Gertrude Graham Smith, nicknamed Gay, is a studio potter and teaching artist who singles fires her porcelain ware in a soda kiln near Penland, NC. Her grant awards include a North Carolina Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship in 2008/9, and Regional Artist Project Grants in 2009/10 and 2012/13, and an NC Arts Council Artist Support Grant in 2020/21. She’s held artist-in-residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation and at Penland School. Her teaching credits include workshops at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School, the Harvard Ceramics Studio, and the EcoVillage Findhorn in Northern Scotland. Her work is represented internationally, and collections include the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC and Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan. She’s been featured in Ceramics Monthly magazine, and her work is included in numerous publications including Making Marks and Functional Pottery by Robin Hopper, Working with Clay by Susan Peterson, and the Lark series of 100 Teapots, Vases, etc. She has served on the boards of Penland School of Craft and the NC Pottery Center.
These days, I contemplate the relevance of living as a practicing artist with our planet facing extraordinary challenges. I imagine how the work of my hands and heart may be of benefit. Perhaps, working as a potter develops beneficial qualities: caring attention, commitment, honesty, courage, passion, hard work, love of beauty, and a willingness to get one’s hands dirty. Engaging daily in the primordial, mysterious act of creation with earth, water, fire, air, the essential raw materials of which we and the pots are made, links us with all earthly life.
