“I’m someone who just loves to play. I’m not really tied to the outcome,” says ceramic artist Emma Terry. It’s a laid back, experimental approach that allows her to try different things. Terry may feel like she’s playing, but she’s actually stretching her creative muscles, expanding both her skill and imagination, through trial and error. You can see the results in “Keepers of Wonder,” a show featuring a variety of whimsical, sculptural pieces on view at New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery through September 16.
Terry began work on an expansive ceramic seascape after a snorkeling excursion to the island of Roatán; she was so blown away by the experience, she wanted to immortalize it. This desire has particular significance for her because she has the neurological condition aphantasia, and can’t make mental images in her head. “When I close my eyes, it’s just completely black,” says Terry. “I thought when people said ‘imagine yourself on a beach,’ it was metaphorical. I didn’t realize that some people can actually see the beaches. I wanted to capture what I was seeing under the water because I can’t bring it into my head again.”
And while she can’t conjure up the image of a memory, she does know conceptually what things—like sea urchins—look like. For the seascape, Terry made a stand evoking a coral reef with shelves, openings, and deep recesses on which to arrange various ceramic pieces. In addition to recognizable sea creatures like the seahorse and octopus, she punctuates the arrangement with amusing little touches, using abstract shapes and squiggles to suggest other animals or flora she observed underwater.
Terry’s diminutive mid-century modern rooms are almost as fun to look at as they must have been to make. It’s not surprising to learn that the style choice, which provides such rich fodder for Terry, is also her chosen decor at home. Growing up she’d fill a dollhouse with items she made out of paper. Now with clay, the possibilities are endless and each room boasts a variety of intricate details—there’s a lava lamp in the bedroom and even an old-school vibrator with an electric cord on a shelf next to the bed. The shag carpet was made with a garlic press.
It was thanks to a prompt by City Clay teacher Steve Palmer, asking students to make covered vessels inspired by Egyptian canopic jars, that Terry’s “Gimme Dolls” came into being. Canopic jars were used to hold the organs of mummified corpses, but Palmer was interested in them because they were adorned with animals specific to a family and he wanted his students to produce their own versions. Terry’s “Gimmes”—aliens who live on a planet called Glona—have been part of her life since age 6, when she wrote a story about them. “‘Gimmes’ have shown up multiple times in my practice,” says Terry. “I sewed them for all my friends’ kids.” Rendered in clay, they are simply marvelous with their wild eyes and crazed grimaces. They could be supremely unsettling if not for the soft candy-colored hue of the glazes. The combination creates something that, as Terry puts it, is terrible and adorable all at once.
To produce her protest Marys, Terry made slip casts from a plaster mold, attaching the crowns subsequently. Terry plans to donate proceeds from the sale of these to an anti-ICE or immigrant assistance program. “I’m so mad this is happening,” she says. “I’m not religious at all—in fact, I’m an atheist; it burns me that people use religion to justify the terrible things we’re doing.”
“‘Wonderkeepers’ are what I call my little shrines that are intended to hold things—a feather, a pebble, a bit of sea glass—you find on your walks. They speak to the awe and wonder in the world that I see and collect and try to create and make,” she says. The “Wonderkeepers” come in a variety of shapes and sizes—there’s even a tiny one in Terry’s mid-century living room.
Terry will host a community pin-making event at the gallery on August 22, and it will be transformed on September 4 and 5 into a pop-up market featuring work by ceramic artists from Milkweed Clay Studio, of which Terry is a member.
This is Terry’s first show, soon to be followed by another featuring a different body of work, at Second Street Gallery in October. In spite of the flurry of professional activity, she remains humble. “I only claimed the title of artist in the last couple of years,” she says. Nevertheless, Terry, who by day is the programs and communication director for UVA Arts and special assistant to the university’s vice provost for the arts, comes to the title naturally. Her father is a photographer and writer and her late mother, Georgia Terry, was a painter and multimedia artist who ran but is it art?, a co-op gallery in Carytown.
“Because of my Mom, we had lots of material around the house. I was always making something, whether it was paper, crafts, or sewing projects,” she says. It wasn’t until 2023 when Terry took a class at City Clay that she found her path. “Everything I liked to make or wanted to make, I could do with clay because it’s such a versatile material.”
Emma Terry’s “Keepers of Wonder” is on view at New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery through September 16.
