The impetus for my ceramic sculptures came from traditional Southern face jugs. I had switched to working in clay exclusively in the 1990s. I had been making sculptural assemblages but had to stop because I couldn’t use a table saw any longer as I increasingly suffered from seizures, which are the result of brain damage sustained in a bicycle accident in my youth. Table saws and seizures don’t mix.
I always had been intrigued by face jugs, especially those made by Southern slaves. At my middle school, we tried to develop teaching materials that appealed to our African-American students, and so I decided to have them make face jugs. I had never made any, so I first created several myself. The first ones I didn’t quite like, and so I made some more. Each batch got better, but more importantly, when I finished a batch, I couldn’t wait to make the next one. It just seemed to be in my bones. It felt like I had made them before – that I was catching up where I had left off. I wanted to let everything go in my current life and go back to a previous one that I had discovered. I once was lost and now was found.
From the jugs I came to the current, more elaborate sculptures. It started when my then 4-year-old son Joe started to stick pottery chards, which I used for teeth, in one of my jugs. All over: nose, eyes, lips. He went wild. Then he started to stick other objects in them, like a ceramic snake. I began to help him and gradually really liked the results. My style was very different, and I had much more respect for the face, but to this day, Joe claims that he made me famous.
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