Title: Georgia Blizzard On Plum Creek
By: Roger Manley
Medium: Selenium-Toned Gelatine/Silver Print
Dimensions: 15” x 15” image on 16” x 20” paper
Price: $500

I had the unbelievable good luck to share a house with Kitty Couch for several months in 1992, while we were both invited to a NC Arts Council residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA. From the moment we met each other, we became great pals. I felt like I’d found the woman who should have been my relative . . . an aunt at least, if not my “real” grandmother, although she acted young enough to have been an older sister. But we weren’t related in any standard way but the one that really mattered: we could make each other laugh. We laughed while firing pots with driftwood on the Pacific beach, and laughed while making blackberry pies from berries we gathered illicitly in the surrounding wildlife refuge.

A few years after that joint residency I took Kitty with me to visit the great self-taught potter Georgia Blizzard, who lived in the mountains of southwest Virginia and made pots from clay she gathered from crawfish nests. As I had hoped they would, Georgia and Kitty discovered an immediate rapport with each other. Both preferred working directly with their hands to build up their vessels instead of turning them on a wheel and both liked to fire with wood or other organic materials from time to time to give their pots a range of subtle tones that aren’t possible in gas or electric kilns. I don’t know if the two of them kept in touch with each other after that encounter, but each later told me individually that meeting the other had been a great experience.

Getting to meet and know Kitty Couch was certainly one of the transformative experiences of my own life. I will never forget her.