Photography contributed by JOSH AND JUSTINE RILEY, PANTHER CREEK POTTERY
Josh and Justine Riley share a passion for their art at Panther Creek Pottery.
Take the wheel Panther Creek Pottery: molded with passion
T
he pottery wheel helped Josh and Justine Riley find one another. It also led them to others with a passion for pottery. They call them “our people.” “I got a degree in something besides art at Murray State, but I had found the clay community, and I love those folks,” says Josh Riley. “I went to go try a clay class, and it was just obvious, without a doubt, that these were my people. I could understand them. I just knew that I had to pursue it.” For the past 18 years, he has been doing just that — creating, teaching and learning. He traveled to Florida and met Justine at St. Petersburg College in the fall of 2007. All of those roads led him back home in 2009 and to the creation of Panther Creek Pottery, named for the nearby creek that
12 | July/August 2020
Story by JOHN CLAYTON
winds through the Western Kentucky hills. He finished at Murray State after studying computer science for four years before unearthing a passion for pottery. Justine Riley majored in the art form, finding a bond with the wheel just as Josh had done hundreds of miles away in Kentucky. She quickly adopted the major after her initial ceramics class. “It was my first art class, so I was also falling in love with the processes of art,” she says. “I walked by a ceramics studio and said, ‘You can get credit for doing that?’” she recalls. “Josh had his afternoons free and was just playing in clay.” The romance had begun, and so did the unofficial beginnings of Panther Creek Pottery. “I guess when we met each other, it started then,” she says. WK&T Telecommunications Cooperative
