There’s No Monkeying Around with This Pottery

There’s No Monkeying Around with This Pottery

By Joe Motheral

Monkeytown Pottery occupies a prominent place in the small town of Bluemont in western Loudoun County in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Amy Oliver has been holding court there for some time engaging in her favorite activity: making pottery.

She credits her mother with getting her interested in art. As a little girl she liked coloring, and her mom taught her to draw and to “look at something and observe the details— to simply draw what you see.”

After taking art classes in high school, she studied drawing at Northern Virginia Community College. Her awakening to ceramics came when she attended James Madison University and “when I discovered ceramics, it was love at first throw.”

An intricate Monkeytown Pottery Creation

Oliver described her work as “Stoneware functional with an artistic kind of twist.” She uses a mixture of various clays from a Georgia company she’s able to buy locally. She blends the clay with a bit of water and, “I throw pots on a Potters’ Wheel” before it goes into a kiln twice, the first time at 1,800 degrees and the second at 2,200 degrees.

“I glaze after the first firing,” Oliver said, “but I dip the pots in ‘slip’ before any firings and when they are leather hard I carve the drawings in. Slip and glaze are different things and I do both.”

Slip consists of a liquid mixture of slurry or clay and/or other materials while glazing can include silica and various metal oxides.

Her main products these days are vases and pots. One of her unfinished creations was marked with a message that reads “Has the slip but hasn’t been fired.”

“I just stare at the pot and something comes up,” she said of her creative process. “Like the clouds that look like a dragon.”

She posted an owl on the pot and added, “I just kind of use my imagination. It literally goes around the pot. An owl rides a horse. I do like to put a horse in every now and then. It gives the animal something to sit on.”

She makes many mugs because they are her most marketable item. “If you can drink out of something that is a work of art it just kind of improves your life,” she said. “I love to draw nature, especially birds that have a lot of personality and trees. I think I started drawing the birds just to decorate the trees. I carve in the trees first.”

Oliver teaches three ceramic classes a week and opens her studio twice a year for visitors. Her teaching motivates her and “I really love doing this.”

Her pottery can be seen at the Booth and Nadler Gallery in Marshall and the Tin Tip Art and Handmade Gallery in Winchester. A number of local businesses sell her pottery, and it’s also available at the Buchanan Hall Farmer’s Market in Upperville. And why Monkeytown? Oliver said her great grandfather owned the same property she now occupies and had a private zoo populated by monkeys, a chimpanzee and a mountain lion.

“The authorities came along one day and told him his zoo was illegal and he would have to shut it down,” she said. And so, he followed their instructions by simply opening all the cages and releasing them.

Monkeys were soon all over town. The pottery came many years later.