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10/06/2021 08:30 AMIn a recent photo, Nicole Ginzburg shares an excited smile as gigantic, yellow and black polka dot sculpture undulates joyfully in the distance. Now, the photo appears at the Guilford Art Center (GAC) website, helping to introduce Nicole as GAC’s new resident potter.
Nicole loves the photo of her encounter with contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Dancing Pumpkin, which is currently on exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden, together with many other of Kusama’s large-scale works, through Oct. 31.
“A lot of them have motifs of plants and these organic, moving, beautiful ideas. and a lot of very graphic details like the polka dots. It was really exciting to see,” says Nicole, who earned her bachelor’s degree in industrial design, with a minor in ceramics, from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2021.
While she works on a much smaller scale than the Kusama sculptures on display, “...I really do really like to explore color and texture,” says Nicole, who likes to work in clay using a technique known as hand-building.
“I like to show people the things that I make I make with my hands,” she says. “I like the idea of leaving finger prints in my work, because clay is such an organic, raw material, and I like to express that a lot.”
Since Sept. 20, Nicole has been happily at work with clay, and enjoying the perks of the facilities and materials at her fingertips, in her new residency at the GAC campus at 411 Church St.
“They have a large amount of clay at your fingertips- four different kinds of clay—that’s already three more than my school had. They have Raku, which is so hard to find anywhere,” says Nicole. “They have a glaze room where you can make your own glazes. Even the amount of glazes and quality of glazes they have is exceptional. And they have a huge, outdoor kiln.”
Nicole is at GAC Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays as well as during planned practice sessions. For the next year, Nicole will work, learn, and share her talents at GAC, culminating in a special exhibit of her work at GAC in August 2022. Nicole also loves learning from others and says there’s plenty of experience to be gained by sharing time in the GAC pottery studio with students, teachers, and artists.
“Even in my first few weeks here, I’ve learned a lot and noticed how knowledgeable every student is. They’ve been around clay for much longer than I have,” she says. “And they do have questions for me, too. I’m very happy to answer any technical questions or questions about my work in general.”
To date, Nicole’s work has favored the functional side of pottery, although she likes “toeing the line a little bit.” One of the exciting elements of her new residency is that it will give her time to explore and expand her work.
“Hopefully, in this next year at GAC, I’m going to explore my more conceptual side a little bit more,” she says,
Nicole’s family immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1989; she speaks Russian fluently. As a first-generation American, Nicole grew up in a city just outside of Boston: Newton, Massachusetts. With plans to move to New Haven after graduating from Pratt, Nicole was researching studios in Connecticut when she found out about GAC’s unique potter in residence program.
From that point on, “applying for the residency was my main focus, alongside my major,” says Nicole. “Seeing as how it was the only residency program in Connecticut, I really worked hard on my portfolio while I was at Pratt for the last semester I was there. I was really trying hard for it.”
Non-profit GAC’s resident potter position, offered annually since 2015, is designed to provide the resident with “time and space to develop their own art, while contributing to the workings of a communal pottery studio,” according to information supplied by GAC.
Nicole’s experience at the Pratt Institute Ceramics Studio includes her work as a studio technician from 2019 to 2021, during which she also served as president of the Pratt Institute Ceramics Studio Club. In 2019, she interned during the summer as a ceramics technician and teacher with Clay by the Bay in San Francisco. At Pratt, she earned the Presidential Scholarship and was named to the President’s List.
Her accomplishments are all the more impressive when you learn Nicole only started to seriously work with clay as a Pratt sophomore. She was inspired during a history of industrial design course, where she learned about artist and designer Eva Zeisel, a Hungarian-born American industrial designer famed for her work with ceramics. Zeisel passed away in 2011, at the remarkable age of 105.
“She lived a very long and very, very fruitful life,” says Nicole. “She was a big part of the mid-century industrial design-accessible design movement, and she was a ceramicist who made these beautiful slip-cast forms.”
Nicole was taken with the Zeisel’s creations of accessible, hand-held tactile objects, and realized the design form could be something she could pursue.
“There was something about that process that struck me as something I really could fall in love with,” says Nicole.
She started by taking a wheel throwing course at Pratt. While it fit her idea of constructing vessels and other functional objects, it was a hand-building course which put Nicole on her path of exploring texture and form in clay.
“So it all stemmed from Eva Zeisel,” says Nicole.
Like Zeisel, Nicole also works in the industrial design realm, currently with an Oxford firm that is providing a flexible schedule to help Nicole undertake her GAC residency.
“Industrial design is very analytic and technical; and a lot of problem solving goes into it,” says Nicole. “I think that idea transfers very well into ceramics when I’m hand-building and trying to figure out how to do it.”
If she does find some spare time, Nicole says she would love to take some of the interesting classes offered at GAC, with weaving and blacksmithing currently topping her wish-list. But for the most part, she plans to spend her time at GAC working in clay and expanding her creativity in the medium.
“Having this residency and allowing myself to explore in clay, and still having that industrial design perspective, I’m just going to start in scratch and see where it takes me,” says Nicole. “I’m going to take this next year to totally immerse myself in this new step in my life.”
Guilford Art Center is happy to announce its popular fundraiser, Soup for Good TO GO, is back this year on Sunday, November 21. Tickets, $40, include a handmade bowl by GAC potters, a choice of 3 homemade soups, bread, a split of wine, and a sweet. Participants will also receive a discount coupon for The Shop at GAC and be entered into a prize drawing. Guests will pick up their soup and bread "to go" at GAC on Sunday, November 21 from 2 – 4 p.m. Tickets are available here Learn more about GAC at guilfordartcenter.org.