Ceramics Instructor All Fired Up

“Sorry I can’t show you these,” Annie Webster laughed as she peered at a gauge on the kiln in her Long Beach home studio. “It’s 1,000 degrees in there.”

On a recent Wednesday she was hustling to produce new ceramics for the Chadwick Art Faculty Showcase at the Zask Gallery. Webster is one of nine Chadwick art instructors who will exhibit works in the show, which begins Wednesday and runs through April 27. The gallery has moved once again, but it’s still here on the Hill, in the former J. Jill location at the Promenade on the Peninsula.

Artworks in various stages of completion take up every flat surface in Webster’s studio. Many are delicate, flattened bowls. Or are they shallow plates? Their impossibly thin walls and central wells make them look like poppies with one continuous circular petal. They can be placed on tabletops or hung on walls.

Webster says creating wall work “takes it out of the functional,” making it clear that these are fine art pieces, not dishware. The large, flaring rims are kept plain like oversized frames for details like colorfully painted centers or multicolored and patterned sticks laid across the plates.

“I love detail and pattern,” Webster said.

She also loves natural shapes. A pile of ceramic shells and leaves waits to be tied onto strings that will dangle from the edges of plates.

Leaves and poppies have recurred in her work for the past four or five years. So have pomegranates and seed pods, symbols of things that are not fully formed but full of expectation.

Giant colorless glass poppies extend across the top of a shelf. Webster created them at a workshop she recently completed at Pilchuck Glass School, which was founded by famed glass artist Dale Chihuly. She feels that the form and reflectivity of the bulbous flowers on their long, gently curving stems gave enough interest that they didn’t need color.

Poppies reappear in a series of monoprints. Since monoprints involve painting directly on a smooth surface to produce a single print with perhaps another “ghost” image, they gave her a chance to try her hand at painting again.

Webster enjoys making paper, mixing fine fibrous materials like cat whiskers, fine wire or threads into the paper pulp and shaping the sheets into wall art.

However, she fell in love with ceramics in high school.

“Clay is the one thing that just keeps me going," she said. "Maybe it’s the malleability of the material, the ability to work really thin. That interests me a lot.”

She summed up: “I picked a profession I’m passionate about. I tell [the Chadwick] kids, ‘Pick a job you’re in love with.’ ”

The Chadwick Art Faculty Showcase also includes paintings by Jane Bradbury, Kim Kohler and Bronwyn Towle; mixed-media ceramics by David Bradbury; photography by Doug Morgan; fused glass by Kim Straub and sculpture by M.C. Armstrong and Karla Cummins.