Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Hands and hearts
Artisan pins her hopes on Clothesline Fair.
ometimes a pot is just a pot, and a pumpkin is just a pumpkin.
But sometimes a piece of pottery comes with a piece of its maker’s soul. For Katie Carnahan, “taking some mud and turning it into something somebody can use and enjoy feels good.”
“I believe Mom told you that the pottery has been a kind of therapy for her, and I would confirm this,” says her daughter, Katherine Thacker. “In pottery she found a sense of purpose and a community of people with similar interests. She takes lithium to manage her bipolar disorder, and she has often said that, while lithium keeps her from having a manic episode, it is not enough to control the depression. Pottery has done more for her in this area than anything else.”
Thacker and her husband, Jeremiah, might be called Carnahan’s apprentices: They — and their children — are learning to do what she cannot. “I used to do it all — throw the pots, fire the pots, glaze the pots,” Carnahan says. “But now I just throw the pots and glaze the pots.” Carnahan explains that when she lost her leg in a hit-and-run accident in 2002, her husband, Curtis, took over loading and unloading kilns and handling hot pots for finishing techniques like Raku. Then Curtis was diagnosed with cancer.
“When he got sick the second time, they had to move back here to be closer to family,” Thacker says. He died in January 2015. “It has taken a long time to get her pottery up and running on the little resources that she has,” her daughter goes on.
“Moving a pottery studio complete with gas kiln is a big job anyway! Add to that her growing physical limitations, and the task has stretched out to take longer than we had hoped.”
This weekend, however, Carnahan will celebrate returning to the Prairie Grove Clothesline Fair, where she has been a vendor for about 25 of the fair’s 66 years.
“This is the only show I’ve been doing for years,” she says of the Labor Day event hosted by the Arts Center of the Ozarks, the Prairie Grove Lions Club and Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park. “I don’t really love the selling part, but the Clothesline Fair is a family reunion kind of thing. You see a lot of people you haven’t seen for ages! And now, I’m breaking my kids and grandkids in.”
Carnahan says she started throwing pots in 1976, when she took a class with Don Curtis at the University of Arkansas. “Then I took some time off to have four children!” When she went back to school in 1990, she worked with Curtis, loading kilns, mixing glazes and so forth. When he retired in 2000, she built a studio in Prairie Grove, then spent 12 years in Alicia — near Jonesboro — with her husband. Now, she’s back in her childhood home and turning the milk barn into a studio.
“There’s something therapeutic but also a little unsettling about moving into the home you grew up in,” she says with a quiet laugh. “I can hear conversations in the corners!”
The Raku and horsehair pots she’ll take to the Clothesline Fair are not really her traditional work. They’re what she can make without the gas kiln hooked up.
“I like to do functional, mostly,” she says. “I do a lot of leaf designs where I actually put a leaf in the pot and get the veining and everything. And I’ve probably made and sold more coffee cups than anything. It’s nice if something is beautiful and has a function.
“What I take to the Clothesline Fair will be the first things made in my studio here — where I’m planning to be for the next 30 years!”
“Our entire family has benefited from Mom’s pottery,” Thacker says. “Not only do we enjoy the finished pieces, but we have gotten to practice our own creativity, and now her grandchildren are getting to spend time hand-building and learning to throw. We are so grateful for events like the Clothesline Fair that keep these wonderful craft traditions alive.”