Asheville in Atlanta 2008

MudFire Gallery welcomes back guest curator Kyle Carpenter for its annual exhibit of functional and decorative pottery by North Carolina artists from the Asheville region. This year for "Asheville in Atlanta," Kyle will exhibit his works alongside those of Penny Waters-Clark, Ken Sedberry and Jon Keenan.

The artist reception and exhibit opening will be held Saturday, October 11, from 5-9 pm. The exhibit and sale will be on display through November 22, 2008.

The annual "Asheville in Atlanta" show is MudFire Gallery's most anticipated event each year. Guest curator Kyle Carpenter invites a select group of artists from in and around Asheville to participate. This area is known internationally as home to a vast pool of ceramics talent including an intense concentration of the world's top studio potters. For the MudFire exhibit, the number of artists is limited so that visitors are able to enjoy a sizeable body of works by each artist, gaining a deep familiarity with each of their styles.

This year's show will feature handbuilt tableware by Penny Waters-Clark, whose unassuming forms provide a beautiful canvas for drawing, stenciling and painting. Her playful, stylized patterns recall textiles somehow fused onto pinched, coiled and slab-worked clay.

Ken Sedberry's wood fired pots defy the traditional earthen colored, subdued, reserved and muted shades in favor of colors which combine with the conventional wood firing hues to create surfaces not unlike those found in nature's wildest fauna, flora and oceans.

Jon Keenan's ceramics are both functional and sculptural, echoing the interaction between nature, culture, and the experience of everyday life. His experiences in New Delhi, India and Kyoto, Japan provided the technical training and the aesthetic sensibility evident in his work.

Kyle Carpenter's work exhibits a fusion of striking contemporary designs with traditional materials & process, noteworthy for his masterful use of slips, brushwork, minimalist glazing, and a warmly inviting finish. The combination of three-dimensional forms and two-dimensional drawings is a natural fusion of both his love of drawing and pottery, art and craft.