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In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, artist and educator Molly Morningglory has found herself reflecting on clay as a medium for creation, as well as a vehicle for connection, comfort, and resilience. With roots deeply embedded in the traditions of North Carolina ceramics, Molly’s journey has been shaped by her family’s legacy, particularly her mother, Maggie Jones, a regional studio potter whose work and relationships have inspired an outpouring of community support during challenging times.

In this interview, Molly shares the evolution of her artistic practice, from an early apprenticeship in production pottery to her explorations of conceptual, ephemeral, and immersive installations. Her recent experiences – navigating personal and communal loss, rebuilding after the flood, and creating spaces for community engagement – have shifted her focus toward objects and experiences that foster joy and comfort. Through her work at Arrowhead Gallery and Studios and her artistic endeavors, Molly is crafting more than clay; she’s cultivating spaces and moments that unite people.


Randi O’Brien (ROB): In thinking about our conversation, I have to confess that I was struggling to find a clear starting point. You have a complex artistic practice, and at the time of the flood, there were several variables that ranged from the tree that fell on your mother’s studio, Turtle Island Pottery, and health concerns, all of which impacted your family within a week of each other. Is there a place you would like to begin?

Molly Morningglory: It's hard to know where to begin.

My mom, Maggie Jones,  is a unique studio potter in that she's highly introverted and shy. She's been working as a potter for forty years but alone in the woods. She will do shows and whatnot, and people know about her, but she doesn't have a national footprint. But regionally, she is well known. Her experience during the storm has been incredible, and that is largely based on the relationships that her work has developed. 

As far as the idea of community and networking relationships goes for ceramicists, there are so many different ways of doing it, right? There's the intense community required in wood-fired pottery, a process-oriented community. Then there's the socially oriented community-based in community centers and collective art spaces. There's also the online community platform that happens mainly through sales and social media, as well as through the education delivered on those platforms. But then there's another subset of the community that doesn't get highlighted very much, the community that is created specifically through the work itself. People’s connection to her work brought an outpouring of support, both financial and emotional. What people gave of themselves because they loved her work blindsided her. She had no idea that people would be so invested in her recovery. The people who rose to help her were the ones who had been buying her work for forty years. 

ROB: Just to share a bit of my behind-the-scenes thinking – I'm focused on finding ways to feature luminaries in clay. While many artists gain recognition through social media, there’s this significant gap where some incredibly talented makers haven’t received the same visibility. These are the people who may not have been part of the social media wave but remain deeply active in their practice. They’re the scaffolding for the next generation, bridging the gap between the old school – like Shoji Hamada, Warren Makenzi, and Karen Karnes – and today’s rising stars. I’m trying to figure out how to celebrate this middle generation and honor their contributions to our community.

Early on during the disaster, I exchanged emails with your mom for this series, but it seemed like she had an incredible weight on her shoulders that required her focus. I hope to carve out time to reconnect with her for a feature that highlights her role in the ceramics community, focusing not just on the hardships she faced but also on her remarkable commitment to a life in studio ceramics.

You have a family connection to the area, which sets you apart from many of the other artists I’ve spoken to. Let’s start there. Your mom has an established studio practice in the region, and you’ve built on that foundation. Maybe we can dive into your history and see where the conversation takes us.

Molly: So my parents started training me in production pottery when I was four years old; I had my own little workbench in the studio, and I made work and sold it at craft shows with them. My professional practice kind of started at four years old, and then my childhood was pretty much an apprenticeship. I didn't even have house chores – I made a terrible college roommate because I only knew studio chores –  I could mix a glaze, but I couldn't make dinner. So, my childhood was definitely an apprenticeship. I learned how to throw when I was about nine years old, but I mainly stuck to hand-building. I created a lot of face jugs, but they weren't in the southern wood-fired tradition. They were more of a hybrid that paralleled comic books. I had cone six kilns at my disposal because of my parents, but I did wood-fire quite a bit. 

My first wood-fire experience was when I was about ten or eleven. It was at Burlon Craig's groundhog kiln at the Burlon Craig festival. A  groundhog kiln is a traditional and regionally-specific kiln to Catawba Valley. I don't know how much you know about groundhog kilns, and I don't want to take up too much time with that, but they're fascinating in that they are regionally-specific kilns. Ultimately, I got wood-firing experience early on and in a regionally-specific manner. 

