THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 28, 1996 TAG: 9601250217
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 15 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Mary Ellen Riddle
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
There's an expression that inspires me when a spark is needed to jumpstart my enthusiasm. While I'm famous for misquoting proverbs like: a rolling moss gathers no stones, I think you'll get the gist of this one, even if I massacre it somewhat:
``While all of us on earth are standing with our feet in the mud, some are staring up toward the stars.''
I've decided to put this saying aside for a time after meeting Carol Lee and learning about her relationship with clay.
While some of us are simply trudging through that clay (the muddy layer that frosts the container of life), Lee is reaching down and communing with it in a poetic sort of way.
Before you remove your toes from the warm goo, wiggle them. It's rather expressive, isn't it?
No, I haven't gone crazy. I've just decided to look down for a while rather than up. Upward glances have long been related to heaven and the heavenly, but what about this clay and rock and ore mass that bears the load of billions of moving feet and wheels and shovels and homes each day?
For an answer, talk to Carol Lee. The 35-year-old teaches pottery at the Pocosin Art Center in Columbia.
With a BFA in clay and painting from East Carolina University and an MA in Expressive Therapy from Lesley College, Cambridge, Mass., she's used the earthen substance and other art forms to help people achieve some inner peace, self esteem, and quite simply . . . pots.
Expressive therapy is not just for the troubled of spirit or body such as the children suffering from cancer that she worked with in a Boston hospital, or the elderly suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a Massachusetts nursing home, but for whatever ails us all.
``Everybody has physical and emotional challenges,'' said Lee, who has vivid memories of the folks she's worked with. ``One woman was completely gone, she couldn't focus on you, but she could play the piano. There was a wonderful magic person still in there.''
Another woman would grab Lee's hand with her bony fingers and give her a little squeeze and say, ``Plain, keep it plain. Always simple, never fancy.'' Lee has adopted this motto for her own. Having a brother with epilepsy and a learning disability inspired Lee to go into a helping profession, but she makes it clear that her work at Pocosin is an artistic endeavor, rather than therapeutic.
But her empathic nature is not lost on her students.
The lovely thing about Carol Lee is her noninvasive approach to teaching. Despite her healing background, she doesn't search for your quirks when she teaches you to manipulate clay, but exercises a subtle sensitivity to the human condition that makes for good one-on-one teaching. If she has a personal agenda it's only to let you feel the clay experience so perhaps one day you'll come to love it as she does.
In Lee's class you don't have to create masterpieces or make five exactly matching dinner plates, just satisfy yourself. Feel the earth slide between your fingers, spin it quickly on the wheel, and bake it to perfection in the fiery kiln.
``For learning, you need to be patient and gentle,'' Lee said.
``Learning to listen is important when teaching. It's not a lecture, it's a back and forth thing. I'm always checking and looking for some way to see if I'm understood. I'll let you do what ever you want to do because it's not a therapy class.''
Her goal is to establish a dialogue with clay. ``I think they come out of the clay,'' Lee said of her students. ``It just happens. It's not forced at all. It just happens.''
Some students, said Lee, are very particular about what they want to make with clay. They'll bring in a picture and tell her that they want to reproduce that pot exactly . . . now.
One woman, bubbling with enthusiasm, wanted to create a work that really was impossible to do in one sitting. Lee, who has a great sense of humor, plans to teach her the knee-pot method. It's simple. Grab a hunk of clay and smash it on your knee. And you've got a knee pot.
Lee's love for teaching and art make her a treasure. So what's Carol doing holed up in Columbia? Keeping it plain, always simple, never fancy.
She's raising two daughters with her husband, Allen, who is an artist and an art teacher, and she's teaching at Pocosin. Lee will be holding classes regularly at the center. It's well worth your while to check her out. She's a natural. MEMO: Mary Ellen Riddle covers Outer Banks arts for The Carolina Coast. Send
comments and questions to her at P.O. Box 10, Nags Head, N.C. 27959.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo by MARY ELLEN RIDDLE
``Learning to listen is important when teaching,'' says Carol Lee, a
pottery teacher at the Pocosin Art Center.
by CNB