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May Issue 2004
Focus Gallery at Folk Art Center in Asheville, NC, to Feature Terry Gess and Chad Alice Hagen
Works of art by Bakersville potter Terry Gess and Asheville fiber artist Chad Alice Hagen will be on display at the Focus Gallery at the Folk Art Center in Asheville, NC, May 1 through June 22, 2004. Gess's earthy pots and Hagen's colorful felted wall hangings complement each other and offer visitors the opportunity to see new work from two of the region's talented craftspeople whose talent has been recognized nationally and internationally.
Gess is a studio potter who lives near Penland School of Crafts. His formal education includes study at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and Penland School of Crafts. His work has received numerous awards and he has had international experiences including a trip to the People's Republic of China during which he collaborated with a master Chinese potter in the development of new teapots. He was also a guest at an international ceramic exhibition and symposium held in the small craft village of Fiskars, Finland, which coincided with a lecture at the Estonian Academy of Art in Tallinn, Estonia. The North Carolina Arts Council awarded Terry a ten week residency at Chateau de La Napoule, an international artists' foundation housed in a magnificent castle on the Mediterranean shore of the French Riviera.
Gess credits his interest and appreciation of the spirited, populist pottery styles, such as Medieval English jugs or swollen-bellied Persian jars, with helping him to develop his own style. He states that "he values these pots for their clunky forms, thick lips and age-worn surfaces. Their causal, mundane earthiness, healthy and unpretentious, holds a subtle, grounded beauty that reveals its secrets slowly. The hand of the maker has not been overshadowed by skillful mastery or opulent lusters, but is still clearly present."
Gess strives for an "awkward, clumsy beauty" in his pots. But he will point out that this is not a sloppy awkwardness, but rather an assured individuality. Work on view at the Folk Art Center includes vases, platters, teapots, jars and more.
Eight of Chad Alice Hagen's colorful felted wall hangings will share the gallery space with Gess's pottery. Hagen's work utilizes hand felted merino wool, dyed and stitched, and found objects to create glorious fields of color that are reminiscent of ancient texts.
Chad Alice Hagen has
been exploring hand-felted wool since 1980. She received her BA
in Art and Master's in Textile Design from the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Hagen's hand-felted
wool has been exhibited throughout the United
States as well as in Mexico City, Japan, India, England and Denmark.
Her work is included in the collections of the Mint Museum of
Art + Design in Charlotte, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the
University of Wisconsin - Madison, in the corporate collections
of B.F. Goodrich and Westinghouse, and in private collections.
Hagen's feitmaking specialty and passion is resist dyeing of hand-felted wool. While most of her work in the past has been on a very large scale, recent works are becoming more and more intimate in size, often with intense, embellished workings of the surface. Since 1995 she has been exploring ways to use hand-felted wool as a place to hold collections of various objects. The work on view includes brass safety pins, gourd fragments, coconut disks and stones from Lake Michigan.
Hagen describes the slow, deliberate steps and processes of felting, dyeing, arranging, and stitching as feeling like she's creating a ritual textile. She says, "I feel compelled to create these small stitched and embellished works, not only filling the surface with stitch, line and object, but filling my mind with questions about what their existence means to me. I sense that these objects are creating a kind of protection for me, and at the same time I feel that I am protecting small forms. Some of these pieces even seem like messages and letters to others, written in a deeper than ordinary language.
For more information call 828/298-7928 or visit (www.southernhighlandguild.org).
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