Stella Vognar
Ferryville, Wisconsin
 

“As long as I can remember I’ve made things with my hands, says Stella Vognar, who was born in Pula, Croatia. “I have this need to express things in a visual way.” And clay is “the most direct medium for working with my hands.”

 When she was five years old her family, sponsored by an uncle, emigrated to Chicago. Her physician father served a residency there and then moved his family to Mt. Horeb and later Ft. Atkinson, Wisconsin.

Vognar studied at the University of California Los Angeles where she earned a bachelors and then a master of fine arts degree in oil painting in 1984.  But soon after, as she tells it, “I wanted to make myself a dinnerware set” and got involved in ceramics. “I never went back to oil painting,” although she has begun doing some watercolor painting.

Between 1980 and 1990 she worked as a gallery manager, a framing consultant, a designer for Disneyland and, from 1987 – 1990, gallery director for the non-profit Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, California. Between 1990 and 2006 she taught a variety of art courses, including art appreciation, art history, ceramics, drawing and print making, at colleges in Southern California.

In 2006, Stella and her husband, California native and fellow surfer Dave Carroll, moved back to Wisconsin, settling in the rolling countryside outside Ferryville. They built a bright and airy studio, which Stella shares with the couple’s beekeeping operation.  She and Dave are members of the Ridge and Valley Bee Keepers Association, for which she was a board member, secretary and treasurer. They also have a small herd of long horn cattle.

Creating hand-built and wheel-thrown ceramic vessels and functional one-of-a-kind ceramic pieces, Vognar imprints them with organic designs, letting nature inspire her surface textures and glazes. Her unique wheel-thrown pieces are stretched from the inside, creating a texture similar to cracked earth.

“I’m doing more hand building now than working on the wheel,” she said recently. “Shapes are becoming softer and I am using more organic colors.”

She enjoys experimenting with the various glazes and different firing techniques, like raku firing and horsehair fuming, enjoying both “happy accidents and unhappy disasters,” and always learning from the process.

There are differences in the pieces Vognar creates; some are functional, which she describes as craft, for practical use. Others, which are non-functional and aesthetic in purpose, are designed to raise awareness and understanding.

The move to Wisconsin did not mean leaving teaching, however.  Vognar is now teaching ceramics at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.  She brings her own experiences and her own pieces into her teaching, giving students opportunities to learn along with her.

 She maintains contacts with former students, saying that the most rewarding aspect of teaching is seeing the effect of her teaching on the life and work of her former students.

Vognar exhibits her work at the Viva Gallery in Viroqua and the Kaleidoscope Gallery in Mt. Horeb’s Huff Mall. She has also exhibited at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Wilshire Art Gallery, and numerous other shows in Southern California.  She is one of the featured artists at the Driftless Area Art Festival, and has donated works for the Festival’s spring fund raising gala. 

She also works on commission, currently creating decorative tiles for a home in Minneapolis and works for the Long Branch Gallery in Mineral Point, Wisconsin.

Copper Creek Studio, 608-734-9660 stella004@centurytel.net