And then, of course, I've done anagamma firings all over the country, but my interest in ceramics has gone through this arc of studio function, sculpting on vessels, to sculpture hybrid. I moved to Colorado after college, and breaking out of the region changed my perspective on how to use clay. I was not attached to any of the long-standing traditions of making in Colorado, so it opened up my understanding of how to use clay, and I moved into sculpture. I moved into sculpture off the pot.

Then, I met Patti Warashina in 2016, and she became incredibly influential in my artistic practice. I worked with her, assisting her at many different demonstrations and workshops over the next couple of years, and she pushed me toward the figurative sculpture that I had already been interested in but never jumped into. I worked with her for a few years, and then I went into grad school, where I transitioned again, focusing on conceptual and ephemeral work. I worked with performance and raw clay, incorporating unfired clay mixed with fibers. I also dyed fabric using elements from the landscape and captured the process on video. Then, I combined these craft materials with performance and video projection to create immersive, interactive installations.

ROB: It’s fascinating to see how you’ve grown up with the material and developed such a deep, intuitive connection to it – it’s like second nature to you, more instinctive than a deliberate process. Now, you’ve transitioned into exploring it from a philosophical perspective, researching materiality and nature. You’re looking at clay as something beyond form, uncovering its alternative potential.

Molly: Some of the conversations I had in grad school were interesting because they highlighted how this was second nature – like the language of clay and the language of the landscape. As a kid, I would go with my parents and friends to dig clay directly from the land, immersing myself in both the material and the landscape. Those experiences felt like first nature, more like a first language, shaping my relationship with clay in such an intrinsic way.

I came to this understanding in my research that this material can build relationships between the maker, the viewer, and the landscape. And so, that was an interesting conceptual way of coming home, in addition to physically moving back to Old Fort, here in North Carolina. We're thirty miles east of Asheville.

I haven't had a traditional studio practice in three to five years, partially because of my grad school experience. Being a full-time studio artist has a very different studio pace and practice than a graduate student. I had been a full-time studio artist for ten years before I went to grad school so that pace change was surprising. I was like, Wow, I'm making way less art in grad school than I was when I was a studio artist, right?

ROB: Listening to your transitional and creative arch and hearing how your current work manifests – when your art is deeply rooted in place and the environment –  maintaining a studio practice can be challenging. The ideas often originate in those specific settings, but the actual creation and outcome happen in these external, nontraditional spaces, which adds a layer of complexity.

Molly: Yeah. Since I graduated from grad school, my husband and I have been building a life in Old Fort, which is my hometown. The realities of this – of the market in this area – have changed a lot since the pandemic, and so it's been really, really challenging to find a place to live and establish a home base. We went under contract on a house on Monday, so it's happening. 

ROB: Congratulations!

Molly: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we've been looking for three years. I haven't had the bandwidth to focus on my studio practice, but I have been teaching ceramics at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College and then also working on building the clay program for Arrowhead Artist and Artisan League (also known as Arrowhead Gallery and Studios). We got $18,000 worth of kilns and wheels the week before the storm happened. That Thursday, when the pre-hurricane storm started flooding, was the day that I was planning on going in to plug everything in and test it. But I couldn’t get in with the waters rising. Nothing had been plugged in before it was submerged in the flood. It was the same with my private or personal studio; I had just gotten everything set up and was ready to start making things again. We got a solid three feet, maybe a little more, of mud through there.

Ultimately, my practice has evolved from a traditional studio-based focus to a deeper exploration of materiality during grad school – between material, person, viewer, and land. However, lately, I’ve been centering my work on the relationships between makers and the community. In many ways, my studio practice has shifted toward building community itself. While I’m still working with clay, I’m now more focused on sculpting community spaces.

ROB: In line with that, one of the questions I’ve asked a few artists is how the natural disaster affected their sense of community. More specifically, and I think it might have been too soon to ask some people, and it could be too soon for you as well, but since you're already thinking about community, I’m curious: How do you think this flood will affect your body of work? Because you’re coming from a more philosophical, socially-driven perspective, whereas the other artists I’ve spoken to are more focused on the object itself. For them, it doesn’t seem like the disaster will change their work much – unless it’s related to access to clay or materials. But for you, since your work is idea-driven, with a focus on connections, do you anticipate any changes, or do you see inspiration coming from this moment?

Molly: I've been thinking a lot about comfort and the things that bring me comfort, joy, and pleasure – the sustainability of emotion.

