Published: March 01. 2011 2:00AM

By Ann Hicks
Contributing Writer

Ever wondered which one of nature’s shapes you’d pick to describe your life’s journey? Clay sculptor Alice Ballard, who turns 65 this year, has. In taking stock of her life up to now, she declares it spiral shaped.

While mention of nature’s spirals may conjure up galaxies, tornadoes or sunflowers, in Ballard’s case, life coils around butterfly wings, feathers, rocks, twigs, pods, bulbs, shells, driftwood and tiny bird eggs, collected since childhood days on walks and hikes in the woods and at the seaside.

Eventually, year by year over the last four decades, what nature gave her faithful collector has been transformed into beautiful, sensuous “white work” in Ballard’s inspired hands.

Her luminescent pieces are made with white earthenware. They are partially or wholly painted or air-brushed with white terra sigillata, a fine clay slip the consistency of whole milk, and burnished using old T-shirts or plastic grocery bags to a satiny-smooth finish.

The work is always hand-built using coil, slab and pinch methods. Though each piece is completely white, Ballard creates subtle differences in her pale sculptures by varying the degree of burnishing.

The artist says her color choice carries the emotional weight of what white means to her.

“When I look at these all-white forms taken from nature, I’m reminded of the great similarity that plants, animals and humans share. When all the individual pieces of one of my installations are white, it reminds me of the fact that everything in life is totally interconnected.”

The clay sculptor is currently at work on a large, multileveled, multilayered white work installation, “A Walk Remembered.” She describes it “as very strongly connected” to the journey of her life. It is part of a group show shared with three other artists slated to open in September 2011 at Winthrop University.

The multitiered path meandering for more than 30 feet is made vital with 40 individual sculpted pieces. Previous forerunners of “A Walk Remembered,” which were lesser in size and content, were shown through 2001-2006 at Charlotte’s Jerald Melberg Gallery, Asheville’s Blue Spiral 1 and most recently at Charlotte’s McColl Center for Visual Arts.

The work is shown low to the ground on pedestals that vary in size and height, and are spaced across the room in a way that encourages viewers to wander back and forth between pedestals, as if they are taking a casual walk.

Ballard says that for inspiration for this latest installation, she has reached all the way back to the childhood walks that set her artistic life onto its spiral-like journey.

The Florence, S.C., native, the child of an American diplomat, recalls how at age 5, on walks near her home, she began to notice the many exciting ways nature beckoned to her.

Accompanied by her little wirehair terrier, Suzy, which was clad in a matching jacket, Ballard explored the woods. Thus began Ballard’s lifelong fascination with nature’s bounty spread out on the ground. The artist says she was particularly drawn to tiny things that fit into the small wooden box that held her treasures.

While on vacations at her grandparents’ farm, her grandmother gave her corn and beans to plant anywhere in the well-groomed yard. She knew those seeds would sprout before Ballard would have to return home. She says watching her plants sprout cemented her absolute fascination with growing things. At age 6, she grew African violets with such success it fell to her mother to separate them into additional pots.

Taking stock of life

Setting priorities is Ballard’s New Year’s resolution. What really counts is family, friends, health, teaching and studio work. The latter, she says, will get much more of her attention.

Ballard earned her master’s degree in painting in 1969 from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and returned to South Carolina following college. She then was hired by the Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston to become its first curator of education.

The recent graduate became an arts educator but she also spiraled back to being a student. While teaching art at the Gibbes, an artist friend showed her clay work that she recently created in a workshop at North Carolina’s Penland School of Craft. It aroused in Ballard what she describes as “the possibilities inherent in clay” as a medium for her rather than painting.

Her passion for working with clay was ignited by rereading potter-philosopher Paulus Berenshon’s “Finding One’s Way with Clay.” This tome is a paean to the magic of earth, water and fire.

Today, she is a highly sought regional clay art teacher. With a broad smile, Ballard recalls how pleased, but also surprised, she was when Berenshon signed up for one of her recent classes at Penland.

An overwhelming tragedy struck her life when her husband of 13 years, Charlie Munn, with whom she had son Ryan, was killed in a 1983 airplane crash. The shock shut down the desire of the then-38-year-old Ballard to continue with her artwork. “My studio became the loneliest place for me in the world.”

Her exile from clay lasted 15 years. During that time she taught art in Charlotte and immersed herself in religious studies at UNC-Charlotte in Tao, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

Looking back, she says learning about the ancient religions of the Far East was her salvation in those dark days. It eventually led to a trip to India on a Fulbright Fellowship to study art, architecture and religion. She calls it “a key trip in her life and healing.” In a truly spiral fashion the Hindu connectedness to sacred trees reawakened in Ballard the longing for the woods and trees of home and the walks remembered.

The early 1990s also ushered in love and marriage and a move to Alaska with new husband, architect/artist Roger Dalrymple. During those years the couple worked together to create large mural works at schools across Alaska.

One of the things Ballard says she learned while working on the public art projects was how to integrate large installations within an architectural space, so the space and the artwork become one. As a result, she always visits the space where she plans to do a show as part of her creative process.

The couple relocated to Greenville in 1996, the same year Ballard took a job teaching art at Christ Church Episcopal Middle School.

The only thing that was still missing from Ballard’s universe was the spark to rekindle her desire to return to studio work. That spark materialized when close friend, artist Kitty Couch, suggested Ballard consider spending time at an international ceramic art colony in Resen, Macedonia. Couch, in a previous year, had spent a highly productive three-week fellowship there.

Ballard took Couch’s advice, and in August 1998 joined an elite group of artists from various countries at Resen. Ballard says working once more with clay during those turbulent Balkan War days amounted not only to an unforgettable experience, but also to a resolution that upon returning home she would resume working in her studio.

To memorialize those days, she plans to add to “A Walk Remembered” at least one meaty bell pepper in clay. The pepper is an abundant ingredient in Macedonian summer dishes, as well as Ballard’s nod to the clay colony.

“A Walk Remembered” will also commemorate Ballard’s 2004 trip to China, financially assisted by CCES and a Metropolitan Arts Council grant, where she sought and found one of her favorite shapes to sculpt: the long, slender pods of China’s native Royal Polonia tree.

Ballard says she’s not sure the Winthrop show will be the final one for her “A Walk Remembered” installation, but it will be the most comprehensive show of her spiral-shaped journey in life.