Atlanta artist one of 50 showing at Ga.'s largest pottery exhibition

By Howard Pousner

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wrens, robins and other birds love to fly into the southeast Atlanta studio of ceramic artist Katy McDougal, just as they’ve paid visits to every space where she’s set up shop.

Their arrival is a mystery, yet fitting, since a lot of the work that flies out of the converted detached garage behind her family’s Park View neighborhood home features these fine-feathered creatures.

And with McDougal honored as one of 50 Georgia artists showing at the Perspectives 2009: Georgia Pottery Invitational exhibition starting Saturday in Watkinsville (just south of Athens), a serious amount of work with bird motifs has been flying out of her studio lately.

The show staged by the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation is billed as the state’s largest annual pottery event, with more than 5,000 pieces for sale by top Georgia ceramicists, as well as demonstrations, workshops and studio tours. But amid the long tables and shelves groaning with a wide array of work, much by metro Atlanta potters, McDougal’s should be easy to spot.

While a great deal of pottery produced today is the art of the now — its makers pushing forward with new forms, techniques and materials — McDougal’s hand-built work appears lost in time, almost Victorian.

It’s a throwback, as it turns out, by design. The Louisiana-born potter aspires to make pottery that looks like heirlooms, pieces she hopes will come to be appreciated as much as she values the pink and gold and flowery antique china she inherited from her great aunt.

McDougal’s creations, with their muted pastel glazes and birds — whether as 3-D sculptures perched on a bowl’s edge, in relief form on the side or added via ceramic decals — are ultra feminine, unapologetically so.

“Katy has done in a relatively short time what every art maker is striving for,” observes Atlanta potter Rick Berman, a Pace Academy ceramics teacher, “which is to create their own way or style so that the work and the maker become one.”

McDougal’s singular approach is not a sales strategy, though standing apart from the pack can have that advantage. Instead it’s an expression of her individuality, something that she’s been working at for all of her 36 years.

“I’m trying to emulate my grandmother’s time in my art as well as my domestic life,” allows the mom of 18-month-old Violet and wife of Wayne Pelletier, a graphic design creative director. “I just think of how people find comfort in antiques and love to think of an object having a story. Each of my pots has its own story. It’s just that the story is a record of my everyday life as a wife, mother and artist.”

McDougal’s creative plotline began in 1992 when she was a Louisiana State University math major who found her accounting classmates boring and, on a whim, enrolled in a ceramics course. Having never taken an art class, she realized, being surrounded by artists, that she was one. She would work all night making sculpture that explored her identity as a young woman and her relationship with nature.

“It was wonderful how these emotions that I had always felt so strongly could manifest themselves outside of me and be such a release,” she recalls of her early art making.

At LSU and then after she transferred to the Appalachian Center for Crafts in Smithville, Tenn., she struggled with issues of wanting to be strong and not depend on males to define her, fighting what she thought was society’s belief that men were somehow better than women.

Looking back, she knows some of that stemmed from her parents’ divorce when she was 10. Her mom, a rare female computer programmer at the time, moved to North Carolina, leaving her and her brother to be raised by her dad. “In my mind, the lesson was that a woman either had to pursue a professional life or have a family,” she recalls. “You had to focus on one or the other.”

McDougal, who moved to Atlanta in 1998 and has worked in a variety of roles in Callanwolde Fine Art Center’s pottery studio, ultimately decided that there was some gray possible between the black and white. She could be a bit of her grandmother, a domestic goddess who showered her with undivided love, and some of her career-driven mom, who’s now tearing down walls as an Episcopal priest.

While attending graduate school at Georgia State University, she found more food for thought about roles during research into rural Moroccan pottery. Women there create elaborate patterns, some symbolizing birds, on the pottery with which they prepare meals, even on the clay walls of their below-ground homes.

“What stuck with me was that if a husband referred to his wife as a partridge, it was a huge honor,” McDougal recalls. “So I started thinking of birds as a metaphor for myself and where I was in the ‘What does it mean to be a woman?’ dialogue I started with myself long ago.”

Dating and then marrying her husband, a partner with whom she shares love and respect, and settling into their cozy home near the East Lake Golf Club finally brought comfort and clarity. And a motif that’s become very much part of her.

“Even though I didn’t see it very clearly, the idea of nesting was right there in front of me,” McDougal says. “Every day my work would fluctuate between birds in cages, to birds in flight, eggs... It wasn’t until after I made nesting bird bowls that I made the connection of birds to my emerging family.”