Louisville Magazine

FEB 2014

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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the permanent collections of the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, and he was embraced by private collectors such as Al and Mary Shands, whose important ceramics catalog will be donated to the Speed Art Museum at the completion of that institution's new building. But Ferguson's life and work took an unexpected turn six years ago when an auto accident rendered him sightless in his right eye, leaving him without depth perception and unable to create in the medium that he loved so much. "I work in three dimensions and all of a sudden the world was fat," he says. "I realized that I would never be the same person that I was before." Ferguson started writing, and the subject became his own life. "Quickly, short stories, songs and poems came out of me. I began to sketch, at least 300 drawings and paintings that dealt with childhood experiences and issues that matter to me — mountaintop removal, climate change. Ten I began working on a personal narrative, a history. I began talking about my own life," he says. Ferguson's personal history is a rich and speckled one — think a combination of Hunter S. Tompson and Georgia O'Keefe. Ferguson, whose father was in the military, joined the service himself at 15, got found out and spent some time in the stockade; he married, traveled, lived on communes and became a hippy and a biker and a teacher and an artist and, eventually, a middle-aged man. In time, after his life-changing car accident, Ferguson's eye adjusted and he got back to the clay. He discovered that "all my storytelling, my poems and drawings started infuencing my work." His pottery refected his stories. As we talk in his Clifton Heights studio, he works on a bust of his father, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Ferguson himself. And as he tells stories of his childhood, he gently scrapes of a bit of clay to form a familiar nose and a patrician ear, creating his father right in front of my eyes in three dimensions. He shows me a pot, very old and worn-looking, with small indentations on the lip, and explains to me that this embellishment is not of any use other than a way for the potter, long since gone, to say, "I made this." Tis is the implied use of this vessel; it not only holds water but history. "I don't sign any of my work," he says, "because I know that in years to come, if I have done my job correctly, I can be identifed by what I make. A hundred years from now someone could look at one of my pieces and say, 'Tat is the work of Wayne Ferguson. He made these pots.'" Wayne Ferguson will have a one-man show at Craft(s) Gallery in the Guthrie Coke building (572 S. Fourth St.) March 7 to April 18. For more information, visit craftslouisville.com or call 584-7636. Artfully funny: Three polymer-clay self-portraits (top photo) of Ferguson's past hairstyles; a row of face jugs, including a carny, a coal miner and a "peckerhead" politician; and (bottom) ceramic pigments and other sculpting supplies. 2.14 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 83

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