Red Lodge Clay Center – Workshop Presenter 2022
Alleghany Meadows is a studio potter in Carbondale, Colorado. He received his BA from Pitzer College, Claremont, CA, and his MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Alleghany studied with Takashi Nakazato, Karatsu, Japan, received a Watson Foundation Fellowship for field study of potters in Nepal, and was an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. He has presented lectures, workshops and been a visiting artist at art centers and universities nationally and internationally, including Penland, Alfred, Kansas City Art Institute, RISD, Chicago Art Institute, Anderson Ranch, Archie Bray Foundation, Haystack, UGA Cortona, Italy, Curaumilla, Chile, and Good Hope, Jamaica. He is the founder of Artstream Nomadic Gallery (2001), co-founder of Harvey/Meadows Gallery (2005-2020) and co-founder and owner of Studio for Arts and Works (SAW) (2006). He served on the board of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Long Beach Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art and the Huntington Museum of Art, WV, where he was honored with the Walter Gropius Master Award.
I am a potter. My search is for emotion, feeling, content and form in objects meant to be experienced and used in the comfort and safety of home. I believe that ordinary domestic rituals can have a profound impact on the human condition. My work is intimately connected to our bodies through form and scale, food and nourishment. It is activated most when in use, when engaging the senses of touch, sight, sound, taste and smell. I wish for my work to inspire creative decisions in the simplest of actions, such as sipping a moment of tea, preparing a soup, or arranging two daffodils in spring. I imagine a cup remaining in use and active for centuries; yet, I am acutely aware that the intended context is transitory, where it can in one breath caress someone’s lips, and in the next be shattered by an accidental drop.
Memory, and my understanding of memory, are intimately connected to objects. A new cup enters my life and engages, becoming familiar, holding my attention as I trace its subtleties, the pace and rhythm of its handle, the weight and balance when full, the transferring of its heat into my touch, the way light passes through its contents. Through time and use, this cup acquires a patina of memories which changes my understanding and relationship with it. Holding it, steam rising from tea, the memories connected with the cup echo back, the long shadows of the sun rising one morning, a conversation with a passed friend, my youngest daughter taking her first step, marking moments in time which give life meaning and richness.
I often draw inspiration from details in nature, the form of the sky seen from a solitary hilltop, the tension in a peony blossom squeezing outward during a warm week in late spring. I love to work physically hard, long hours in the studio. Repetition and rhythm in my process are how I search for subtleties, forms, surfaces, patterns. I am fascinated by the potential for related elements to stack and arrange, becoming something greater than a sum-total of parts. A series of soup bowls nesting together evokes an emerging flower, then transforms into a stage for breaking bread with loved ones, then circles back to a stack of bowls after they are washed, poised and alert for their next experience.