Sharing the Stories Exhibit Artists

​“The sharing is the most important thing. An artist does what they do in order to share.”

“I love doing my art. I would go on making it even if I couldn’t sell it. I started making art as toys when I was a child. I use to make pop guns, sling shots, bow and arrows and what have you.”

“Weavers are problem solvers. We like to figure out things and work things out. . . . you look at other people’s patterns for ideas but we like to figure out things and put things together in our own way.”

“I was looking for a common denominator, in essence, that could be communicated in very simple forms, almost like a haiku in three dimensions.”

“I think probably the process that I’m most in tune with is the firing with wood and that is like, it’s almost like alchemy, you know. It’s something that you have to develop an eye and then a nose for, and you have to listen to the kilns.”

“Being captive to the beauty and miracle of nature, it seems fitting that the work I create reflects my love and respect for the Earth.”

“The measure of a teacher is to open the doors and set the base for the student and to give them the thirst and the yearning for knowledge so that they choose to go beyond that base.”

“Many artists, including myself, spend much time solving problems. For the most part they are hypothetical in nature and rarely resolved as solutions. It’s time to realize that artists invent problems for their own sake. Artists are problem makers.”

“I have been heavily influenced by the work of the renowned chairmaker Chester Cornett who used to say, ‘It takes half a fool to make a handmade basket and a pure fool to make a hand carved chair.’ “

“We have worked with natural materials that are available to us in our surroundings, in our environment here in the woods, . . . our inspiration comes from the beauty of the nature around us.”

“And so, I don’t give up process or tradition, I incorporate it. And when in incorporating it, it becomes my own type of visual language . . . that hasn’t before been created, and so I sometimes fit between craft shows, art shows.”

“I make art because I have to. That’s why anyone makes art, because you have to. My quilts were never made traditionally for beds. They were artistic expressions. Artists have a freedom to express themselves and the drive to do it.”

“I’ve been making baskets on and off since I was about nine years old, helping my mom to start out.”

“I’m in the business of making an instrument that will actually serve the musician and will emanate and give the best sound that it can.”

“. . . the history lesson here of, of African-Americans in the South… you’ve got the music, you have the coming and going of the people, you have the wisdom of the people, you have these feet which means people are planted, are rooted in this place and can’t be moved.”

“My craft developed quickly when I began creating pottery full time. Without the distractions of a conventional career, my creativity soared to new places. I have never compromised or held back my creative urges when making these artworks of clay.”

"I aspire to create simple, elegant woven vessels that possess a richness of spirit and a presence embodying the soul of the tree from which they came.”