Piedmont Clayworks is a wood-fired and woman-powered pottery studio
We create one-of-a-kind, handmade pieces and offer pottery classes 7 days a week.
About JulieRose of Piedmont Clayworks
Born and raised in Durham, North Carolina JulieRose has been crafting and creating art from the earth since she was a child. After graduating from SUNY Purchase with a double major in Anthropology and Media, Society and the Arts Julie went on to spend three years working as a Butcher in Brooklyn, New York. It was here that she began to form a deeper understanding and appreciation for our connections to the earth and to ideas of sustainability and gender equality. After returning to North Carolina in the winter of 2016 Julie moved to Seagrove, North Carolina to learn how to make pots with fifth generation potter Sid Luck.
It was in Seagrove that Julie for the first time fully embraced the role of an artist and fell in love with clay and the North Carolina pottery community. While working with Sid Luck Julie mastered wheel throwing and wood firing techniques that she continued to develop during her six month residency at the North Carolina Pottery Center in early 2019. Through playful representations of the female body and contrasting traditional forms, her work aims to inspire joy and form tangible lines of connections between diverse groups of women.
In November of 2020 Julie co-founded Outer Loop Arts in downtown Durham. Outer Loop Arts is a collaborative art space focused on connecting community and building opportunities for local artist. Julie currently teaches classes and workshops out of her studio space at Outer Loop Arts and works part time as a studio assistant and teacher for Liberty Arts in Durham.
My work grapples with what it means to be a feminist, a woman, a maker, an activist and human being in todays media saturated world. Important to this are my experiences as a young woman working in mostly male dominated or championed fields such as butchery in New York City, and the wood-fire communities here in North Carolina. I draw deep connections between whole animal butchery and clay communities; both deal with raw products and their transformation into consumable goods, and both provide ample opportunity to study the inclusion, and often assumed or automatic exclusion of women in these stories and histories. In combining traditional North Carolina pottery techniques and forms with images and depictions of the naked female body, I hope to bring to light some of these questions and universal experiences of women.
