Arts & Culture Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 56) Judy Pir k e y Passionate Potter Potter Judy Pirkey brings a wealth of experience to her art. This one time pre-med student taught sensitivity training to nurses, owned a health spa in Mexico, traveled the world making large oceanariums, and built brownstones in New York City. “Life presents itself in wonderful ways if you can take advantage of it,” she says. “There’s a lot of spirituality in pottery. Allow whatever occurs to occur.” When she first began doing pottery, she had a hard time centering it on the wheel. Then, after learning to center it, she would make the same round pot over and over again and felt stuck. It was M. C. Richards, a Pennsylvania art therapist, who taught her to allow the spiritual and creative part of her to make the pot rather than focusing on the technical aspects. “And that’s why I’m so impassioned, because it’s so endless as to what you can do,” she says. Studying with master Korean porcelain artist Ki Woon Huh has brought her work to a new level of excellence, one she describes as “the icing on the cake.” In addition to working in finely finished porcelain, she is also passionate about Raku, a rougher form that takes advantage of creative accidents. And with Sandy Light, a friend she met in Ki’s class, she has been creating jewelry and paperweights incorporating all kinds of things. “One time we found an old pin with an alligator in it and made a whole collage in clay with shells, beads and things we could find from the typical Florida scene. People are now giving us things—pieces of an earring where they lost one, watches that don’t work, a piece of lace,” Judy says. Her work embedding found-objects in clay has come full circle from her childhood in Atlantic City, NJ, where she and her friends would look under the boardwalk for things that fell off the Miss America parade floats. “We thought we were really hot stuff!” she exclaims with a burst of energy. “There’s always been a part of me that loves to look around outside.” judypirkey@verizon.net ONLINE ART 56 : : arts and culture magazine www.artsandculturemag.com http://www.artsandculturemag.com
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