If you’re an art nerd like me, you get pretty excited when there’s a new art gallery in town. I learned about Ology Gallery (located, in all places, in the rear of a building on Thunderbolt’s Bonaventure Road) through friend Faran Riley who was helping co-coordinate SIP, A Ceramic Cup Show, the gallery’s first exhibition held in April of last year. SIP is organized by the Savannah Clay Community, and annually showcases approximately 200 drinking vessels created by clay artists from all over the U.S. Cups range from the sculptural, whimsical, and highly decorated, to the downright funky.
Since last April, Ology has hosted several other superbly presented and well-attended art events including Faran Riley’s beautiful installations of rocks and paintings in July’s Curiosities, and October’s The Odd, the Weird, the Strangely Fabulous show, which was all those things and more! However, gallery director Wendy Melton asked me to wait to write about the space until the new year, as plans were underway to further expand this burgeoning makers’ community. It was not until late January that I interviewed Wendy and her vivacious (and very funny) partner, Clair Buckner.
A former veterinary medicine tech., Buckner tells me her first name has no “e” on the end, and Melton chimes in that when Buckner subsequently became a ceramics specialist for the City’s Dept. of Cultural Affairs, the teachers had to wear name tags during summer camps. “So, she wrote 'Clayer' for the kids to understand how to say her name.” Quick-witted Buckner loves a good pun.
She “blames” Professor of Ceramics and Sculpture John Jensen for her love of clay. Buckner took an elective under his tutelage at Armstrong (now Georgia Southern) and credits him with allowing her, and many others worldwide, “to branch out and find what makes us happy.” Now she and Melton are passing on that happiness to others.
Clayer & Co Pottery Studio first opened in 2019, “six months B.C. – six months Before Covid,” in two empty spaces inside a building owned by Johnson Construction. Buckner began by teaching pottery classes and has slowly expanded into more and more rooms, converting them into an open studio space, jewelry classrooms, a wheel classroom, a hand-building room for students who don’t use pottery wheels, a room for storing and applying glazes, a space to house electric kilns, shelved storage rooms for pieces before they are fired, and even a retail shop that sells a supply of clays and pottery tools. “We wouldn’t be here without the Johnsons,” Buckner says, “They have been so supportive, especially when Covid hit. They really liked what we were doing, and they saw how happy people were! Darwin [Johnson] loves Thunderbolt and really wants to help the community.”
Originally, Buckner, who holds a BFA from Armstrong, and her friend Shawn Patrick (also a former student of John Jensen) taught all the classes, but now Patrick has moved on, “ and we’ve fostered and brought in three or four other teachers – because everyone brings something different, and if they’re excited, the students are excited.” Today, the first classroom has been converted into a sunny open studio that can accommodate up to 40 clay artists throughout the week - “people who know what they are doing, and just come and do their thing.” Buckner continues, “We had two new wheels gifted to us, but all the rest of the equipment is used. We like to refurbish, recycle, and reclaim. Clay is a non-renewable resource, so we recycle it. If you make a pot and you mess it up, it goes in ‘the bucket of love,’ and then we put the pieces in a machine outside to mix them back up and shoot through a pug mill to remake into usable clay. It keeps our classes sustainable.”
In addition to ceramics and sculpture classes for the “novice potter or veteran ceramicist, low country local, or just visiting,” there are jewelry, enameling, and metalsmithing classes. Soon, a cabinet maker and wood turner who recently rented a space and has taught at Penland and John Campbell Folk School, will be teaching woodworking.
Buckner laughs as she says the floor in the space now occupied by Ology was too “nice to mess up” so it became the gallery, and is managed by her partner, Wendy Melton. Melton, who most recently served as interim director of Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum, has always loved the arts, working in the theater for the first ten years of her career. “I think the thread has always been that I like telling stories – whether that’s on stage or through exhibits.”
Melton is planning a stellar roster of shows for 2024. First up is the opening of the aforementioned SIP show on Friday, April 12 from 6 to 9 pm, with a closing reception on Friday, April 26. (Don’t wait too long to come, as cup enthusiasts show up early to nab their favorite drinking vessels!) The call-for-entries for SIP closes on March I.
Next will be a May 17-July 12 show entitled Feral & Functional: Purposeful Form From Wild Clay with 10 percent of sales benefiting the Islands Feral Cat Project. Buckner met juror Hamish Jackson at a workshop in Nashville. “He’s been into wild clay since doing his Masters in Utah. He’s on the cutting edge,” Buckner says. “Georgia is very cool because of our different regions – we have white kaolin found near Milledgeville, red clay of course, and locally we have clay and slip from the marshes and beach. Indigenous peoples have used these native clays for thousands of years. You’ve heard of ‘shop local’, I’m teaching ‘dig local!’” The call-for-entries closes on April 6.
Melton is in conversation with a couple of sculptors to have a show in August (augmented by a sculpture workshop in September), and from Sept. 27-Oct. 26 she plans a retrospective show of paintings and ceramics entitled Rick Petrea: Twisted. A Retrospective of a Multi-Disciplinary Artist’s Work. The “energetic and bold” work spans the Savannah artist’s thirty-year career. Finally, in November, look for a show of pottery serving dishes with 10 percent of sales benefiting Giving Kitchen, the Atlanta nonprofit which provides emergency assistance for food service workers.
To end my tour of this exciting art and teaching space, we go outside where there is the pug mill, the workshop for the cabinet maker/wood turner, and a space that houses gas kilns. Installed in the fall, the gas kilns truly excite Buckner. “It’s next level for potters,” she says, “It’s a big community builder. We’re really all about community. There’s no need for potters to have all their own equipment when they can make things at home and then have access to our kilns. It’s what people want and need. The goal is just to make a nice, fun, happy place where people want to come.”
Mission accomplished.
