Kay Campbell
Ferryville, Wisconsin
 

If a successful artist is one whose work attracts buyers, then Kay Campbell has been successful from the very first, while still a student decades ago. As pleasing as that may be, Campbell insists that she remains a student of the ancient art of potting, especially of the work of master potters of the Far East.

Kay Campbell, award-winning Driftless Area artist, is a charming blend of self-assurance and humility, fascinated with the challenge of exploring new approaches to her work yet comfortable talking about pottery with visitors to her studio and gallery in the tiny Mississippi River village of Ferryville.

Campbell has been a potter for 21 years. She has two workshops, one on the 180-acre farm she shares with her husband, Gordon, and the other, at the studio she established in a converted bank building in the village of Ferryville, which she calls Kay’s Potiques. Her specialty is high-fired stoneware and her pots, vases and platters reflect her admiration for the work of late Japanese and Chinese artists.

A native of Prairie du Chien, she says she has “always” wanted to be a potter but, after studying at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, delayed her pursuit of her art because of the demands of being a wife, mother and operator of the farm the family purchased in 1976 while Gordon, a boilermaker, traveled extensively.

The Campbells moved to the Ferryville-area farm from Lansing, Iowa, and tried raising beef and hogs. But, after ten years of trying, they decided “we were getting nowhere.” So Gordon resumed work as a boilermaker, the couple began renting out their arable land and Kay mixed pottery with the task of managing their rental properties in the area.

Gordon, now retired, is helping with the construction of a new gas-fired kiln at the farm and has ambitious projects of his own, building a small foundry and restoring vintage tractors. Their daughter, Dawn, an artist in her own right, lives in Telluride, Colorado. Her work hangs proudly in the Campbell home.

The gas-fired kiln will bring her inventory of kilns to three and allow her to fire her work at temperatures of up to 2,600 degrees. It will occupy its own small building adjacent to the spacious workshop housing her other two kilns, both electric, two potting wheels, work tables and abundant storage space for ingredients for her clays, porcelain and glazes and work in various stages of completion

She spends winters working in her studio at the farm and does all of her firing there. During the summer months she throws pots on a wheel at her gallery, where she enjoys meeting visitors, talking about pottery, explaining how she approaches her art and even critiquing the pieces visitors bring to her.

“I’m often asked if I will begin teaching and I really would like to. But teaching pottery takes more time, workspace and equipment than I have right now. But I want to teach. It’s a way of ‘giving back.’”

Much of Campbell’s work is functional art, combining practical shapes with deft touches of texture, color and whimsical detail. She employs a variety of firing techniques – pit, raku and reduction firing among them – depending on the type of piece she’s making and the effects she seeks. It is at the glazing stage where Campbell does most of her experimentation.

“I mix my own glazes and I keep looking for one that will knock the glazing community on its ear,” she says with a twinkle. Commercial glazes are stable, predictable and much less work but would limit her ability to experiment, she says.

But inventing new glazes is a mixed bag, she explains.  “It can be very boring work,” she says, requiring the precision of a chemist and the discipline to maintain detailed records. She keeps three by five file cards of her glaze recipes, noting “there is no way I could remember all the glazes I’ve tried. It would be sad to come up with a real winner and then not remember how I did it.”

Even though Campbell describes herself as a solo, self-taught artist, she is an avid student of the published works of renowned potters, including the late Japanese master, Shoji Hamada, as well as that of Paul Soldner, Bernard Leach, and Warren MacKenzie. And any lists of artists who’ve influenced her work, she says,must include Len Stach, her first pottery teacher at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse.

Campbell maintains a website presence at www.kpotiques.com, a site created for her by her daughter where numerous samples of her work can be seen.

Interview by Brad Niemcek
Photographs by Brad Niemcek and Jerry Quebe