This pot was made by Karen Karnes in 1997 and is called Flower Container. All of the photos illustrating this review are from the book.A Chosen Path, The Ceramic Art of Karen Karnes, edited by Mark Shapiro, University of North Carolina Press, 2010, hardcover, 192 pages, $40.
Reviewed by Bethany M. Dunbar
The proof is in the pudding — or in this case — in the pottery.
There are those who discuss their own accomplishments endlessly, or talk about what they are going to accomplish.
Others quietly create magnificent works of art on a regular basis with little fuss. Karen Karnes of Morgan is among the latter group.
A Chosen Path, The Ceramic Art of Karen Karnes, is a book about Ms. Karnes’ accomplishments as a potter. If one were to read only her own essay in this book, one might conclude with the notion, “My what a fortunate woman.”
More than once she attributes her success to luck.
Luckily, however, one can’t very well read the essay without seeing the dramatic photographs of her work and accompanying essays by those who know perfectly well that her success is about talent, vision, hard work, and persistence — not just luck.
In this sense, the book’s editor, Mark Shapiro, has accomplished something important himself in putting together a beautiful, fascinating look at one of our neighbors. It includes dozens of photos of Ms. Karnes’ work and essays by seven of her colleagues.
The book is designed to accompany an exhibit of Ms. Karnes’ work ongoing around the country.
The exhibit is currently being shown at the ASU Ceramics Research Center in Arizona through January of 2011, after which it will travel to Asheville, North Carolina.
The closest the exhibit will come to Vermont is the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, where it will appear through This photo of Karen Karnes glazing was taken in 1953 in North Carolina.December 3, 2011. After it leaves New Hampshire it travels to Wisconsin and then California.
We came to be aware of this book because a photograph taken for the Chronicle appears in it. Mr. Shapiro contacted us to ask about reprinting it. In 1998 Steve Blake photographed the aftermath of Ms. Karnes’ fire at her studio. The photo is reprinted with an essay by Ms. Karnes outlining her career, including the fire:
In 1998 a fire started by the wood kiln burned the kiln shed and the house. We lost everything except the clothes we were wearing when we left the burning house. Fortunately we had good insurance and the builders to reconstruct the house and shed. A group of potters came and took down the big wood kiln — I felt that I no longer wanted to work with a wood kiln.
It took over a year before I was able to work in clay again. It was the first time that my work had been interrupted for such a long time, and my new direction was hard to find. The work became smaller, lighter, and not like the larger vessels I had been making. I made pieces that clung together, that had a gentleness and affection that was new. It was a direction that grew directly from the trauma of the fire, and it was a welcome one.
Ms. Karnes grew up in the Bronx in New York City, the daughter of garment factory workers who came to this country from Russia and Poland. She could take advantage of art and music classes and a library nearby. The city was safe.
“Such a life, with both parents working, made for really independent children. Nobody was watching us, so we just did what we wanted to do. We rode bicycles, we visited the park.”
She married David Weinrib soon after college. Her first pottery was making lamp bases. She was paid $25 apiece for each design. The two lived in Italy for a time, then moved back to New York and later to Black Mountain, North Carolina, where she met Shoji Hamada. It was the 1950s, and artists, dancers, and painters were all around them.
“Watching Hamada work was the most important ceramic instruction I, as a young potter, could have. He had a quiet presence — he didn’t say anything as he worked. (In contrast, [Bernard] Leach talked a lot and worked a little).”
Ms. Karnes’ next move was to join a group of artists in Stony Point, New York. She made fountains and bird feeders, even a sink and a urinal out of clay.
In 1967 she discovered the method of using a salt kiln, which creates a different surface and speckled colors. She and her husband separated.
“So there I was, a little self-employed potter, supporting myself and my son and an irregular income, no health insurance... But I still had a life and work I loved.”
The editor of the book, Mark Shapiro, also grew up in New York City, some time later, a teenager obsessed with pottery. He knew of Karen Karnes as a master.
“She seemed to inhabit the inaccessible elsewhere of salt glaze, a place of unimaginable technical and logistical achievement and authentic authority. When I wandered into America House one afternoon, I couldn’t believe that her work was there, for sale right on Fifty-second Street, available for anyone — even me. I bought the smallest cut-lidded jar, the one I could afford. It cost $14, a dollar for every year of my life.”
Karen Karnes (left) and Ann Stannard in Morgan in 2002.Ms. Karnes’ signature cut lid design was created by accident during a workshop she was running in Pennsylvania. She had mislaid a wire she would normally use to cut off a chunk of clay with a clean, flat line. A student offered her a wire made of two coarse twisted strands.
“When she cut a lid off the wheel with the borrowed tool, the striking effect was observed by all present. ‘Striated planes like plowed fields that float over the landscaped mountains,’ she later described these marks,” Mr. Shapiro writes in his introduction.
An essay by Edward Lebow titled “Her Pot” describes the shifting form Ms. Karnes’ pottery has taken.
“More an iconoclast than a revolutionary, Karnes has evolved her forms from biomorphism to blue-collar utility then back again without ever stirring the dust of clay rebellion.”
Ms. Karnes created teapots with split bases that suggest feet, and short rounded spouts.
“The nubby spouts of her Teapots from 1989... appear to be pursing their lips for a good hard whistle,” says Mr. Lebow.
Examples of her work in the 1990s include pieces called Black Boulder with Two Openings, and Flower Container, a wide-bottomed pot with a large opening in the middle and four tubular structures reaching up from the base. A photograph of one of these works appears on the cover of the book.
Appropriately, the names of the pieces are completely modest and understated. More than one piece bears the simple name Flower Container or Sculptural Vessel.
Ms. Karnes moved to Vermont in 1979 with Ann Stannard, a fellow potter from North Wales. The two met in 1968. The move to Vermont was to share a studio with a friend, Ron Bower.
“Our stay at Ron’s marked our ‘back to earth’ phase. There was no electricity and only a little running water. The house was a mile and a half off the road; we had to walk in and out, carrying our groceries on our backs or on sleds in the winter. It was a real adventure but not an adventure we wanted to continue in our older years. So in 1983 we found a place of our own — an old farmhouse on ten acres near the Canadian border...
“I moved to Vermont at just the right time. The isolation suits me. I still go to New York once or twice a year and have a wonderful time for a couple of days zipping around to galleries and museums. But that’s enough. I don’t need to see lots of other work anymore. I work from my own impulse. I always have.”
