Lorna Meaden, 2012 ALCC Featured Artist

Colorado potter, Lorna Meaden is one of the featured artists at the 2012 Alabama Clay Conference. 

Here is a quick description about her career and work:

With her elegant and sensuous vessels, Lorna Meaden puts her own spin on historical ornamentation and celebrates the practical use of everyday, utilitarian objects. “Handmade pots are potent in their power to reveal the extraordinary, within the ordinary,” she says. She contrasts elements of extravagant embellishment with a rough-hewn, home-spun, sensibility. One of America’s most popular potters, Meaden exhibits in galleries and museums nationwide. She has been a resident at the most prestigious art instruction centers in the country, and currently resides in Durango, Colorado where she calls herself a studio potter.

Inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement of the nineteenth century, Meaden honors the handmade useful object as a valuable entity and a sacred tradition. She spurns the modern proclivity to assign worth based on convenience rather than authenticity and uniqueness, revering instead the intimate connection fostered in handmade items—between the user of the piece and the artisan who made it.  If handmade work is a luxury in today’s world, Meaden’s use of adornment on her work extends the idea of extravagance. Yet while her forms are playfully suggestive of Baroque and Rococo grandeur, her use of material remains in the dominion of old-fashioned folk pottery. Rather than using delicate white porcelain with shiny luster embellishments, her materials retain the bulky, neutral-glazed solidity that give her work the delightful balance between the fancy and the uncomplicated.