that had been built by his father. And Bill and Suzanne continued to run a small bed and breakfast in their home. People walking by would often see Bill sweeping the driveway or tending to the landscaping.
His mail chore, his frequent walks through the neighborhood, and his cheerful personality made him a familiar and welcome presence at Penland until recent years when old age and dementia began to limit his activities.
Meg Peterson, who was Penland’s teaching artist in the schools for more than 25 years, remembers Bill for his intellectual curiosity and for “his affection for his little part of the world.”
“Bill was deeply rooted here,” she said. “Penland is so transient, and he was a deep and knowing presence who had seen it all and still loved it. He loved the people, he loved the educational community of the public schools, and he loved the woods. It was a remarkable breadth of affection.”
So here is Bill Ford at 57, and at the bottom of the page is a short video of him at 80. We miss him.
Bill Ford at the Lily Loom House in 1993. Photo by Ann Hawthorne.
Bill Ford: Folk Dancer, Teacher, Penland Institution
from The Penland Line, Fall 1993
“I’m a Willis from Snow Creek, so I understand the mountain people, but I grew up at Penland, which is a world unto itself.”
Bill Ford started working at Penland for ten cents an hour when he was six years old. In the more than 50 summers since then, he has taught enameling and folk dancing, made copper plates for the gift shop, and washed pots in The Pines. He’s currently in charge of mowing the school’s lawns, and, along with his wife, Suzanne, he runs the Chinquapin Inn, in a house that his family used to share with Penland’s founder, Lucy Morgan.
Bill’s roots at Penland School go even deeper than his many summers of work. Lucy Morgan was his godmother, and his grandmother was the first Penland Weaver. (The Penland Weavers was a craft production project that Lucy Morgan started in 1923 before founding the school.) His mother, Bonnie Willis Ford, was, at various times, secretary, registrar, bookkeeper, and interim director. Bill’s father, Howard “Toni” Ford, taught several different crafts, provided technical advice to Lucy Morgan, and once took a small log cabin on a Model T pickup to the Chicago World’s Fair as a sales booth for Penland crafts.
In addition to Penland School, Bill’s other great passions have been folk dancing and teaching. He retired in June [1993] after 30 years as a social studies teacher in the Mitchell County Public Schools, but he originally wanted to be a dancer. He learned folk dancing at Penland as a teenager, when the school used to host weekly community dances. He picked up more folk dances in India, Europe, and Lebanon while his father was stationed overseas with the State Department. At Appalachian State Teacher’s College, he was president of the folk dance club and choreographer for school musicals.
“I took ballet and modern dance when I was 20, and I felt like a pregnant cow the whole time,” he remembers. “All my muscles were set. I realized all of a sudden that this was the end of it. I couldn’t go any further. At that point I settled for teaching, which I enjoy doing, but I guess there’s always been a struggle between the very physical aspect of dance and the intellectual pursuit of teaching.” He did continue with folk dancing, however, and taught it at Penland for more than 20 years.
From Dancing to Social Studies
Bill’s passion for international dance reflects a deeper interest in the cultures of the world, which became the focus of his teaching. “My parents were very inquisitive and broad-minded. From them I got an openness to other people,” he says. Through his teaching, Bill hoped to foster this openness in his students. “I tried to get them to be less ethnocentric, to be more accepting of people who are different.”
His teaching took him in a lot of different directions and sometimes got him into trouble. “I taught everything imaginable in social studies: psychology, sociology, art history, geography, world history, world religion, world culture: anything that could be considered social studies,” he said. “I taught a lot about world religions, which is pretty liberal for this area, I guess, but I felt it was important to teach what other people think. Of course, I used to get into hot water about twice a week!”
He often had to explain to parents that the ideas he was presenting were not his own opinions but were reflections of cultures with a whole different way of looking at things. Despite these misunderstandings, Bill was not one to shy away from a touchy subject. “A lot of teachers absolutely will not talk about anything that’s the least bit controversial, like sex or religion or politics. My position was that if something grew out of a class discussion, if the student was sincere and asked a question, that I would answer the question or tell them where to get the information. I believe that if a student is sufficiently motivated, they are going to learn with you or in spite of you.” He added, however, that he lived in a trailer until the tenure law was passed.
Potwashing With Shakespeare
In between all the years of teaching were the summers at Penland, 20 of which he spent washing pots in the kitchen. “I was interested in the young people that I worked with, and they said it was fun. If I got a pot that was really difficult to scrub, rather than bitch about it, I would recite a Shakespeare sonnet, and when I got through, it was clean, and we would laugh about it.”
One might wonder why a gifted teacher would want to devote so many summers to such unglamorous work. Bill had this answer, “Penland means a great deal to me personally. I grew up here. The Craft House was built from Poplar logs the year I was born. And I want to be useful, in my small way.”
But it isn’t just his personal connection that has kept him coming back. “There is a spirit, a dream that Penland represents,” he says. “People talk about Penland as not being the real world, as being a place where they come and get involved but go away feeling tired but happy and fulfilled. I would hate to see that spirit ever get lost. I’m not afraid of change. It’s necessary; it’s important. The school has to keep up with modern things, but I want to see the best of the past preserved as well.”
In 2015, when Bill was 80, photography student Emma Nash made this short video of a conversation with him, about trees and pinhole cameras, that captures Bill in his later years: playful, observant, a little hard to understand, still curious.
Lars Shimabukuro is leaving Penland after three wonderful years as a Penland Core Fellow 🥹. Anyone who has had the pleasure of sharing space with them can tell you how capable, curious, and intentional they are in everything they do.
At Penland, Lars spent time in nearly every studio, learning techniques to work in paper, wood, clay, and textiles, just to name a few. Here are images of some of the stunning work that Lars created at Penland.
“Tradewinds” installation at the Praxis Fiber Workshop Gallery in Cleveland, OH
This piece, titled “Fish Trap,” combines ceramic and lashed reed.
Working in paper
Chair caning (the chair is old; the rainbow caning is new).
And so much beautiful weaving
This year, Lars will teach weaving at both John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina and Arrowmont in Tennessee! Learning from Lars is sure to be a wonderful experience and we encourage you to sign up. You can also follow them on social media and check out their website for more of their thoughtful work.
LARS IS TEACHING the following weaving workshops:
A Survey in Blocks John C Campbell Folk School, May 14-20, all levels
This workshop will cover twill blocks, doubleweave blocks, and more
Imagery with Theo Moorman Arrowmont, October 15-20, all levels Learn a unique inlay technique that allows you to draw on the loom.
(Theo Moorman is the name of inlay technique, which was developed by a weaver named Theo Moorman.)
