Silvie Granatelli

Pottery through the Culture of Food

Course Description
The relationship of food to pottery form will be the focus of this course. We will discuss how various cultures designed pots for the foods and rituals they revered. While looking at how American culture treats food containment, what does it mean to be a contemporary potter? How can the pots we make embrace our food culture? What does surface embellishment convey, symbolically and formally? What makes our pots personal?

This workshop will focus on tableware, from dinner plates to serving dishes to centerpieces for the table. Participants will use the wheel as a tool to make various pots, which will be reformed and altered. There will be some hand building as well. We will use cone 10 porcelain and will explore the development of surface decoration by carving, slip trailing, and drawing with colored stains. All of these surface decorating techniques are employed before the bisque stage. Work will be bisque fired only.

Artist's Biography
Silvie Granatelli, originally from Chicago, began working with clay at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1966. Primarily interested in functional ceramics, Silvie eventually settled near Floyd, Virginia, where she has a house and studio overlooking a river. She has been instrumental in forming 16 Hands, an art collective whose main approach to selling work is a self-guided tour of artists' studios. In the last ten years Silvie has developed an assistantship program whereby she works with an emerging artist for two years, sharing her studio space with that person. As she says, "Before 1966, I never imagined a person could make a living working all day in a studio surrounded by clay. Today, I cannot imagine my life in any other way."

Artist's Statement
Making pottery for me is about giving and receiving simultaneously. It is about hospitality. I would like my pottery to embody my unspoken assumptions about our heritage and culture. How and what we eat is one of the means by which society creates itself, and acts out its aims and functions. By thinking about food as identity, as sex, as power, as friendship, as a means of magic and witchcraft, and as our time controller, I see food as the root of culture: that which gives meaning to our lives. As a potter, I hope my pots will shape and dramatize the rituals surrounding food and allow me, the potter, to partake actively in the lives of those who enjoy my work.

My pottery is made of porcelain clay. Most of it is wheel thrown and altered. While some pieces have figurative elements, all of my work is glazed and decorated to enhance visual and tactile contrasts. I fire my pots in a gas kiln to cone ten.