Clay Tells The Story
A dreadlocked country boy who grew up fur trapping, raising fighting cocks, driving his dad’s 18-wheeler, and playing golf, Joey Jones is a ceramic artist shaped by paradox. His art education has run the gamut from prestigious to folk. His functional moonshine jugs, hand painted with Southwest Virginia motifs of hounds, raccoons, rabbits, and cocks, reflect the influence of his country upbringing. His dramatic and sometimes disturbing sculptures are inspired by ancient Chinese bronze tea ceremony jars and explore themes of religion, politics, and eroticism.
Born and raised in rural Franklin Country, Virginia, to a family of tobacco farmers, Jones first became interested in making pots in the 7th grade when a middle school art teacher introduced him to a potter’s wheel. Working with clay came natural to the high school athlete with good hand-eye coordination, and his teacher was amazed by the result of his first effort at the wheel. “I’ve always liked the dirt. I was a dirty kid, always down at the river catching salamanders and in the mud,” Jones remembers.
An admitted “misfit” Jones says his mother shipped him off to Berea College in Kentucky to keep him out of trouble. As his rebellious tendencies played out, his work with clay gained momentum. After being “kicked out of Berea,” Jones took some psychology classes at Ferrum College in Virginia and informally taught a ceramics class there. He completed a scholarship semester at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and assisted with ceramics workshops at Peter’s Valley Craft Center in New Jersey. It was the teachers at Penland and Peter’s Valley who, recognizing Jones’s potential, pointed him in the direction of the Kansas City Art Institute, where he studied under Ken Ferguson, won ceramics awards, and received his Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts in 1989.
The Doors (one of his favorite bands) said “Go West,” and so Jones pursued graduate work at San Jose State, where he became known for his shows featuring giant sculptures and provocative performance art. During that time, he lived at “Last Chance,” an off-the-grid community north of Santa Cruz, known for its bohemian residents like Ken Kesey and other counter-culture refugees from the mainstream.
Although Jones completed all his post graduate credits, he became wary of what he felt was an “over-intellectualization of art” in his academic life and left San Jose before his graduation. With his partner expecting their first child (which turned out to be twins), he relocated back to Virginia to raise his sons and returned to Ferrum College to teach ceramics as an Associate Professor. Settling in the mountains of Floyd County – an area that had been drawing back-to-the-land artists and musicians from all over – Jones built a home and a pottery studio on a spread of woodland acreage, where he has been residing since 1993.
In the past, the studio potter was active in the juried art show circuit but eventually got burned out by it. After recently recovering from a diabetes-related kidney transplant, which disabled him for two years, Jones is back at his potter’s wheel, ready to re-devote himself to his art and share it with others. More concerned with emotional content than design technique, Jones’s work draws from his life and possesses an archetypical and shamanistic quality. Pointing to a group of his sculptured jars with half-human, half-animal clay figures balanced on the lids, he says, “The hounds are me. They tell the story of my life and how I’m seeing it.”
~ Colleen Redman