Resting on a small, wooden table in a corner of the Kenai Art Center is a flowing turquoise blue fountain. The bottom shelf where the water flows is full of large rocks that sockeye salmon once swam past.
The piece of pottery is one of about 100 on display in the art center’s main gallery this month for the Kenai Potters Guild annual Clay on Display exhibition. Each piece is a different take on the “river” theme.
“It's really interesting, because sometimes we go very specific, like big bowls or something,” said Carol Padgett, president of the guild. She helped come up with this year’s theme, which she admits is a bit vague.
“We just went a little bit more esoteric and said, ‘What connects with us and what's near us?’ And we, our group, decided on ‘river’ this year,” Padgett said.
The guild celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023, and its annual installment at the art center dates back to the 1980s. But the ambiguity of this year’s theme was a challenge for many of the featured artists.
One of them is Wendy Gist, a newcomer to the potters guild who has five pieces on view. Although she says a few of them touch on the show’s theme directly, others aren’t as obvious. One is a vase that’s nearly hidden in a collection of rocks she’s collected near the water.
Gist says it was neat to watch how the glaze on that and other pieces were formed.
“Having the river as a topic, it stretched me," Gist said. "It was a lot of fun, and what I came up with was nothing like what I had expected.”
Also on view is a charcuterie board with a flowing river-like glaze, a working clock surrounded by ceramic seastars and several salmon-inspired works.
And pottery isn’t all that's being shown this month at the art center. In the back gallery is a photography show titled “Fruits of our Labor.” As its name suggests, the show spotlights an assortment of photographed fruits – and vegetables.
Longtime artist Susan Johnson is behind the roughly two dozen photographs of carrots, peppers and tomatoes. She hopes her photographs will inspire a newfound appreciation for growing and harvesting crops.
“I think we take that for granted sometimes," Johnson said. "We go to the grocery store and pick out whatever we want without realizing the work that went into it. So this is sort of like a glorification, I guess, of the simple vegetable.”
This isn’t the first time the small show has been displayed on the Kenai Peninsula. Johnson says it was recently on view in Homer.
But this show, and the Clay on Display exhibit, will be on view at the Kenai Art Center through the end of the month.
