On Friday, May 20, Studio B will help kick off Boyertown’s 150th anniversary weekend by featuring the work of Ken Standhardt, an award-winning, unique pottery of native-born potter. The community is welcome to the preview opening reception from 5 to 8 p.m.
Standhardt, who now resides in Oregon, has generously offered a collection of his unique fine art pottery to Studio B to exhibit and sell with all proceeds to benefit the studio, according to Linda Rohrbach-Austerberry, the fine art potter who first inspired him.
“It’s an incredible gift,” noted Rohrbach-Austerberry. The collection includes vases and pots with lids in assorted sizes and prices and lamps with shades, for example. All one-of-a-kind pieces will be on exhibit and for sale during Boyertown’s anniversary weekend.
“As a teenager, Ken watched me throw pots for 4 hours during the first Belsnickle Festival held at what was Boyer’s Store on the corner of Philadelphia and Reading Avenue,” Austerberry recalled. “He fell in love with creating pottery during that afternoon and hasn’t stopped creating it since. His work is amazing.”
Standhardt recalls spending most of his childhood outside in nature working his father’s farm, constructing dams at the creek, building forts in the woods, and hunting arrowheads in the fields after heavy summer thunderstorms. And after meeting Rohrbach-Austerberry, he recalls convincing his father, the late Clarence Standhardt, Boyertown’s Citizen of the Year 2005, to help him build a kickwheel. Ken’s love of the art led him to eventually specializing in a new form of folk art pottery he calls “Church Key Pottery,” nicknamed after a simple kitchen tool, a can and bottle opener.
Continuously exploring, he has developed dozens of distinct patterns that bear the influences of Pre-Columbian Native Americans and the work of ancient cultures from around the world. He credits the qualities of primitive vessels that were created by the process of pressing a layer of clay onto the interior surface of a basket. The interior pattern of the basket becomes the exterior surface of the clay vessel once fired, creating vessels with three strong elements: form, pattern, and texture. In nature he finds endless combinations of these elements to inspire his work.
Describing his process, Standhardt says “After I throw each vessel on the potter’s wheel and it dries leather-hard, I trim its rough edges and indent the exterior surface with a variety of handmade steel-tipped tools.
“In a single vessel, the number of indentations can vary from 500 to 5,000, each placed by hand and eye. Thus, no two vessels are ever the same. Each vessel is given further character by carving and incising the rim, again in the designs that reflect Pre-Columbian patterns and form.
“When the vessel is completely dry, it is fired to a stoneware temperature of 2150 degrees Fahrenheit. The vessels are very durable, require dusting with a clean, dry shoeshine brush or canned air to remove dust from the indentations. Vessels are dishwasher safe; glazed work is food and microwave safe and will last for generations.”
Standhardt has exhibited and won prestigious awards throughout the United States. His work is housed in the collections of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; the American Embassy, Bangkok, Thailand; Georgia Pacific, Atlanta, GA; and MCI, Washington, DC. He is featured in the Oregon Art Beat, October 15, 2009, Oregon Public Broadcasting and in a cover and feature story in Clay Times Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2008. Visit standhardtstudio.com to view the gallery of his work.
