Chickadees Pottery at Glass, Metal and Clay Day 2025
Craft traditions take center stage at the Folk Art Center this spring with a combination of live demonstrations and a new exhibition that highlights the expressive power of handmade work. On Saturday, April 4, visitors can experience Glass, Metal & Clay (GMC) Day, an educational event featuring demonstrations by Southern Highland Craft Guild members, while the Focus Gallery debuts Lyrical Tendencies, a new exhibition exploring rhythm, movement and emotion in contemporary craft.
Janet Wiseman, the Guild’s event coordinator, says GMC Day offers visitors a chance to see craft practices that are not always easy to observe in action. “These crafts are not ones that are particularly easy to just jump into for the casual hobbyist,” she says. “There is quite a bit of equipment involved and some danger if there is a fire torch involved. So, typically, demonstrations in these media are not as common as other crafts.”
Wiseman notes that the demonstrations reflect the Guild’s ongoing effort to showcase the breadth of talent within its membership. “We have juried in some incredible talent in these media during the last year and some of these new members will be showcasing their work at this event,” she says. “Lots of fire processes at this event make it exciting in a different way than other craft media.”
Because participation changes each year, the event takes on a slightly different character every time it is held. “Each year has different members participating and that makes for a unique stew of ingredients,” Wiseman says. “We also have some different hands-on projects lined up so visitors can try out their own creative inclinations.”
The demonstrations coincide with the Lyrical Tendencies exhibition, now on view through June 14. The show gathers artists across materials such as clay, fiber, wood and metal. Curator Valerie Berlage says the exhibition emerged from the way certain artists’ work seemed to echo one another visually and emotionally. “I group artists together whose work complements or plays well with one another’s,” she says.
The title came from a conversation with Laura Spritzer, manager of the Guild’s Tunnel Road shop. “She mentioned that the word which kept coming to mind for these artists was lyrical,” says Berlage. “It can mean ‘beautifully full of emotion,’ ‘having an artistically beautiful or expressive quality suggestive of a song, fluid, graceful, delicate, expressive’—all words that can describe work in the show and bring to mind emotion, beauty and perhaps even sound. I hope that viewers can also hear the art in their mind’s ear when they view this show. Can they hear the beautiful melodies created from the delicate tinkling of glass, soft scuff of leather, warm thud of wood, hollow thunk of clay and more literally the peaceful tones of intricately carved flutes?”
Also on view through Wednesday, April 29, at the Folk Art Center is the exhibition We Still Make Things: 100 Years of Craft and Culture at the John C. Campbell Folk School, reflecting on the Folk School’s century-long role in sustaining hands-on craft education in Western North Carolina. Together, both of these exhibitions and the GMC Day event underscore a central idea: craft traditions remain vital because artists continue to reinterpret them.
The Folk Art Center is located at Milepost 382 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Learn more at CraftGuild.org.