Emotional spaces act like weather; you experience the motion, but it moves through you. If you don't attach yourself to it, then you have more flexibility and more resiliency. But as far as going through a traumatic event like a natural disaster, this comes with a complex set of indescribably difficult emotions. Then, if that is sustained over time, and throw in the fact that you don't have much control over your circumstances, how do you facilitate the movement of those emotions through your body so that you can have or create or jump-start the resiliency?

One of the things that naturally happened in Old Fort was the community came together, and I know this happened across western North Carolina, but just from my own experience in Old Fort, we're a town of 800 people, and the water came right through the middle of town and devastated a lot of homes. A lot of those buildings just aren't there anymore or have had to be demolished since the storm. And when the storm happened, we were trapped. Every road to exit town has a bridge that was damaged, so we were entirely cut off for several days. 

   

   

My friends and I live right in the center of town. We set up a tent in the back and set up some camp stoves. We had propane tanks. Tangentially: One of the kids I grew up with works at the local hardware store and opened it the day after the storm with no electricity, no power, no nothing. She was taking cash only, writing hand receipts, and keeping inventory of everything. Because she understood people needed things. We didn’t have cell service, so she couldn’t get the express permission of the owners and managers, but it was that spirit of doing what needed to be done. Everyone was doing what was needed. 

And so in the evenings, when it would get dark, we would all gather for an evening meal in the tent out back. There were a couple of us who took it upon ourselves to make sure that this evening meal happened every day. It was a good two weeks, two and a half, maybe three weeks, where every single evening – except for maybe one, where everyone was just too, too exhausted – we had like around 20 people, at least sometimes more, sometimes fewer, gather for a meal. 

It was fun, it was sweet, it was joyful, it was sad, it was all the things. But we were co-regulating, you know, we were in it together. We were meeting up; we were doing the things that were comforting. Thinking about place making and my artistic practice, comfort was also felt in the candlelight, the meals, and the children running around; children being children and bringing a sense of normalcy there. And so, now that we're not in a communal, everyday situation with our friends and neighbors, I've been thinking: What are the things that engender that spirit of closeness and comfort? 

I’m interested in making candlesticks and candle holders, as well as small wall sculptures of strawberries. Strawberries are a source of comfort and joy for me, so they feel meaningful to incorporate into my work. I also want to focus on making mugs – specifically tea mugs and teacups. My friend Anya made me something years ago that’s been inspiring me: it’s a piece where you place a teapot on top of a stand that houses a candle, which keeps the tea inside warm. I’d love to make those as well.

My thinking has shifted a bit – it’s still centered on relationships, but now it’s more specifically about comfort, joy, and creating objects that foster those positive emotions. I want to craft pieces that help set a positive mood and sustain us through the chaos and extraordinary circumstances we’re all navigating these days.

ROB: To help contextualize this for our readers, and while we’re discussing candlesticks and teapot warmers, which are relatively small works, I can’t help but think about your installation work. Your past projects have been large-scale yet intimate, deeply connected to the body. When you talk about comfort as a full-body experience – sensing kids running around, the light, the smells, the setting, the air – it feels like a natural extension of your arch of artistic practices, uniting the vessel with the immersive experience.

In articles like this, it’s challenging to convey that fully, as we often focus on a single image or object. But your work is much more experiential, rooted in presence. Even your textile and fabric-driven environments require being there to fully understand them, to feel the space and the scale of the work as it relates to our bodies, making it difficult to capture their essence in words or photographs.

I’m excited to see where this leads. Knowing your artistic lineage, I can’t just picture these as isolated objects – I imagine a more expansive, immersive experience emerging from the ideas you’re cultivating.

Molly: That's a nice reflection. I have a feeling I'll probably get into rituals; creating a scene or setting with all of these different objects and creating a space for someone to enter.

I want to engender joy as much as I can and facilitate joy for people. This is one of the reasons I'm excited about the clay space, the community space at Arrowhead that I'm working on; I want to see people find joy in clay. 


You can explore more of Molly’s work by visiting her website Mollymorningglory.art and Instagram page @mollymorningglory.
 
To follow and aid the organizations and people mentioned in this article, Molly recommends:
2) Arrowhead Artists and Artisans League: https://arrowheadart.org/donations
3) Bounty and Soul has been feeding people for years in the Swannanoa Valley and is also one of the hardest-hit parts of western North Carolina https://bountyandsoul.org/ways-to-give/