Marcy Eady • July 2006

A Pot Full of Fun

By Tara Roberts

The kids, dressed in oversized and faded T-shirts, are bent to their task intent on finishing in time. Some sit in metal folding chairs pushed close around four or five narrow tables. Others stand focusing on their projects and working quietly. A few more roll out long snakes of reddish brown clay to coil around their pots, building up the sides layer by layer.

Walking among them, adding an extra hand here and a word of encouragement there, is Marcy Eady.

The kids, all members of the Boys and Girls Club, are at the Arts and Design Society workshop in Fort Walton Beach learning about pottery. Eady, ADSO’s executive director, is also the workshop instructor. She is teaching the group how to make coil, slab or pinch pots. Each young artist is able to make two pots during the workshop. Once finished, the children will leave the pots to dry and be fired in a kiln.

Despite their intermittent grumbling about “mine doesn’t look like hers,” or “this isn’t working,” it is still obvious they are having fun, and for Eady, that is the whole purpose.

“If it’s not fun, why do it?” Eady asks.

Eady has been director of the ADSO for the past 10 years, and she also teaches adults and children the art of pottery.

As an accomplished artist in her own right, Eady has her pieces on display in the ADSO gallery. She has won numerous awards for her sawdust fired pottery, and her slab and coil pots.

Art, Eady says, isn’t just something she does – it is something she is.

When she planned her college career, Eady decided she wanted to do “something that feeds my soul.” An art degree later, and a few more years along, Eady found a way to express herself. Whether it is her pottery or painting, Ea dy tends to lean toward the abstract.

Eady enjoys the unpredictability of working with clay. “Clay tends to turn out on the odd side,” she explains.

She prefers using more hands-on techniques, such as coiling and pinching – the methods the Club kids are learning.

Coiling, she explains, is taking long rolls of clay and “coiling” them around a base and building one on top of the other. The inside of the pot is smoothed out, while the ridges of the coils remain on the outside giving the pot a unique texture. Pinch pots are made by pinching a ball of clay into a shape.

“After I could throw three or four pots on the wheel in one day, I stopped using that,” she says.

It’s that hand building of a pot that Eady loves – the feel of the clay and working to make something out of nothing. “For me, it truly is in the making”

When she is teaching a class, Eady tries to help her students understand that everyone’s project is different and special just like they are. No two will be alike and no two should be.

“They turn out different,” she explains. “No worse, no better.”

Adults, Eady says, are more stubborn about letting their child-like enthusiasm loose. Yet, once they begin and learn what their limits are, they will open up and let their creative juices flow.

A few more years down the road Eady said it will be time to retire from her paperwork job, but not from art. She will always find a way to be creative. “There is a part of me that has to be fulfilled.”

As the kids clean up their muddy tables, they turn and walk by their projects that Eady has gathered for drying. No two look even remotely the same, and each child tilts their head and smiles at their own artistic attempts.

About the Gallery
The ADSO Art Gallery is located at 17 First Street, SE in Fort Walton Beach. Gallery hours are from noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

Currently the main gallery is hosting "On the Menu" through July 16, featuring member works of art focusing on edible models. Eady's "Pineapple Anyone?" features a coil pot pineapple.

For more information about ADSO workshops or a class schedule, call (850) 244-1271.